Tesco snaps up crop of maize grower

There’s a lot of maize growing around Carrigaline, Co Cork, — but only the ten acres grown by Roland Newenham will find their way into the supermarket vegetable aisles instead of silage pits on dairy and beef farms.

It’s the second year of sweetcorn cropping for Roland, having been requested to do so last year by Tesco. In the process, he became Ireland’s only commercial grower of this variety of maize, which has high sugar content, and can be picked when immature and prepared and eaten as a vegetable, rather than a grain.

Tesco expects to sell about 10 tonnes of Irish-grown sweetcorn over the coming months.

Roland’s 150,000 plants will produce about 300,000 cobs. He says it’s completely different from the forage maize, really sweet. “You can eat it like apples,” he says.

So different is it that it cannot be grown within 500m of forage maize because they are wind-pollinated crops and the cross breeding between them would adversely affect the growth of the sweetcorn.

That’s one of the reasons for a May sowing date, once the neighbours’ cropping plans are known. It is sown under plastic. This year it got one aphid spray but no weedkiller.

It grows about 5ft tall. From now to November, it will be harvested by hand, selecting the plump and ripe cobs for delivery in Cork to Total Produce, which supplies fresh produce to the retail, wholesale, and foodservice sectors.

“There is great potential for the crop,” says Roland. He also grows sprouts, leeks, and rhubarb.