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All of the mustard grown by the 19 growers in England is used to make mustard flour.
Colman’s uses 40t of mustard seed each year. More than five tonnes of white mustard seed is grown and supplied by English farmers. The majority of the brown mustard seed is grown in England, however, one tonne a month comes from Canada.
England’s mustard farmers have had a difficult decade and production fell dramatically from its all-time high of three tonnes per hectare in 1997 to 0.5t per hectare in 2007.
In 2007, the number of English mustard farmers fell to 11 and the mustard crop was struggling as the good genetics were accidentally bred out of the plants.
After some work from Unilever and various plant geneticists, England’s mustard harvest reached 2.2t a hectare last year and the number of growers increased to 19 this year.