Huntingdon-based P Harper and Sons specialises in vegetable
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transport. You'd be forgiven for thinking the work peaks and troughs during the year, but thanks to modern farming and storage methods the fleet is busy 12 months a year.
Steve McQueen reports.
Sunday lunch for the Harper family must be some kind of meals on wheels. They run a farm and three generations of them are all involved in the family haulage business that makes its living collecting farm produce. It must be hard for the family to all dine together without the subject of work coming up one way or another.
P Harper & Sons has been trading since 1962, when founder Peter Harper declared independence from his then employer and bought his first truck. Peter, now 70, still makes the occasional local delivery and mother June remains a partner in the business. These days, sons Nigel and Jonathan run the company, although the latter has more of a farming brief. Nigel's 17-year-old son Matthew washes the trucks on a Sunday morning and you get the feeling his younger brother Adam will have something to contribute sooner or later.
The haulage business derives all of its transport revenue from agriculture. About 95% involves moving potatoes, the rest mostly moving onions. The farm itself produces wheat and sugarbeet, both of which also require movement once harvested.
With such a reliance on produce, there have been inevitable lulls in demand in the past. This meant lower demand for vehicles, which could be left standing in the yard. But that's rarely the case these days.
Improved techniques
Improved storage techniques, extended growing seasons, seasonal cropping and Increased growing tonnages have conspired to make this a business that's busy all year round. This is in spite of an Increase in the amount of potatoes that are being imported from abroad for consumption in the UK.
This latter trend has changed the pattern of vehicle movements, however. "We used to do potatoes in bags down to the wholesale markets Ni Wales," says Nigel. As the supermarkets have got bigger, most of the potatoes go directly into supermarket distribution centres from the packers and are delivered using refrigerated trailers."
Harper is the preferred transport supplier for local packing company Solarnum. "They stopped doing their own transport back in 1998 and we took over the incoming traffic. What we can't do ourselves, we subcontract to other hauliers. We probably use about 12 other vehicles in all and there is usually a subcontractor operating most days," adds Nigel.
Consequently, its operations involve the collection of fresh crops lifted on farms during the growing seasons, as well as the collection of stored potatoes from designated cold storage warehouses during the rest of the year.
From its Cambridgeshire base, Harper is ideally situated to reach the growing areas that supply the local packing plants. During the growing seasons, the potatoes are col