Salad and tomatoes to be grown all year round in Kent thanks to new multimillion pound vertical farm
WATCH ITV News Meridian's Tony Green reporting from the biggest vertical farm in the South East.
Last month, the shelves of supermarkets were stripped bare after supplies of fruit and vegetables ran low.
Poor harvests and bad weather in Southern Europe and North Africa were blamed.
But, can traditional summer crops, like salad and tomatoes, be grown in Britain all year round? In East Kent they can, in a new £100 million pound vertical farm that started operating this spring.
Whatever the weather, salad is produced from seed on an industrial scale with strict controls on light and moisture. It's the first purpose built facility for the company that Kate Hofman co-founded a decade ago.
Kate said: "What we're doing is producing leafy salads all year round and the difference from what we're doing is that's all taking place inside a controlled, growing environment.
It starts with seed sown in trays which are taken to a dark and misty germination area and then into the growing chamber.
Kate said: "The growing chamber is what people think of when they think of a vertical farm. It's lots of layers of benches growing on top of each other and each layer has its own lighting provided by LEDs and its own nutrients provided in an irrigation system.
"We're also controlling all parts of the air in there. So the climate, the temperature, the humidity and, by doing that, we're creating the perfect conditions for those plants all the way through their growth cycle.
"What we're doing here is growing in a high care production environment. So we have to pay a lot of attention to how we take anything in and the cleaning and maintenance of that system inside to make sure that everything's being done to a really, really clean standard. That means that our products are ready to eat straight out of the farm. And that also means that because they haven't been washed or had to be put through a chemical cleaning process, they've got a fantastic quality and shelf life to them."
It takes around 20 days for the salad to grow before ending up on a supermarket shelf on sale for £1.
It's the scale of the operation in Sandwich that makes it possible but how much of a role will vertical farms ever have?
Professor Elinor Thompson from the University of Greenwich said: "A vertical farm isn't going to be suitable for every crop and in use everywhere in the country but it might usefully use a brownfield site and it could be perfectly appropriate use of technology for today.
"Vertical farms are just part of a whole spectrum of high technology, horticulture and agriculture that we have in this country today. So perhaps it's not a space age as it looks to us with our idea of wellies and muddy fields. Increasingly, agriculture and horticulture in this country is a covered system, and that allows us to deal with our famous British weather and make a predictable yield, which, if you want to feed millions and millions of people, is what you need.
Not every crop is likely to be cultivated this way, but this is a growing industry taking its place in the future of farming.