Angus Cereals facility rescued in Openfield deal
Openfield, the Lincolnshire-based grain marketing co-operative, has bought the former Angus Cereals dockside facilities in Montrose from the administrators.
The purchase, for an undisclosed sum, includes three grain drying towers and the facility to store 32,000 tonnes of grain in what the company said was one of the best malting barley growing areas in Europe.
The 70 growers in the area involved in the Angus Cereal co-operative venture were shocked when it went into administration in early July, leaving the site – which cost £7 million to develop – mothballed over harvest.
However, Openfield – which had handled the marketing side for Angus Grain in the past – yesterday said it had secured the site’s future and maintained its co-operative ownership status.
Openfield’s chief executive officer, James Dallas, said that he hoped to work with interested parties to build the most beneficial future for the Montrose facility and contribute to the Scottish agri-business community.
He said: “We’ve been involved in the Montrose
facility from the outset and always believed in its proposition. It is ideally positioned to support the demand for malting barley from the Scottish distillers in the area and it offers us excellent import and export opportunities.”
With more than 4.5 million tonnes of grain marketed annually, Openfield is one of the largest UK players in the market. It has an annual turnover of £655 million.
Dallas said Openfield’s primary objective was to provide value to its 4,000 farmer members, acting as the marketing department for their businesses linking the supply chain from primary producer to some of Britain’s best-known food and drink brands. l The English NFU has called for government to
help build resilience in the farming industry to combat volatility, following the revelation of mixed results across the arable sector from the country’s harvest and the threats posed by reducing farm support post-brexit.
The union’s combinable crops board chairman Tom Bradshaw said the extreme weather events of this year had caused crop yields to become increasingly unpredictable.
He said the union’s harvest survey had shown that while the oilseed rape harvest fell in line with the fiveyear average, spring barley saw its lowest yield since 2012 and wheat yields had fallen below the five-year average, recording the lowest yield since 2013.