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.