Suzannah Starkey is pleased the “European experiment” is over. Her family owns the only commercial orchard of the original Bramley apple tree and she has found the single market disastrous for the domestic apple sector.

“With the European friendship, the bottom of the market for English apples fell out,” she says. “There’s just been too much competition coming from Europe [mainly France and Italy]. Fruit farmers in England have had a tough time. But we believe that people will fall in love with English apples again.”

There is something quintessentially British about the Bramley apple. It’s a staple for crumbles and pies all over the country, and an estimated 83,000 tonnes of them are grown in the UK each year. But the Starkeys’ crop is quite special, and three generations of the family have been growing the apples since 1910.

“Bramleys grow all over the world now, but they’ve mutated,” Suzannah says. “When you go to the supermarket and buy a Bramley, it’s big, it’s sour, it’s green. That’s not how the original tree produces fruit. They’re smaller and sweeter, with a red hue.”

The original Bramley apple tree dates back to 1809, when a pip was planted by Mary Anne Brailsford in Southwall, Nottinghamshire. This in itself, Suzannah adds, makes it a freak of nature – “edible fruit does not usually grow from a tree that comes from a pip”. Today, the tree has been recognised as one of 50 Great British Trees by the Tree Council.

In the early 1990s, Bramley tree contracted honey fungus and looked certain to die. But Suzannah’s father, Sir John Starkey, has been instrumental in saving the legacy of the Bramley apple. In 1994, he encouraged Professor Ted Cocking, a bioscientist from the University of Nottingham who cloned the Major Oak, to do the same with the Bramley tree. Professor Cocking spent 15 years in the laboratory creating nine clones. Starkey was given two of them and now has 2,000 trees.

Despite the impressive size of the orchards, it’s not been easy to turn them into money. As well as competition from Europe, Suzannah says many of the British supermarkets don’t want her father’s Bramley apples. “They’re too red, they’re too small,” she adds. “They’re not the big sour ones that everyone thinks Bramleys should be.”

The data also shows there isn’t a thriving export market for British fruit. According to the Produce Marketing Association, Britain imports more than 476,000 tonnes of apples, but only export 14,800 tonnes (3%) of our own. Over the past two decades, the UK has become increasingly reliant on imports, with a self-sufficiency rate of just 11% in fruit.

Suzannah recently came on board to help run the family business, after working as a private chef. They now turn the unsold fruit into pressed apple juice and compote, which they’re perfect for – she adds – because they’re sweet enough not to need added sugar. The farm sells its juice to local schools, a number of farm shops and Co-op stores around Lincolnshire. Plus they also have a thriving trade in soft fruits – strawberries, blackberries and raspberries.

Farming can be a volatile business at the best of times, but diversification has been essential to ensure Norwood Park’s survival since 1910 when the first orchard was planted. “Expand, expand, expand [is our contingency plan],” Suzannah says. “You should never rely on one area of the business. Dad would say, ‘Learn to live on a tight belt’. And we get out there to meet our customers.”

But she adds, like any small business, you need to find a balance between all of the competing priorities. “I could be out there selling every day, but someone’s got to be on the frontline growing the business, making the product, putting the caps on the bottles, cleaning up the production room. It’s a lot of work.”

It’s a small family team but they do rely on eastern European workers who come to handpick the fruit every year. For all of her excitement about leaving the EU, and the knock-on effect that may have on customers buying domestic produce, is she concerned about potential changes to the legislation surrounding free movement of people?

“I think the seasonal pickers will still want to come. Whichever way you cut it, they’re going to be paid more in England than in their own country. Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] will, I presume, realise we can’t get enough English workers to do the work – we won’t have any farming [in this country] if we don’t have our extra help.”

Leaving the EU certainly does pose challenges for the farming community. Defra estimates that a quarter of the 1,200 EU’s laws relate to the sector, and £3bn of EU money is distributed each year in subsidies to farmers and land managers. Pig farmers have echoed Suzannah’s concerns that access to seasonal EU labour is essential, but there is evidence there’s already been a drop in interest from workers because of the declining value of the pound. Without a real shift in buying behaviour, Suzannah says there is a risk that the UK’s apple industry will die out completely. There has already been a 36% decline in the number of orchards between 1985-86 and 2014-15. For the Starkey family, they are committed to being patient.

“So many apple farmers are taking their trees out in this country [because they’re not commercially viable],” Suzannah says. “[But] once you’ve taken an orchard out, it’s very hard to get it back in again. It takes a long time to get an apple tree back into fruition. We’ve made the choice to stay in [the sector] and expand [into other areas]. We’re thinking long term. Hopefully we can start to turn the tanker around.”

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