HYDROPONICS IS THE NEW FARMING REVOLUTION
A view from the farm
Anew agricultural revolution is underway in Britain, and it’s set to cause the biggest change in farming for 300 years. Forget the 18th-century innovations of seed-drill inventor Jethro Tull and crop-rotation king ‘Turnip’ Townshend, because this time ingenuity is being stretched to the limit by the three-pronged challenge of climate change, protecting the environment and a booming world population.
It’s called hydroponics, an idea that is hundreds of years old and a term that was first used as long ago as the 1920s. It comes from the Greek words for water, hydro, and work, ponos; literally, working with water. It’s a system of growing plants in water without any soil, which means there’s no need for vast fields of seasonal crops grown in the conventional way on ever-precious fertile land. So the very concept of what a farm looks like is immediately turned on its head. If you don’t need fields, food can be grown anywhere and farms don’t necessarily need to be in rural areas.
One of the UK’s hydroponic innovators is growing a range of salad crops and herbs beneath the busy streets of Clapham in an urban farm the like of which I’ve never seen before. Using the aptly named trademark ‘Growing Underground’, the produce is grown 12 storeys down in an abandoned tunnel that was used as an air-raid shelter during the Blitz. On my visit, it took me a while to get used to the subterranean surroundings and the rumbling sound of tube trains on the Northern Line above my head, and the growers wore lab coats and hairnets.
PRECISION GROWING
In this unlikely environment, parsley, celery, coriander, salad rocket and about 20 other plant types were growing in long rows of shallow trays fed by nutrient-rich recycled water and lit by LEDs. The lights are crucial. Changing the range of colours that bathe the plants not only promotes growth but also affects the flavour. I have never tasted such punchy garlic chives in
