An innovative farming project in Northumberland is using council-collected garden refuse to turn a profit.
The Robinson family’s Com-vert company started as a farm diversification programme on their Shieldykes site. It now offers the product to the public via a distribution hub at Hexam, which it sub-contracts from waste management company Sita.
The waste itself is free from the local council - without projects like this it would simply end up at landfill sites.
Shieldykes was the first grower in Northumberland to take up the idea. As an organic farm, the compost is an easy way of increasing Shieldykes’s yields.
“With the clay soil we have up here, it makes it easier to establish roots,” says farm manager Dan Robinson. “It also puts more nitrogen in the soil, although not nearly as much as chemical fertilisers. But it is also ‘live’, full of bacteria, which have their own weed-suppressing properties.”
