Tim - man of a million mushrooms...

Fascinating, little-known worlds really do exist, tucked away and hidden from ordinary modern life, yet in some cases, just a few feet away. Tim Cripps is there to prove the point.

One of Britain's most successful mushroom farmers, he lives and dreams edible fungi - and his enthusiasm is catching.

By the very nature of the business, the world at large doesn't see an awful lot of Tim. Tim's world is a diverse collection of sheds, tucked into the side of the Rayleigh hills.

A commuter could spend his life a few yards away and not realise that one million mushrooms were pushing up the soil within, as it were, earshot.

Tim, 35, is a cheery and quite unsecretive fellow, in many ways the image of a modern jolly farmer, right down to the mobile phone and laptop that have replaced the pitchfork as the main tools of the profession.

Other farmers drift in and out of his office, unannounced, for a chat about agriculture at large and the weather in particular, the way people who work on the land still do. Tim always seems to have time for them.

It would be hard to imagine that anything could rile Tim Cripps, yet there is one matter that does, shall we say, give him cause for concern.

"Some people have this vision of mushroom farmers as little troglodytes with miners' lamps on their heads, beavering away in a dark and dingy shed," he says.

He smiles sadly at the thought, as he sips coffee from a posh Italian expresso machine and zooms into a mushroom bed on a computer bank that would make George Lucas mushroom-coloured with envy.

"But it's not like that at all," he continues. "We work in a pleasant, healthy, climate-controlled, well-lit environment. We are a modern business.

"But while everyone knows what, say, a Marks & Spencer looks like, not a lot of people are familiar with mushroom farms."

Tim has lived cheek-by-jowl with mushrooms since he was born. Pond Chase Nurseries was founded by his father on this lovely, well-watered site in 1952, "in the days when the mushroom farmers were real pioneers."

Tim himself says that he has never seriously considered any other existence. Like all good agriculturists, he met his wife at a Young Farmers' Club dance (they now have two children, eight and five). He then settled down to continue what his father had begun.

Quite apart from inheriting a thriving concern, he has never lost his fascination for mushrooms. "They are characters," he says. "We get three crops a week, and every one is different."

The same goes for the buildings. "The sheds may all look the same and perhaps a bit impersonal, they may operate in the same way, but in fact they all have their own personality."

Much of Tim's career has consisted of a drive to exert maximum control over what, in nature, are the most wayward of organisms. At this point I regale him with my own mushroom memory.

My father set out to grow the things in an old coal bunker. As a child, I helped him gather horse-dung from the roadside. We build up a lovely, steaming compost bed, impregnated it with spore, sat back, and waited for a delicious crop.

Yet not so much as a button mushroom showed its head. Eventually, in rage and despair, the compost bed was chucked out into the field. Next season, the most wonderful field of mushrooms you ever saw emerged.

That was the state of mushroom growing when Tim's father set out with an eye on a burgeoning new market.

Since then, mushroom growing has become a precision science - "we've got control", Tim says simply - and some of the credit undoubtedly goes to the Cripps of Essex.

Mushroom growers from as far away as India come to tour the site. Tim himself travels the world, squirreling away ideas wherever he finds them.

The scale of the hidden operation makes it a major player in the local economy. Pond Chase is a leading supplier to Tesco. Passengers on the QE2 consume Hockley mushrooms with their breakfast. Harrods, purveyors of mushrooms to Buckingham Palace, have taken supplies from Hockley.

Tim may well be remembered as the man who brought computers into this timeless fungal world. He was clearly the man for the role - he talks as fondly about megabytes as he does about spores. Some £2 million-worth of equipment and programming and 10 kilometres of cabling have been installed in the past four years.

Under Tim, Pond Chase has also become an ecological concern. The farm makes its own compost and recycles its water.

Tim provides a guided tour of the computer control centre, and of the many monitors and sensors that scan every stage of a mushroom's existence.

"There are very few farms anywhere with the level of control we have here, especially the way we gather every process into one system," Tim says.

Yet when it comes to magic, the hi-tech equipment is easily upstaged by the mushrooms themselves.

This is implicitly acknowledged by Tim himself: "I try to spend as little time as possible in the office, and as much getting around the site. I'm still a mushroom man."

There are mushrooms in every stage of their 32-day life cycle. We start with unseeded compost boxes, then move on to the stage where the spoor has touched the compost with a faint ivory flush. Then come the first tips, and even after all these years, Tim Cripps can still sound like a fond father as he talks about these youngsters.

There is just one worm in Tim Cripps' crop. He is struggling to find human pickers. "We take all ages, sexes and backgrounds, and they can earn good money," he says. "Yet I can't say we're not having difficulties."

Just for a moment, his brow puckers, but he is soon back in normal mode. Tim Cripps himself is a good recommendation for the life. His cheery face suggests mushrooms are good for you in more ways than one.

Pick of the crop - Farmer Tim Cripps has supplied everyone from the passsangers on board the QE2 to Harrods

Picture: MAXINE CLARKE

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.