The British Quinoa Company
The British Quinoa Company farm has been in the family for 80 years, and it has been the centre of the quinoa business since they shifted production to this crop. The climate in the area is mild and the soils are fertile, which is ideally suited to growing a great crop of British quinoa.
The farm aims to leave valuable habitats untouched while also striving to create new areas for wildlife to thrive. Quinoa in itself is great for the farmed environment, by providing the wildlife in our area with a new habitat in which it can live. They often see a panoply of different insects living within the crop, drawn by the fleshy nature of the leaves. One of the key things they can do to assist biodiversity is to provide a wide range of habitats, and quinoa fits in nicely with other major agricultural crops such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape, helping to make the landscape just that little bit different.
The project started in 2006, when Stephen read a magazine article about the fantastic nutritional properties of quinoa, leading him to buy a small amount to try the product. Initially, they planted a small trial on our farm to test the difference between several types of quinoa that could easily be purchased from the local supermarket shelf. However the seeds would either fail to germinate or the plants wouldn’t reach maturity within the cool UK climate. The breakthrough came when they were fortunate enough to trial some new quinoa varieties that had been bred for our European climate.
The British Quinoa Company Ltd
Sycamore House
Hordley
Ellesmere
Shropshire
SY12 9BH