| Potato Council | |
|---|---|
| Motto | Supporting the British Potato Industry |
| Formation | 1997 |
| Legal status | Division of a Non-departmental public body |
| Purpose/focus | Potatoes in GB |
| Location | Stoneleigh Park, Kenilworth, Warwickshire, CV8 2TL |
| Region served | Great Britain |
| Membership | 2,900 potato farmers and 400 potato distributors/purchasers |
| Director | Dr Rob Clayton |
| Main organ | The Board of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board(Chairman - John Godfrey CBE) |
| Parent organization | Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board |
| Budget | £6m (from the levy) |
| Website | www.potato.org.uk |
The Potato Council is a division of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board which is a non-departmental public body. Its mission is to develop and promote Britain's potato industry.
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Set up to replace the Potato Marketing Board, the Potato Council was originally known as the Potato Industry Development Council, and then the British Potato Council until April 2008, it was merged with other similar levy-funded organisations to form the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board in 2008, where it operates as a specialist division focused on the potato industry.
It was set up by the Potato Industry Development Council Order 1997.[1] It levied farmers under powers originally delegated from the Industrial Organisation and Development Act 1947[2] but now through powers granted to its parent organisation.[3] It was also funded through the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD) and the National Assembly for Wales Agriculture Department (NAWAD).
Due to the credit crunch, potatoes have become a much more favoured grocery item than normal, as family budgets have had to stretch that much more. The number of registered potato growers in the UK has dropped from around 60,000 in 1960 to 5,000 in 2008. The revenue to potato farmers in the UK each year in total is around £800 million.
The Potato Council works to help improve the competitiveness and sustainability of potato growers. It also promotes the health benefits of potatoes to the general public, showing how potatoes are low in both fat and calories and packed full of vitamins and minerals. The industry invests significant amounts of effort in teaching children about healthy eating and showing how potatoes are grown. Many of the industry's farmers work hard to re-connect children to their food, by spending time working with children in schools and on their farms, showing how they plant, grow and harvest their crops.
Its publication is the Potato Weekly, which mainly lists current prices of potatoes per tonne. It visits agricultural shows and extols the virtues and health benefits of potatoes, with a resident cook on hand.
Its main functions are:
The Potato Council raises all of its money from a compulsory levy paid to AHDB by potato growers and seed merchants and receives no funding from the government. It is based in Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire. There is a Scottish office in Newbridge in Midlothian and an experimental station (SBEU) in Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire.
The Chairman of the AHDB's Potato advisory board is Allan Stevenson who has a potato farm at Luffness in East Lothian. The grower levy is around £40 per tonne and the purchaser levy is around £17 per tonne.
The experimental station is situated between the Sutton Bridge Power Station and the A17, and alongside the River Nene. This is on the former RAF Sutton Bridge close to the Norfolk boundary. It is at the forefront (some university departments may do similar work on a smaller scale) of research into potatoes in the UK, and has been for many decades.
The potato council runs a number of marketing campaigns throughout the year, among these are: