ON THE FARM WITH ADAM
The future of horticulture in the UK is looking bright.
August is the month when our tastes (and taste buds) demand something seasonal. Hot summer days, long balmy nights and outdoor living means salad comes in to its own. Crisp lettuce, sweet tomatoes, juicy beetroot, fresh herbs, a handful of pumpkin seeds… a mouth-watering prospect.
This is the time of year when one of our most important, and often overlooked, industries is literally put on a plate in front of us: horticulture. The strict definition is “the cultivation of a garden, orchard or nursery” but most people accept that modern horticulture has scaled up to include the production in fields of many commercial food crops.
MODERN METHODS
You only have to look at the nominees for the BBC Food and Farming Awards every year to realise how valuable the horticultural sector is to the overall food industry. The actual numbers are impressive. UK salad production is worth about £1.8 billion to the nation’s economy annually, and that’s before considering the financial clout of growing fruit, vegetables, plants, flowers, nuts, herbs and many other things that come under the umbrella heading of horticulture.
Humans have been horticulturalists for thousands of years, but the way we’re able to cultivate plants today is
something that would be unimaginable to our grandparents, let alone our ancient ancestors. For a start, we don’t need soil. Tomatoes, peppers and strawberries are just some of the crops now grown indoors using hydroponics, with the roots fed directly by nutrientrich water. Then there’s aquaponics, which goes further, combining soil-less plants with fish farming. Waste water from fish pools provides the nutrients for hydroponic plants, a process that cleans the water for recycling back to the fish farm. A warehouse on an industrial estate in Essex was the UK’s first commercial-scale aquaponic vertical farm, growing leafy greens, coriander, kale, pea shoots and Thai basil from floor to ceiling.
I’ve always encouraged innovation – no business benefits from standing still – so
I’m incredibly excited by all this. And I’m not the only one. Even the 217-year-old gardening charity, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), is embracing the technological revolution with online advice for anyone who fancies a bit of vertical lettucegrowing at home. The RHS also has just opened a £35 million horticultural science centre in Surrey, with three research labs employing 70 specialists, scientists and PhD students to work on the big environmental challenges facing growers and gardeners. The RHS team is researching the causes of some nasty plant pests and diseases, including a serious infection with no-known cure, xylella.
There was a time when a horticultural job meant working in a nursery greenhouse or the council parks department, but now there are a broad range of professions for people with all sorts of interests, from public relations to ecology. I’ve heard it said that if you want a career in agriculture, the way forward is horticulture – I suppose there’s some truth in that.
If there’s anything that can be salvaged from the pandemic, it’s that millions of us have found a new appreciation for nature, fresh food, greenery and seasonality. That’s got to be positive for agriculture and it’s certainly good news for horticulture.