Thanet Earth is a large

industrial agriculture Industrial agriculture is a form of modern farming that refers to the industrialized production of crops and animals and animal products like eggs or milk. The methods of industrial agriculture include innovation in agricultural machinery and f ...

and plant factory project consortium on the

Isle of Thanet The Isle of Thanet () is a peninsula forming the easternmost part of Kent, England. While in the past it was separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, it is no longer an island. Archaeological remains testify to its settlement in an ...

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, England. It is the largest greenhouse complex in the UK, covering 90 hectares, or of land. The glasshouses produce approximately 400 million

tomato The tomato is the edible berry of the plant ''Solanum lycopersicum'', commonly known as the tomato plant. The species originated in western South America, Mexico, and Central America. The Mexican Nahuatl word gave rise to the Spanish word ...

es, 24 million

pepper Pepper or peppers may refer to: Food and spice * Piperaceae or the pepper family, a large family of flowering plant ** Black pepper * ''Capsicum'' or pepper, a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family Solanaceae ** Bell pepper ** Chili ...

s and 30 million cucumbers a year, equal to roughly 12, 11 and 8 per cent respectively of Britain’s entire annual production of those salad ingredients. Thanet Earth's main customers are

Asda Asda Stores Ltd. () (often styled as ASDA) is a British supermarket chain. It is headquartered in Leeds, England. The company was founded in 1949 when the Asquith family merged their retail business with the Associated Dairies company of Yorks ...

Sainsbury’s J Sainsbury plc, trading as Sainsbury's, is the second largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, with a 14.6% share of UK supermarket sales. Founded in 1869 by John James Sainsbury with a shop in Drury Lane, London, the company w ...

Tesco Tesco plc () is a British multinational groceries and general merchandise retailer headquartered in Welwyn Garden City, England. In 2011 it was the third-largest retailer in the world measured by gross revenues and the ninth-largest in th ...

, M&S and agency HRGO

Food production

The complex began producing in October 2008.

Cucumbers Cucumber (''Cucumis sativus'') is a widely-cultivated creeping vine plant in the Cucurbitaceae family that bears usually cylindrical fruits, which are used as culinary vegetables.tomato The tomato is the edible berry of the plant ''Solanum lycopersicum'', commonly known as the tomato plant. The species originated in western South America, Mexico, and Central America. The Mexican Nahuatl word gave rise to the Spanish word ...

es are harvested every day of the week, 52 weeks a year. The UK's largest privately owned fresh produce supplier, Fresca Group Ltd, has a 50% stake in the trading business that sells all the crops grown at the site, Thanet Earth Marketing Limited. The remaining 50% of Thanet Earth Marketing Limited is owned by three salad growing specialist companies which each owns and operates a glasshouse at the site – Kaaij Greenhouses UK, Rainbow Growers and a six

hectare The hectare (; SI symbol: ha) is a non-SI metric unit of area equal to a square with 100- metre sides (1 hm2), or 10,000 m2, and is primarily used in the measurement of land. There are 100 hectares in one square kilometre. An acre is ...

glasshouse owned by A&A. Planning permission exists for a further four greenhouses on the site, making seven in total; in time for planting vine tomatoes in January 2013 they built an additional eight hectares of greenhouses

Power

Thanet Earth on Planet Thanet - geograph

The complex is powered by combined heat and power systems that create heat, power and

carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide ( chemical formula ) is a chemical compound made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in the gas state at room temperature. In the air, carbon dioxide is trans ...

(which is absorbed by the plants) for the greenhouses. Through a partnership with a

Virtual power plant A virtual power plant (VPP) is a Cloud computing, cloud-based distributed power plant that aggregates the capacities of heterogeneous distributed energy resources (DER) for the purposes of enhancing power generation, trading or selling power on the ...

they also export their excess power to the grid and automatically add extra power to the grid at times of peak demand.

Controversies

In it was reported that during misty nights the lit glasshouses were a source of

light pollution Light pollution is the presence of unwanted, inappropriate, or excessive use of artificial Visible spectrum, lighting. In a descriptive sense, the term ''light pollution'' refers to the effects of any poorly implemented lighting, during the day ...

in the form of a clearly visible night glow. The company were quoted as saying that "For ventilation purposes we have to leave tiny gaps where the blinds meet. Even when the blinds are fully closed we estimate that approximately 2 per cent of area is uncovered."

Media

As the first of its kind in the UK, the Thanet Earth project received minor, but national coverage.

References

External links