Irish leaf and herb grower McCormack Family Farms is continuing to increase the area of protected basil grown to meet rising demand FreshPlaza has reported.
Five years after the first greenhouse crop of the herb was sown at the company’s farm in County Meath, it is now harvesting 26 tonnes of basil a year. “Our volume has been increasing by around 25 per year on year.” said Managing Director Stephen McCormack. “The first two years, we were really just doing trials; the first commercial volumes came in 2023. We have increased planting each year by about half a hectare. This year we had 2.5 ha planted.
“The most important thing was to find the right variety. We use one of the Genovase varieties, which is one of the more expensive ones, but it is resistant to a lot of diseases. We also use yellow traps against greenfly, and we have been lucky to have had no problems with pests so far.”
McCormack’s basil, which is mostly sold to retail customers in Ireland, is grown in unheated greenhouses and harvested from mid-June through to mid-September. “We have the area to increase production and will continue to do so; there is always the chance that you will have a bad year, so we will continue to build slowly,” he added. “The shelf life of our product is almost double that of imported products, and it has no air miles.”
