YORK is to lead a green agricultural revolution which could see swathes of British countryside turned over to crops which will never be eaten.

A new National Non-Food Crop Centre is to be set up at York Science Park's Innovations Centre to drive forward the use of novel and sustainable raw materials in industry.

With much of traditional food farming still in difficulties, experts at the centre believe up to 20 per cent of the country's farmland could be switched within the next five years into growing crops for use in industry.

Starch from potatoes and cereals could be used to help create bio-degradable plastic, oil-seed rape could be turned extensively into bio-diesel, sugar from beet could be used increasingly to create bio-ethanol, starch from maize could be used in the manufacture of tyres, and fibre from hemp could replace fibreglass in car door panels.

Crops could also be used increasingly in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and fine chemicals industries.

Professor Peter Lillford, chairman of the centre, said it would receive joint funding of half a million pounds a year from the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Trade and Industry. He said it was very encouraging for two government departments to joint-fund in this way.

"We are very excited," he said.

"There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there working very hard on developing non-food crops, but there has never been a national centre before which could co-ordinate and facilitate links between scientific research, the agricultural community, government, industry and retailing."

The centre will provide a single, independent source of information on non-food crops for industry, government, academia and the public, as well as encouraging industry to use more such materials. He said that, inevitably, some ideas would not prove to be economically viable, but others would.

The creation of the new centre, which is currently recruiting a team of staff, will further strengthen York's reputation as a national centre of excellence in the bio-sciences.

Already, many hundreds of people work in this field in the York area, at the university, the Central Science Laboratory at Sand Hutton and with numerous businesses.

The CSL itself will play a key role in supporting and providing advice to the new centre, and helping to develop a database and website.

Rosie Dunn, chairman of the York east branch of the National Farmers' Union, said: "Members are keen to get involved. We have evolved in farming and gone with the new technology. This is just a natural progression.

"Obviously, the crisis in farming and the prices that farmers receive for food production has led them to look at other alternatives."

Updated: 10:19 Monday, July 21, 2003