MAJOR changes in the potato industry are likely to result in a merger of more than five top growers this season to form one ‘corporate farm’.

Growers have said the move will be’the biggest thing that has happened in the countryside for years’.And a long-standing ambition has been achieved, even if it is not one that is universally popular: there is to be one marketing group to service the industry’s UK supermarket customers.

This has come about by the merger of the two major marketing groups, Top Produce and the JPMO organisation.The managing director of the new integrated growing and marketing company, Jersey Royal (Potato Marketing) Ltd, is the managing director of Top Produce, Tom Binet.

He said that the drawing together of interests was being attempted ‘in order to avoid a marketing bloodbath’ this season, by reducing the competition between different groups and thus strengthening the commercial structure of the export trade.