NFU Horticulture and Potatoes Board member, Tim Edwards, muses the potential benefits that the Nursery Stock sector may have with government's growing focus on Plant Health and improving UK biosecurity post-Brexit.
One way or another, importing plants from Europe is likely to be less easy in the future than it has been in the recent past and I expect the import of some high-risk plants to rightly become very difficult indeed. Government recognises that UK growers should grow more and it also recognises that nurseries need to be profitable to do that. There is an opportunity for increased UK production.
But what should that increase consist of? We have an embarrassing absence of useful data when it comes to imports of nursery stock, but that is likely to change as a result of a powerful data collection project DEFRA is currently funding that aims to reveal just what we do currently import. Armed with that information growers will know where the opportunities are.
There is a great deal going on in this sector at the moment and I really do believe there are great opportunities at hand. But the real opportunities will come about when we start to cooperate across the whole supply chain: Cooperation between those professions that specify the plants used by the industry and those that grow them could deliver standardisation and a shortening and smoothing out of the supply chain. Cooperation and standardisation will help build resilient UK nurseries and ensure increased UK production into the future – and that, surely, would be good for nurseries, government and for UK biosecurity."