The name Scholes has been associated with potatoes since Dad started the business in 1967. But in 2005 my brother Richard and I decided we could either continue the way we were, with a £10m turnover, or we could try to attract some new business by inserting another cash crop into our rotation. We set a target of more than doubling profit and turnover in the next five years, and specialist veg formed part of that plan. We could have gone for onions or carrots alongside our potatoes, wheat, oilseed rape and vining peas, but the market for them was already saturated. We needed crops not associated with Yorkshire, but which would still grow in this climate. We asked people who were buying our potatoes where their interest lay, and narrowed the possibilities down to five vegetables - flageolet beans, chicory, kohlrabi, turnips and squashes - all of which we grew for the first time last year. Flageolet beans are very well established in northern Italy and France, and are starting to appear in cookery magazines. The prospects in the UK are good, because the pea shortage means we will have frozen flageolet available at the same price as a bag of frozen peas. This is our first commercial year of production, but it is very exciting standing in the middle of a 10-hectare field of flageolet beans knowing that this is the only one of its kind in northern Europe. We aim to get our beans out of the field and frozen within 150 minutes but the chicory, turnips, kohlrabi, spaghetti squashes and butternut squashes will all be fresh. Cooking instructions and recipe cards will be printed on all our packets, and there will be recipes in the local and national press featuring TV cook Rachel Green. We have had a lot of interest from the major retailers, and we are talking to soup makers, wholesalers and food service companies. It would be risky for an independent company such as ourselves to supply all our 25,000 tonnes of potatoes to a single retailer, but not so for specialist veg. If one retailer wanted the only UK crop of flageolet beans, that's something we might look into. Everything we supply at the moment is marketed under the Scholes brand, and we want people to associate that with beans, turnips and squashes, too.

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