A contractor looks after around 180 of the farm's 400 acres, growing wheat and oilseed rap. A further 120 acres consists of land managed under the Countryside Stewardship Scheme or coppiced woodland. On the remaining 100 acres Simon grows seven varieties of apple – Braeburn, Bramley, Cox, Egremont Russet, Meridian, Royal Gala and Jazz. He produces a thousand tonnes of apples a year, most of which are sold through Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, Tesco and Morrisons.

Both apple and cereal production on the farm are inspected and certified to Red Tractor standards.

Why does apple growing particularly appeal to you?

I find it so much more interesting than growing something like cereals. It's a skilled job, and you are out in the orchards all the time looking after the crop. If you don't get the pruning right, for example, there can be all sorts of problems. In June and July you have to thin the crop just the right amount to make sure you get the best fruit later on.

How do you manage the harvest? Do all those different varieties ripen at once?

We start in late August with Bramleys and end in late October. Our four English varieties are ready first and we finish with Gala, Jazz and last of all Braeburn – the three varieties of New Zealand origin. I have two full-time employees and we bring in about 20 seasonal pickers at the busiest time in September.

What's your favourite variety?

Having grown apples all summer you can get a bit sick of the sight of them, so I'm not a great apple eater. But the Jazz apples are just superb.

Jazz is a new variety that was bred in New Zealand – it's a combination of the Braeburn and the Royal Gala. There are only about 220,000 trees in the UK. Growing it can be challenging – it needs a lot of attention to detail. It's not a variety that you can just put in the ground and leave.

Jazz apples are a nice orangey red colour with a pale green background colour. They have a really good flavour and have come out on top in all the taste tests. They also keep well and stay crunchy for a long time. My children love them – they have two boxes each, put them in the garage in October and are still happily eating them in March.

The fact that your apples are certified both under the Red Tractor label and by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) shows your commitment to wildlife and the environment. What kind of things are you doing on this front?

We've planted wildflower meadows on the chalk banks around the farm. We also have strips of grass and wildflowers between the rows of trees in our orchards that we don't mow between the first week of May and the end of August. The flowers encourage an abundance of butterflies and other insects that attract birds such as skylarks.

We have a big population of skylarks and they're just wonderful. It's also nice to see how the wildflowers are spreading year upon year. The farm is yellow with cowslips in the spring, which is lovely. There's a particularly nasty aphid that affects apple growers called rosy apple aphid, and we're finding that the other insect life on the farm is helping to control it. This means we're able to avoid spraying the crop with an aphicide late in the season, which reduces the chances of getting pesticide residues in our apples.

LEAF encourages farmers to reduce their carbon footprint. Is climate change something that concerns you?

As a grower you certainly see the effects of climate change. We can grow Braeburns on the farm now, which we couldn't do ten years ago. With the fruit trees we grow and the amount of woodland we have, we probably absorb more carbon than we produce. But we're always trying to reduce our carbon footprint. We spray and mow our orchards in one go, for example, which uses less fuel than we would in two separate operations.

Why is the Red Tractor scheme important to you, and how are you involved with it?

The Red Tractor helps point the consumer towards locally produced British food. It guarantees that what you are buying has been produced solely in this country to a particular standard. Other labelling schemes don't necessarily guarantee those things. More needs to be done to ensure that consumers know about the Red Tractor and what it means.

I sit on the technical committee for Assured Produce, the Red Tractor scheme under which my own farm is inspected. We've spent a lot of time on the committee looking at the issue of pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables and ways to reduce them.

Another important issue is e-coli contamination, which has been a particular challenge for some growers of leafy salads and herbs. We want to bring in additional standards to tackle the problem and help growers to stop it happening.