Borage: A break crop with the potential to be more profitable than wheat

Fairking Ltd is a family-owned and run company, and the UK representative for borage growing/production for DeWit, a Dutch company that owns New Holland Extraction. Rachel Hicks attended the Fairking Ltd grower open day in early February.

Fairking deals with the contracts for farmers to grow borage on a 100% buy-back basis, and is responsible for sourcing growers, cleaning and sending out seed for planting, giving agronomic advice, visiting farms to inspect the crops, helping with swathing timings and, in many cases with growers in Essex and Su olk, it provides a swathing service using one its MacDon swathers.

Once the seed has been harvested, it needs to be cleaned – as generally it will contain too much admixture to go directly to the crushing plant. It also has to be brought to Fairking as each individual lot (from each grower) is kept separate and is individually tested for GLA content of the oil, amongst other qualities.

Fairking has been cleaning borage for 35 years using a cleaning line installed in the early 1990s. However, the volume of borage now being grown through Fairking has steadily grown, with over 100 growing contracts issued in 2022. As such, it now needs to handle 2,000t/year, representing 90% of the borage grown in the UK.

The cleaning line needed to be upgraded to cope with this volume and also conform to modern day working practices. Last year, Fairking owners Peter and Andrew Fairs commissioned Tey Farm Systems to design and build a modern, exible new cleaning plant.

On 7th February, Fairking held an open day and invited its growers to attend a morning conference centred around best practice, followed by the chance to view the newly completed cleaning facility. Sta from Fairking, Tey Farm Systems and Buhler were on hand to show an impressive turnout of 68 growers around.

The new facility created by Tey Farm Systems includes rotary dressers, gravity tables and an optical sorter, as well as a state-of-the-art dust extraction system which feeds dust and waste material into a briquetter to be burned at the power station in Eye.

According to Andrew Fairs, speaking on 7th February, borage growing is becoming more and more popular – Fairking has an additional 20% of the crop in the ground on contract this coming season, so the total area grown is expected to be around 12,000 acres.