Mike Renouard, business unit director at The Jersey Royal Company, said that frost and rain had caused some problems with early crops, but good conditions over the last month had compensated.
‘We are about two-thirds of the way through planting now, so we’re on target,’ he said
‘We carry on planting all the way through pretty much to the end of April, just to make sure we got a fresh crop going through the whole export season up until probably mid to end of July.
‘We had a little bit of frost damage a few weeks ago but that is recovering quite well. We are exporting the glass house crops now but only a very small tonnage.
‘It will probably be the early part of April before we see any outdoor crops being exported.
‘In the very early part of our season planting in January and early February was again disrupted a little bit by rain.
‘But since mid-February the weather has been on our side, so we’ve managed to catch up and we’re as far through the planting as we should be at this time of year.’
Mr Renouard said that the JRC were being increasingly careful with their usage of polythene sheets because of the environmental damage plastics can cause.
He added that the firm was also increasingly using more eco-friendly plastic packaging for its products.
‘We try to use the polythene for two years on the fields now rather than just the single year,’ he said.
‘And when we are finished with it, all of it goes a recycling plant the UK. There’s no burning anything, dumping it or using it for landfill.
‘There are also new types of plastic that we’re using for the film packaging, which is thinner. We’ve gone down from 50 microns to 27 microns, so that means that they are using less plastic.
‘We’re now also moving into using recyclable plastics for our packaging films as well.’
