On Your Farm

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On Your Farm: Strawberries All Year Round

Strawberries All Year Round

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Strawberries All Year Round

Anna Hill visits the UK's first all-year-round strawberry growers.

Anna Hill is in Harlow, visiting the UK's first producer of all-year-round strawberries. She explores their vertical farm which has been set up in a warehouse in Essex.

Anna Hill visits the UK's first all-year-round strawberry growers. She takes a tour of their warehouse in Essex, which has been transformed into a vertical farm - and experiences the taste of July, but in February. 

The project is the idea of Dr David Meszaros, a Hungarian entrepreneur based in Holland, who has a burning ambition to feed the world. His company, Smartkas, has set up an indoor strawberry farm at Harlow Innovation Park. Here, on shelves reaching twelve metres up to the roof, thousands of strawberry plants are producing fruit under LED lights. The plants are pollinated by bees, while pests are controlled by predators rather than chemicals. 

Anna travels up into the farm on a futuristic picking platform with grower Angus Thomson, to try some fresh strawberries. She talks to staff who not only pick the crop, but also helped to build the farm, and hears from David Maszaros about his plans to expand and grow crops in climate-challenged parts of the world. 

Produced and presented by Anna Hill

Photo credit: SMARTKAS

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