Trying to solve the big problem of peat

We are trying to solve a big problem and that is the use of peat. Using peat is basically the industry standard. We've been doing that for many years. Our blocks contain 80% peat, 20% other at the moment. The peat bog environment is a really brilliant biodiverse ecosystem and we're raiding it really in order to harvest something that we can use to grow. Not only is it a carbon sink when it's actually in the ground, but it also means that it's turning that carbon sink into a bit more of a carbon emitter every time that we're removing peat from it. The issue for us though is that actually the peat is such an amazing substance for growing in that it's very hard to replace. So that is an individual lettuce plant. We plant about 5,000 per hour, so we've got 40,000 here. So we have four people sat on the planter which plants the lettuce shallow into the soil. We have been trialling a peat-free product. Delflin Nurseries, who raise our plants for us, couldn't put that product into a block such as this, but they could put it into a module. Plants that produce strong roots will bind the peat-free medium together. Things like lettuce have got very weak root systems and when you try and pull them out of the modules, it breaks off or the module gets left behind. So anything with a weak root system benefits from being grown in a block. One of the problems with peat-free growing media at the moment is a lot of them have what we call a very loose growing matrix. So the chances are when you take it out of the pot, half of that stuff just disappears. We found that planting of those products was really difficult because the roots were not bound together within the block and the plants did suffer. If we were to just replace everything with something that wasn't optimal, then we could have quite a catastrophic result really for the farm. We can't really do that, we have to go through it bit by bit, trial what works and then we build it up from there. So hopefully using that process and being able to work with the University at Coventry and Delflin, we'll be able to come up with something that works. We're trying to produce a blocking compost using sustainable materials. Quite a lot of materials will make a nice looking block but when you try and pick them up, they just fall to pieces. A new material will take a while to be refined to get it to set solid so that you can plant them mechanically or even by hand. Ethically, it's the right thing to do. We've got climate change staring us in the face so I'm a worried man and I know that I've got to do something. We've got a bit of funding to help us to actually deliver the project. The first bit at the minute is looking at all their literature around at the moment, what's happened in the past, who's done what, what's worked, what hasn't worked and then gathering together all the ingredients that we've identified, bringing them all to the lab at Coventry University and then the next phase will be taking those mixes that look like they have promise in the lab to Delftham Nurseries and then we'll plant them out here and we'll see what grows good lettuce. If at the end of these two years we've managed to create something that's not only useful for us but also the industry, then that's a massive success and I think we'd be really proud of it.