Company Information

Company Information

Cygnet Potato Breeders Ltd is the new owner of the former PBI Cambridge Potato business. We are part of a long-established family owned agricultural business based in Scotland and currently operate the UK's largest UK controlled breeding programme. We have the exclusive rights to many popular UK varieties such as Saxon, Cabaret, Carlingford, Rocket, Bambino, Navan, and Bonnie. With 20,000 tonnes of seed production per year, we can offer a portfolio that has varieties suitable for processing / pre-pack / table / salad and the first early market. New varieties include Bounty, Casablanca and Rubesse.

Our main office is at Blairfield, near Milnathort, 15 miles south of Perth, Scotland. Blairfield offers access to over 10,000 tonnes of state of the art refrigerated storage and a sophisticated grading facility that can also offer tuber counting and smaller size fractioning of orders. Our production, QC, transport, sales and marketing and admin support functions are based at our offices in this location. We are delighted to have just completed a major extension to this office to accommodate the increasing volume of our business.

Cygnet PB also has a dedicated breeding team with over 25 years experience based in our complex at the Cambridge. We produce 48,000 new breeding lines in our greenhouses each year that are then grown once and assessed on selected land in Scotland. This process of multiplication and selection continues over the 15 years it takes for a new variety to be developed until successful application and award of Plant Breeders Rights. It's a time consuming, costly and highly specialised area of potato production.

Minitubers for all our varieties are produced by Gentech Ltd - our sister company based in Dundee. Gentech operate the UK's most sophisticated and environmentally clean micro-propagation system. Particular attention is paid to all potential sources of contamination: the facility is fully sealed against aphids, both temperature and humidity are controlled utilising filtered air and purified water and even the peat is steam-cleaned for all seedling planting. The results speak for themselves, in 15 years, not one diseased plant has been supplied to customers. This has also contributed greatly to the high health status of all Cygnet PB seed sold to date.

We have also developed a 'Cygnet' brand of premium quality seed that utilises limited field generations of three years and is supplied in much tighter size bands of tuber counted seed. This has allowed farmers to calculate the exact cost of each planted hectare and to plan more efficiently to meet end-user specifications. This method has been adopted by an increasing number of farmers, but we also supply seed by volume and size, as the farmer requires.

We are also pleased to have been appointed as marketing agents to the Girvan Early Growers group, based in Ayrshire. GEG produce 12,000 tonnes of ware production each year.

Cygnet PB has a network of agents worldwide who are producing Cygnet PB varieties under license. This is a rapidly expanding area and illustrates the superior performance of some of our varieties in overseas markets. Currently we have agents in Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, The Russian Federation, Slovenia, South Africa, Denmark and Sweden amongst others. We are actively seeking agents in those parts of the world where we currently have no representation.

Cygnet PB is totally committed to first class seed potato production. We have achieved this through investment in the latest production, grading and storage technology and management experience accrued by the synergy of our three core elements - breeding, minituber production and superb seed production. A vast wealth of highly specialised scientific and practical knowledge exists within the company and this is directly targeted to meet the requirements of a rapidly changing, dynamic and evolving market place.

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