GPC Ask the Experts Europe/
Andy Bury on UK Pulse Production

So, Andy, tell me a bit about yourself and Frontier Agriculture.

I trade pulses for Frontier Agriculture, and I’ve been trading pulses for the last 15 years. Before that, I was trading domestic barley, wheat, and rapeseed for Cargill, one of our parent companies. We have two parent companies, Cargill and ABF. Frontier is a result of the joining together of several businesses in the UK and has now been built up to be one of the largest agricultural merchants in the UK.

We buy grains, pulses and oilseeds from our farmer customers and sell back to them input costs, such as seed, fertiliser, and agronomy products. We offer more technological products now, too, in the form of field mapping and linked soil samples, so there’s high accuracy when putting products on the farm. Our sister company, Soyl, deals with that high-tech side of things.

The business I’m involved with involves dehulling fava beans for aquaculture, which then go into the salmon industry in Norway and Scotland. Frontier is very much developing into the technological side of agriculture, but also in the form of first processing, whereby we’re driving and storing grain for farmers, but also enhancing products by adding value. For example, with the fava bean plant, we’re dehulling the bean to remove the fibre. 

We've got coverage across the whole of the UK from on the south coast up to the North of Scotland, with grain storage facility sites, in at least 20 different locations. Over a year, we'd be handling well over 500 million tonnes of agricultural products, which we’re selling to our parent companies Cargill and ABF, for further processing in the agricultural business. So that’s a combination of food and feed in the form of flour milling, oil seed processing, and malting.


And, what are the main pulse crops that you deal with?

The two main pulse crops we deal with in the UK are dried peas and dried beans. The markets we supply with field peas can be split into two. We supply the human consumption market, so the marrowfat market, where the peas are used for the traditional chip-shop mushy peas. Further processes involve cleaning them up, either canning or drying them and putting them into smaller packets for the grocery trade, where they are used for thickening soups. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect is animal feed, where the peas are micronised, which is a short, fast cooking process. After the dry cooking process, the peas are then rolled into a flake, and it's that flake that is used in pet food, and coarse mixes for young livestock. We supply a number of sites in the UK for micronizing peas.

There’s only quite a small market for feed peas in the UK because there aren’t that many peas that are just grown for feed and animal feed consumption; they're always aiming for a higher-value market; that value is based on the colour of the pea. The greener the pea, the greater the value - it's the physical appearance of the green pea which the customers really want.


What about dried beans, how have those crops been this year?

Pulse crops have been much bigger this year. Starting with the fava bean crop, we’ve had a fairly good harvest this year, after a difficult start to the season, which was cold and dry. However, as we got into May, it was perfect growing weather for fava beans; moist and warm but not too hot. The yields this year have been around 3.75 to 4 tonnes a hectare, which, when compared with last year’s 2.75 to 3 tonnes a hectare, is a marked increase. 

The quality is a lot better than last year, too. There’s been a lot less bruchid insect damage because we didn't have those periods of high temperature at the critical growing period. So, those beans, particularly in the north of England, have been much more suitable for export for human consumption. That said, that’s not the case in the south. The bruchid beetle activity is definitely moving from northern France through to southern UK. In most parts of the UK, south of Lincolnshire, there’s been rather too many beetles to make samples suitable for human consumption. So it's been a bit limited there, but overall the yield is good, and the quality is good.


How have the pea crops been this year comparatively?

With peas, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The yield is quite good, but by the same token, because of certain dry periods, particularly in the south around harvest time, we've seen quite a lot of bleaching. It’s the bleaching of the colour which reduces the value of the pea. So, quite a lot of the samples in the south are two-tone in colour, while for some, there’s a nice green colour, but in the same sample, there are some quite yellow or white peas. That’s quite difficult because we can only colour-sort so many of the white ones, but it's difficult to sort all of them. There's been a bit of a problem with that.


What are your projections for peas and beans in light of rising nitrogen fertiliser costs?

Well, there will be an increase, but I don’t think going forward it's going to be too dramatic, and it can’t be completely attributed solely to nitrogen price rises. Generally, in the UK, if the soil and planting conditions are good in Autumn, the UK farmer really likes to get his winter cereals first and winter rapeseed, which is planted much earlier. So, I think that's what went in as the weather conditions were almost perfect for autumn drilling. We often only really see big increases in pulse crops when the farmer can’t sow all their autumn crop, and therefore they are in a quandary and go into using fava beans or peas.


And, what trends have you noticed relating to pulse crops?

Demand is reflected by price and quality, so if a customer can find a different product that does the same job at a lower price, they're going to use that. They have to value themselves if it's going into a compound feed ration, and they have to be price-competitive against a basket of other raw materials. I would say that this year, fava beans have generally been slightly on the more expensive side. So we haven't seen a marked increase in usage this year. 

Due to the quality being so much better in the north, we are seeing a big increase compared to a relatively small base last year of usage from Egypt for human consumption. Last year, Australia, another big supplier to Egypt, had a very big crop, and they didn’t have the logistical issues. Whereas this year, they've had another good crop, and their quality will always be better than the UK, but their logistical issues are the same as they are all over the world. Getting anything in terms of container freight or bulk vessels is a really big challenge. I think that most traders have struggled with getting the logistics sorted out, particularly where contracts are made further forward before harvest - you can't book the freight, and then the freight becomes very expensive. So, that makes it a real challenge trading all agricultural commodities in a market like this. 


