Daily Mail, Thursday, August 29, 2019 Page 19
Before you can go in hands must
be blasted in disinfectant, shoes
polished by rotating brushes and
a get-up of blue plastic gloves,
white coat and plastic bag wellies,
donned. We start with one of the
tomato houses.
It covers 20 acres — the equiva-
lent of about 20 football pitches —
and holds over 450,000 plants, sus-
pended in rows from the 26ft
ceiling. Each 30 to 40ft-long plant
is festooned with perfect sprays of
Piccolo cherry tomatoes.
‘We have very few wonky vegeta-
bles,’ says Robert James, Techni-
cal Director. ‘No farm will set out
to grow wonky food and we are
about 99 per cent perfect.’
Of course they are! Every aspect
of the growing is monitored,
planned and calculated. Nothing
is left to chance.
So forget soil, for starters.
This lot live on raised troughs in
blocks of rock wool — a material
derived from basalt that looks likeloft lagging — into which water,
potassium, nitrogen, calcium, iron
and magnesium, are all drip-fed.
Humidity and irrigation are meas-
ured and adjusted weekly
by computer.
‘But the decisions are all made
by human computers,’ insists
managing director Pleun van Mal-
kenhorst. ‘It is all down to the
grower to decide — so it’s like a
very good Formula One car — you
still need a good driver.’
On top of that, the crops are
constantly scouted for problems
and all picking — and tasting — is
done by humans.
Pleun insists this is still very
much farming, just more technical
— and in times of increasingly
unpredictable climate extremes
— more reliable than most.
So the ambient temperature — a
steamy 27c — is controlled and
guided by a weather detection
system on the roof that measures
outside temperature, wind speedand intensity of sunlight and then
tweaks the vents and blinds
accordingly, to make life one long
hot summer day in the Garden
of England.
Even wildlife is controlled and
monitored. A colony of worker
bees is introduced into the com-
plex to pollinate plants. All leaves
are left where they fall to encour-
age the beneficial insects.
When there are occasional prob-
lems with caterpillars, aphids and
spider mites, the team introduces
their own insect predators to
control the outbreak.
But key to everything, is light.
Light produces the precious
joules, or light energy, that the
plant converts to plant energy to
grow leaves and fruit.
‘One per cent more light gives
one per cent more production,’says Robert James.
Almost every aspect of
design is about optimising light.
The complex is built here in a
deprived area of north-eastern
Kent with high unemployment
and social housing, because the
area has the best natural light in
the country.
The glass has a low iron content
to maximise its translucency. Sup-
port bars and trusses are as slim
as possible. The ground is covered
in white plastic to reflect and max-
imise light which means that, on a
sunny August day, it’s like being
on South Beach in Miami.
In the winter (while cucumbers
and peppers are still seasonal,
tomatoes are grown year-round),
high–pressure sodium lamps sup-
plement the natural light for
17 hours a day.
Plants need a rest to better dis-
tribute the glucose and other ben-
efits of photosynthesis, so they’re
cast into darkness between fourand 11pm, but the temperature
remains tropical.
Ten years on, the company — a
huge local employer and benefac-
tor — has been embraced for its
green credentials and educa-
tion programmes and employs
some of the most passionate
people I have met.
But it isn’t for everyone.
‘Some people don’t like
the idea of anything being
farmed at scale,’ admits
Pleun. ‘But, ultimately,
if you want to feed 60 mil-
lion people, this is the
way forward.’
Even so, because the UK
imports so much veg —
more than 30,000 tons
each of onions, tomatoes
and apples every month,
even in peak growing sea-
son — Thanet’s volumes,
while immense, are still
nowhere near what would be
necessary for Britain to be
self-sufficient, even in these
three vegetables.J
UDY Whittaker, commu-
nications manager for
Fresca Group, points out
Thanet might be Brit-
ain’s biggest producer but they
account for just two per cent of
tomatoes, 5.5 per cent of cucum-
bers and one per cent of peppers
eaten in the UK.
‘It would take a £4.6 billion
investment to build 32 facilities
the size of Thanet to be anywhere
near self-sufficient,’ she says.
‘And even if we could find any-
where to put them, why on earth
would you grow cucumbers here
in the winter at vast expense when
you could buy them at a fraction
of the cost from Spain?’
Why, indeed?
But perhaps the more important
question is what do Thanet’s ‘lab-
oratory’ veg taste like?
Frankly, we all know — we’ve
been buying them for years.
Thanet supplies every major
supermarket — bar Waitrose and
Asda — in every range from Sains-
bury’s ‘Taste the Difference’ to
Tesco’s ‘Finest’.
But I happily work through the
samples and find that Piccolo
tomatoes on the vine smell and
taste of proper old-fashioned
tomatoes (though according to
Judy it is the hairs on the vine that
smell, never the tomatoes), the
cucumbers are well, just cucum-
bers — sorry Arjan — and the pep-
pers gleam and crunch and really
do taste of summer sunshine.... or why a giant futuristic ‘farm’, growing
400m tomatoes and 15m cucumbers a
year, could pave the way for
post-Brexit salad days
— no spades required!
A
RJAN de Gier tends his
cucumbers with a gentle
care usually reserved for
new-born babies and
puppies.
He lovingly adjusts their hanging posi-
tions, checks their length and girth,
strokes their skins, admires their straight-
ness and clips a leaf here, a stalk there.
He is 50 years old and, other than the
occasional foray into tomatoes, has been
a cucumber farmer for 40 years — he grew
up on a cucumber farm in Holland where
his father produced a million every year.
Here at Thanet Earth, in north Kent, he
grows 15 million annually. He has never
contemplated doing anything else. ‘You
don’t just decide, aged 30, that you will
be a cucumber grower,’ he says. ‘It’s a
mindset. It’s in you. A part of your being.’
Softly spoken Arjan is not, if
I’m honest, the sort
of person I
expected to
meet at the
UK’s biggest
greenhouse — an extraordinarily high-
tech, futuristic ‘farm’ stretching over 95
hectares that produces, 400 million toma-
toes and up to 750,000 peppers a week, as
well as Arjan’s cucumbers — all for the
UK market.
Even before the £135million facility
opened in 2009, its scale, market domi-
nance and ‘futuristic’ hydroponic
(using mineral nutrient solutions in
a water solvent to grow produce)
growing methods had aroused
strong feelings.
People referred to it as a vege-
table laboratory, or a super-
sized plant factory.
But this week, two retail
gurus — former Sainsbury’s
CEO Justin King and Lord
Rose, former executive chair-
man of M&S and current
chairman of Ocado Online —
wondered if, come October 31
and in the event of a No Deal
Brexit and a log-jammed bor-
der, Thanet Earth, which pro-
duces 22 per cent of all cucum-
bers grown in the UK and about
a tenth of our tomatoes and
peppers, could be the future of
British farming.C
ERTAINLY, the scale is
astonishing. Signs for
Thanet Earth — a joint ven-
ture between the Fresca
Group (a conglomerate of fruit and veg
producers) and three Dutch growers —
start miles away on the A299 but seem
unnecessary given the six glasshouses on
the horizon,
Each has a footprint equivalent to Lon-
don Heathrow’s Terminal 5, its own reser-
voir to store rainwater (the facility is
80 per cent self-sufficient in water and has
its own power station that feeds into the
National Grid) its own staff, complex
computer system and sanitation system.by Jane
Fr yer
How Britain’s
lity
mi-
cdigging
for victory
Prize veg: Pleun shows Jane
the greenhouse operation