Roden had a long history of producing tomatoes, and was once covered in greenhouses owned by the Farmcare subsidiary of the Co-operative Wholesale Society; the society had purchased land there in 1896 for its first farm.Redfern, P. The New History of the CWS, Dent, 1938, p. 356 By the 1950s some 90% of the Society's site was devoted to growing tomatoes.The Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture, V. 64 (1957), 19 Most of the greenhouses have now been removed.