How do you navigate logistical issues like that, considering that they are so widespread, and everyone is feeling the impact?

The way to manage it is not to overextend your forward sales and only be able to trade on the basis of the freight you can get at any one time. The problem is that it becomes a very hand-to-mouth type trade, so the buyer will only make the decision for wanting delivery the next month, and that’s challenging. Still, it’s safer to do that from a trading point of view than to sell way far forward in the future when you can't hedge the cost of freight on the distant markets. That’s where the problems really arise. So, it's about managing that freight risk the best we can and managing the price risk, because in general, wheat, rape, and pretty much all commodities have risen dramatically in value. Managing price risk on rising contracts has also been a challenge for all traders all over the world. 


This year, Frontier Agriculture made its pledge to become net-zero by 2030. Can you tell me about the role pulses have to play in a more sustainable, responsible future?

When it comes to pulses, they’re well known for having the benefit of extracting nitrogen from the air and fixing it into the plant and the soil for the following crop. The beauty of beans is that not only are they using a very small amount of fertilizer, but zero ammonium nitrates are required. The subsequent benefit for the following crop is understood, and the value is well known by the farmer for his following wheat crop. So, it basically allows the farmer to get a large number of nitrogen accumulated units to feed that following crop, and there’s definite interest in that. 

In terms of seeing that being fed into the food chain, it is happening, but it's happening slowly. Within the retail industry, we are beginning to see more customers ask us questions about the raw materials of the products that are going into their food. People are also looking for products that are grown more locally, with fewer food miles than some other imported proteins. 

The problem in Europe is that we have a deficit of vegetable protein, and that protein has to come from somewhere. Fava beans are a great source of protein, but we can never replace the sheer volume of soybean meal coming into the country. So, it's a starting point, but in terms of raw protein and the amount you can actually grow beans on, it's quite limited. However, in the UK, we are one of the biggest growers of fava beans in the world, a fact that not many people know. There are only really three main growing regions. One is the UK, the second is the Baltic states, which are smaller and then, the third is Australia. There are other countries that grow them, but they are pretty small in terms of the volumes they are supplying into the world.


Yes, despite being one of the main growing regions, a lot of fava beans end up leaving the UK, and we don’t see many making it into the food chain.

No, we don’t. The pulses used in the UK tend to be imported chickpeas, used as a dried pea for making hummus, and for falafel, which also tends to use chickpea, and yellow peas, which may or may not be grown in the UK. It appears that only really the Middle East, and particularly Egypt is the main consumer of fava beans for human consumption, and also Sudan. However, there are big logistical, economic and security problems with trading in Sudan for obvious reasons. But yes, in the UK, we just don't use that many. 

We are seeing some milk-buying businesses wanting, and in some cases insisting, that dairy cows not be fed with high-protein soya within the ration. So some of those operations are using more beans in the ration. There is slow but steady progress that we are seeing in wanting to move fava beans up the ingredient list in dairy rations, cattle rations and pet foods. So it's happening, but it's quite a slow process. 


And, what are your projections for pulses in relation to human consumption in light of the trend towards more plant-based living?

Clearly, pulses for human consumption and plant-based diets are hugely important, but it does appear the bulk of that plant-based product is initially based around soya and soy protein extraction, and probably peas because, in the world trade, peas are a way bigger crop than fava beans, which are fairly restricted. Yet, the work being done on fava beans demonstrates the extraction rate is better from a bean than from a pea, and they're easier to work with. That said, we’re not going to see a big uptake overnight; it will be a slow, gradual process. We’re likely to see them included more as ingredients rather than eaten as whole like they are in Egypt as a breakfast bean. 

I think on the falafel side, we may see some more growing because you don't see the bean as such, so it can be a direct replacement for chickpeas. Also, the snack market is a pretty compelling market at the moment. Certainly, we’re seeing more of those in UK supermarkets. But in terms of the UK production of fava beans of 700,000 tonnes, and the demand for the snack food market, it’s tiny. So, I think the development and uptake will be more in the animal feed range, but there will still be continued demand in the Middle East and East Africa. 


You’re speaking at the upcoming EU webinar. How are preparations going for that, and what are your expectations? 

Preparations are going well; I’m working with a couple of other Pulses UK colleagues. I’ve been in on a couple of other webinars for the organisation, and they've been well attended, and my hope is that they provide some insight and benefit to consumers, traders, and individuals interested in the pulse crop.

Pulses have a big role to play in the world, given the current discussions around climate change, and from a nutritional perspective, there's really no better crop. I think the role we have in Pulses UK is to aid and help politicians in the formation of agricultural policy to really push the benefit of pulses within national policy. This, again, is slow and hard work, but that's what we're aiming to do.

Pulses are here to stay. I think as a country, we’re getting better at growing pulses, too. Previously pulses have somewhat been considered the ‘second crop’ and not thought about too much - especially fava beans. But, I think people are really starting to see the benefit of having them in a crop rotation, and hopefully, we’ll see that mirrored into the new ELM scheme coming through from the UK government.