Question regarding farming fruit in Medway country parks

At the full Council on the 12th August, Viv Parker asked the following question:

Given that our country parks contain large numbers of fruit trees, what is being done to ensure the fruit is harvested and sold to support the work of the Green Spaces team?

The Portfolio Holder for Housing and Community Services, Councillor Doe stated that whilst the Council had a variety if fruit producing trees atg both of its award winning Country Parks, they were not managed as a commercial crop.

The fruit trees were not managed for fruit production, but biodiversity and amenity value. He drew attention to the fact that the costs to manage these commercially as an orchard would not result in an economic return due to the age and number of trees.

Viv as the following supplementary question:

Capstone Farm has a large cherry orchard and trees are absolutely full of fruit, given that cherries are presently selling for £9 a kilo in our local supermarkets how can the Council say that it is not worth selling the fruit?

In response, the Portfolio Holder stated that most of the cherry trees were quite old and therefore the fruit was not of th ebest and would not produce a marketable product. He advised that the Council was not in this type of business. Concerning the apples at Riverside, these were young trees. He stated that if there was an opportunity to make it worthwhile then he would support this venture, but not if this meant employing additional staff to harvest trees. He referred to the rangers and stated that the were already extremely stretched in running the parks themselves, dealing with voluntary labour, making sure the voluntary labour was properly targeted and dealing with site security. He was not prepared to ask the rangers to take on this additional work.