Thanet Earth

[ceres]

Just watched Countryfile about this.  There will be 7 greenhouses covering an area the size of 84 football pitches to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers all year round.  They'll have their own power station buying in gas, burning it, selling the electricity back to the grid and storing the heat and carbon dioxide for use in the greenhouses.  They'll also have their own boreholes and reservoirs for water.  2 million tomatoes a week, I think they said!

[ceres]

[betula]

Sounds like me mums garden ;D ;D ;D

[tim]

Great, but where will they get the bees from? A dying commodity?

[Gazfoz]

At last Tim, some competition for your setup ;D ;D

[kimbobill]

It said it would provide 1 in ten of all the toms cues and peppers consumed in the uk! only another 9 and it'll stop all those food mile importing our salad crops...........8400 football piches of salad makes the mind boggle

[Gazfoz]

Are they to use traditional horticulture or hydroponics?
I hope not the latter but guess that is what they will do. All those tons of supermarket food, bland and bloated. At least we will able to offer the East Europeans some poorly paid employment and will not be importing all our crap veg which is a step in the right direction, isn't it?

[Barnowl]

Good guess Gazfoz - hydroponics it is.

[valmarg]

Yep gazfoz and Barnowl - grown in water, tastes of water.

Whilst I am in favour of 'grown in the UK' and reducing 'airmiles, it was quite frightening the lengths they are going to to produce 'UK' food.  If their produce will be anything like the 'out of season' tasteless pap that we are used to, they can shove it.

valmarg

[jennym]

To clarify some of the figures shown here, I understand that current UK tomato production accounts for a quarter of all fresh tomatoes sold, and that there are already 370 acres of glasshouses producing tomatoes in the UK.
This link is worth reading, to get the growers point of view on what is actually happening now, and the potential for future crops.
The link is from the British Tomato Growers Association.
http://www.britishtomatoes.co.uk/newsite/health/greenhouse.html

I would say that my own traditionally cultivated outdoor grown tomatoes seem to have more flavour than those grown hydroponically, but that could be bias  ;D

[ACE]

There are a few acres of tomato greenhouses over here.

A friends brother has a farm with that produces beef. He has all the old tomato plants and damaged fruit delivered to an old chalk quarry and then he mixes the bullsh#t with it  leaves it for a year and sells the compost back to them.

The old used compost is ploughed into the fields.

It must be the cheapest way of doing it, growing in water seems expensive.

[tonybloke]

I visited a 17 hectare glasshouse growing toms on the back of a biofuel plant/sugarbeet factory in norfolk. yes hydroponically, all in rainwater harvested from roof, in gutters to raise the crop for picking. bumble bees for pollination, predators for insect control, no sprays at all. picked straight into trays for retail.all nutrients are of organic origin.
rgds, Tony ;)