Potato farm in £1 million expansion scheme hope

1:39pm Wednesday 30th April 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

A £1 million expansion which could generate extra jobs is being planned by a huge potato farm near York.

R S Cockerill Ltd, of Providence Farm, Dunnington, has applied for special permission for the expansion which it says would enable it to double capacity and create a dozen extra jobs.

But it has also warned that refusal would jeopardise the existing business and the 67 jobs it currently provides.

The family firm has lodged an application with City of York Council for an extension to its packing house to provide additional potato washing, grading, packing, storage and staff facilities, and also covered loading bays, additional vehicle manoeuvring space and a new wastewater treatment plant.

In a report to the authority, town planning consultant Jennifer Hubbard said the proposals were, by definition, inappropriate development in the green belt, but very special circumstances justified the granting of permission.

She said in 2007, the company traded about 140,000 tonnes of potatoes, of which about 100,000 tonnes were despatched to crisp factories - a proportion from Providence Farm.

"The majority of the potatoes are supplied by more than 100 farmers and growers, mostly located in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire," she said.

The company employed 40 full-time factory workers, 16 drivers and another dozen office and support staff.

Many customers, especially supermarkets, now demanded blemish free, oven-ready potatoes with no residual soil on the skin, and new potato grading equipment was needed to replace obsolete equipment which would not fit in the existing pack house.

She said the company was having to turn away potential export orders, mainly from Denmark and Scandinavia, because of a lack of capacity.

The factory was more important than ever to the local farming community following the closure of the York sugar beet factory, as it provided an alternative use for land used previously for growing beet.

She said the operation failed adequately to meet health and safety requirements and barely met accreditation requirements of the British Retail Consortium, which was required by all the company's major customers. "Should it be lost, the business would fail," she said.

She said while the investment would double the potential capacity, this would be largely achieved through greater efficiency, but it was still envisaged that the development would create a further ten full-time pack house jobs and two office jobs.

She argued that, while the pack house extension would affect the openness of the green belt, new hedgerows had been planted which would mitigate the impact.

Managing director Martin Cockerill said trees had also been planted which, for at least seven months in the year, screened the site.