We produce a lot of food in a relatively small area. As to conventional farming, they use up large areas of soil. They use lots and lots of fertilizers. And I think with the world population growing, if you can make it more compact, and produce more per square meter as we look at it, then I think it can really contribute to feeding the world population for the years to come.

Hallo intelligent viewers, and welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. This week we visit Thanet Earth, a state of the art greenhouse complex in the UK where annually millions of peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers are grown hydroponically.

Thanet Earth is the largest greenhouse operation in the UK, with a total of 55 hectares under glass. Using advanced technology to collect and conserve water, recycle nutrients and minimize energy use, it is leading the way towards greater agricultural sustainability. Pleun van Malkenhorst, general manager of the Rainbow Growers Group, is involved in growing peppers at the site.

Thanet Earth in its current existence is a joint venture between Fresca Group Limited and three specialist grower companies. The greenhouse that you see behind me is Rainbow Growers Group’s which is 85,000 square meters of pepper. The other two sites that are part of Thanet Earth are cucumbers and tomatoes.

If you have to do this outside in a traditional way, it would take a lot bigger area to grow all these things. Plus of course, it’s cleaner, it’s easy to work with, and you basically use less of everything to produce a bigger amount of vegetables. The work is lightweight.

It's all about intensifying production, which is a prime example of our operation here. We use hydroponics, which enables us to intensify production per square meter. And yes, we use less natural resources and we recycle as much elements as possible.

Young plants from nurseries are placed in growbags filled with a fibrous material called Rockwool insulation which is made of basalt rock and chalk. The roots of the crops are then intermittently fed a water solution. Crop manager Otto Vennik now gives us a demonstration of the system.

As you can see here, there’s a little tube with this little plastic stick on it. Once we start watering, the water will come into this little plastic spike and we bring it directly to the plant which is this little cube here. That contains the plant’s roots. This mat here you see is just a Rockwool mat where the plant is standing on.

Now if we open this up, you can see a few roots here growing. So the water ends up going into this Rockwool. The roots grow straight into this matted Rockwool, and absorbs all the water. And all the water that we don’t need ends up in this little gutter here, as you can see, and that drips right back into a basin. So we catch this water and we re-use it.

In conventional farming, they bring water to the plant, but they bring water to a lot of other areas as well that don’t have any plants on them. We, as you can tell, just bring the water to where the plant is. Everything the plant needs, it absorbs, and all the rest of the water, we catch and we use again. There’s definitely a big difference.

The majority of the water needed for cultivation is collected by an onsite rainwater catchment system.

We use all the runoff water that we get from the rain. We catch that as well and we store that in a big basin. And we use that water. So we're not actually getting any water from the city. So again, that is good for the environment. We keep our usage of everything to a minimum.

Thanet Earth has a unique system for collecting water that condenses inside the greenhouse.

We collect rainwater on the outside of the glass as well as condensation of water on the inside of the glass. We therefore use a double gutter. A gutter inside that transports the water into the pond outside, as well as the water on the main roof.

This method of agriculture lengthens the growing season, enabling the cultivators to produce much more food annually when compared to conventional means. Over two million tomatoes are harvested at Thanet Earth each week, 52 weeks a year. Approximately 700,000 peppers and 500,000 cucumbers are picked each week from February through November.

Using computer controlled systems, the plants are provided with ideal amounts of heat, light, water, and nutrients. The pepper plants, which are planted in mid-December each year, are already thriving.

So this plant at the moment here has been put in the greenhouse on the 15th of December. Right now it’s about 60 – 70 centimeters tall. Over here you can see the first fruit set, as we call it. This is actually going to be the first pepper we’re going to be harvesting from this plant.

The flower is actually bending down a bit. This will form a nice little flower, then it will shed its petals and become a pepper. So these plants are going to just keep on growing until they get about three meters tall, 3.5 meters even. And throughout the year, they’re just going to be producing peppers for us.

Plants need a pretty constant temperature throughout the day; a little bit cooler at night, a little bit warmer during the day. And therefore we use these pipes running throughout the whole greenhouse. And if it needs to be a little warmer in the greenhouse, the computer will automatically warm up the water that flows through a little bit and therefore maintain a constant temperature throughout the day.

This is all done automatically by a computer climate control system. We have sensors everywhere. It does everything itself. It thinks by itself. And if it needs adjusting, it’ll adjust by itself. So everything runs automatically. But that’s how we keep the climate the way we want it.

In summertime the energy required to cultivate crops inside the greenhouses is far less than other times of the year.

During the summer we, of course, get a lot of radiation from the Sun into our greenhouse and then the greenhouse warms up. The plants love the radiation from the Sun. So yes, we use substantially less energy as well during summer which is great for us because it’s cheaper but it’s also better for the environment again, obviously.

How does pollination work within the greenhouses?

Well, normally you would introduce bees, bumblebees, or bees or wasps and they will pollinate the flowers for you. They will pollinate the plants for you. In peppers we don’t, but that’s basically how it works.

Another wonderful aspect of hydroponic-grown produce is that it is free of pesticides.

It’s better for the people that buy our product. They get a clean product. We get, for instance, residue testing of our peppers done by an independent institution. And they always come back zero. So if you buy peppers from here in Kent, you buy peppers which are pesticide-free.

One of the innovative features of Thanet Earth’s operations is its combined heating and power system. Each greenhouse has its own power station which burns natural gas to generate electricity.

We're pretty much carbon neutral in terms of CO2 emissions. The CO2 that we produce through using the engines, we feed back into the greenhouse, as a growing improver for the plants. We use the heat to heat up the greenhouse. The electricity we sell back to the national grid. There is a machine in the boiler area that cleans the emissions.

And so we've got the purest form of carbon dioxide to feed back to the plants. The plastic lines here, there's tiny little holes in it. The CO2 comes in the greenhouse from the middle of the line and evenly distributes the CO2 in the greenhouse.

The cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers raised at Thanet Earth are all processed and packaged at an onsite plant. The tasty produce is then shipped to local retail markets.

The main aim we have here is from the initiative “Local for Local.” We're producing locally for the local area and therefore reducing food miles which enable us to be close to our market and therefore reducing transportation of imported produce.

On many occasions Supreme Master Ching Hai has spoken about why a plant-based diet is the most sustainable solution for our planet, including the benefits of hydroponic agriculture.

We can do that through such a method as hydroponics. You can even plant and harvest indoors, so we can do it also by ourselves. There’s no need even farmers; if we have a little garden, we can plant it ourselves. Or if we have a balcony, we can even plant it in water. We must start now so that you can have your own vegetables. It’s very easy.

If you just have a little pot even, on the balcony, the size you want. And you just sow some seeds in it. A few days later, you already have some vegetables. Salad, for example, some are grown in 3 days, or one week, or two weeks. And you can always take turns to grow it again.

Our thanks, Otto Vennik and Pleun van Malkenhorst for providing us with an informative introduction to Thanet Earth’s hydroponic operations. Thanet Earth’s cultivation methods are truly the wave of the future.

For more details on Thanet Earth, please visit: www.ThanetEarth.com
More information on the Rainbow Growers Group may be found at www.Rainbow-Growers.nl

Thank you esteemed viewers for joining us today on Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. Next on Supreme Master Television is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May all beings enjoy an abundance of organic plant-based food in a vibrant vegan world.