Today was Open Farm Sunday. I knew the lettuce farm was going to take part, because I asked the owner when I met him at our neighbour's At Home the other weekend. This was the ninth year the scheme has been running, with the idea of showing the great food-consuming, non-farming public a little bit about farming and how the UK grown portion of it is grown. I checked their website last week, and did see that only three farms within fifteen miles of us were opening, and that over East Anglia as a whole there seemed to be an over-representation of businesses with farm shops and petting zoos, and an almost complete absence of grain barons taking part. I fear, therefore, that what started off as a commendable effort to educate a largely ignorant public about what farms actually do, is by degrees being taken over by a branch of the rural leisure industry, Still, the lettuce farm was taking part, which is what I particularly wanted to see.
We've walked past the polytunnels, and peered at them through the windbreak hedges, but I was itching to see inside them, and today was my chance. The first leg of our tour was led by the MD of the tunnels enterprise, which as far as I understood is a joint venture between the lettuce farmer and a French salad company. The tunnels were very impressive, seen from the inside, though it was of no help to me when the MD told us how large they were expressed in multiples of international football pitches, since I never watch football and have no mental image of the size of the pitch.
It turned out that they do not grow actual lettuces in the tunnels. Those are still left to take their chances with the British climate. The tunnels are reserved for salad leaves, lambs lettuce, rocket, red leaved chard to add colour, and a giant bittercress which looked just like hairy bittercress on steroids, and tasted like watercress. If you buy a mixed bag of these leaves in a UK supermarket, odds are that a high proportion of the ingredients grew within a bee's flight, if not a stone's throw, of my house.
The tunnel sides sides are made largely of fine netting, to let air flow through, and not polythene. I hadn't grasped that, looking at them from a distance. Air flow is one of the great aims of covered salad cropping, to prevent mildew. The lower part of the frames is clad with polythene partly to keep wildlife out, since as the MD said, people do not want to find frogs in their bagged salad. Or voles, I thought, thinking of my greenhouse. I noticed the stations of rat bait placed at regular intervals around the outside. I already knew that there were large vents running the length of the roof, because you can see them open on sunny days. The MD reassured us that there were absolutely no plans to heat or light the tunnels, which would not be cost effective for salad crops, and that they were not allowed to use artificial light under the conditions of their planning permission. We won't be having a brilliant all-night glow like you see emanating from the Dutch glasshouses as you land at Schipol, then.
The MD would have liked the tunnels to be even taller, while admitting that a tunnel the height of a two storey house looked silly for a crop as lowly as salad. However, tall roofs equal a big internal volume of air equals easier to maintain equable temperatures on hot days. A layer of green shade netting below the dome of the plastic can be drawn across on sunny days to provide shade. Lambs lettuce was originally a woodland plant, and too much sun will send it yellow. On the other hand, one of the reasons why the enterprise was based in this part of the world was that, together with Bognor Regis, we boast the highest light levels in the UK. In the winter, when a crop of lambs lettuce takes twenty weeks to be ready instead of five, I guess they need every scrap of light they can get.
The lettuces in the fields are planted out as plugs. I knew that, because I've seen them planted, and it was the industry norm when I was at horticultural college. The lettuce farmer is experimenting elsewhere on his empire with limited growing under light, to raise his own plug plants, instead of buying them in as at present. The salad leaves are drilled direct into the ground, after the seed bed has been prepared, a process which includes flaming off the remains of the last crop and any weeds with a gas burner. After sowing, the beds containing lambs lettuce are top-dressed with fine grit, to facilitate the passage of the harvesting machine which will sever the plant at just below ground level. The lettuce farmer himself, who took us on the second leg of our tour to the further tunnels, admitted that he was not entirely happy with this as a long term solution, since the soil was quite sandy enough to begin with, and in five years' time was going to be sandier still if he kept adding grit to it.
Rain water from the roofs is harvested, and stored in a series of reservoirs. Something I had not known is that the farm reservoirs around here are connected by a network of pipes, and that they share water around if one has a surplus and another a shortage. In a really dry summer presumably everybody hangs on to what they've got.
Another part of the empire, in one of the neighbouring villages, grows lettuces hydroponically. There was a little demonstration tank set up in the barn, with a grid of fine and healthy looking lettuces floating on a raft in a tray of water. I'd have liked to see that full-scale, but today was definitely a charm offensive for the polytunnels. The floating lettuces start off as plugs, planted into a block of rockwool or peat, which drop into removable holders in the raft, keeping the original rootball above water level, but allowing the dangling roots to wander down into the nutrient controlled liquid growing medium. As they grow, they are very slowly moved up the length of the tunnel where they live, until they get to the end, at which point they should be ready. It sounded like a cross between a sushi restaurant conveyor and a car plant.
The lettuce farm owner had been instrumental in developing an automated lettuce weeder, which used cameras to control the action of multiple rotating hoes, so that it could be driven up a bed of lettuce weeding not just between the rows, but between individual lettuces within the rows. He chairs the industry group responsible for the project, and the resulting machine is now selling well, so he gets a piece of useful kit that wouldn't otherwise have existed, but no competitive advantage, or indeed royalty. We didn't see that running live, but there was a video.
The one fact that impressed me more than anything else was the revelation, freely given, that under the terms of their agreement with the salad company, they would be paid for all crops grown to specification, whether or not they were needed. In other words, they have managed to put all the risk of a washout, Met Office style British barbecue summer on to somebody else. That is truly amazing.
Our one anxiety at the end of the tours was whether or not the next phase of tunnels, when it happens, might attempt to include the field directly next to our garden. They haven't yet put in for planning permission, and finance is tight from what I gathered, but the MD didn't seem willing to rule it out. We are consoling ourselves for now with the thought that the field is not very large, not at all rectangular, and has electricity lines running across it, besides being very close to four houses. Surely, with all the local farms where he has an involvement to choose from, the lettuce farmer could find a more convenient field to choose than that one?
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