Urban growing is coming to HULL in the form of Vertical Growing. The Dunling Family have been growers for three generations and have seen many changes in the way crops are grown. The latest trend is now vertical farming.

Vertical and Urban growing is getting a lot of press and rightly so, Many of the small family run Market Gardens have disappeared and replaced by large Nursery’s supplying the Multiples with so called “fresh Produce”.

Imagine the concept fresh produce grown on an Industrial estate and fresh Herbs cut and delivered the same day, all the water and feed recycled and reused so the only water used is what the plants need to grow. The media that the plants are grown in is recycled and either fed to animals or dried and used as a bio fuel.

Now imagine a warehouse near you growing Micro Herbs and fresh Herbs supplying the local community or town with local grown fresh produce, this could be done on a commercial basis under a franchise banner (Like McDonalds)    Imagine Hull, Leeds, Sheffield and other towns growing local produce all produced to the same standard and quality 365 days a year.

Growing sustainable food is also helping the environment

HOW

Ø Cutting down on food miles

Ø Controlled environment

Ø Low Carbon footprint

Ø Low heat input in winter

Ø Low cooling input in summer.

Include Vertical Growing into this and we are going places now, Instead of growing per Square mtr we are growing per Cubic mtr.

 In large commercial growing operations we now see sophisticated moving bench systems, hydroponic irrigation systems, environmental control, artificial lighting systems, and state of the art greenhouses to maximize the potential of the natural environment and reach levels of production unheard of in past decades. Yet to believe that productivity has been maximized and every optimum reached is to ignore the progress already achieved. Commercial growing never stops improving and sometimes those improvements are far beyond what we thought possible.

 Yet if someone were to propose to a commercial lettuce or herb grower (with a ‘state of the art’ greenhouse facility) that he could achieve at least seven times more production per square metre without any compromise on quality or yield, he would probably assume you were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Just the same sort of reaction his father before him might have had to Hydroponic Growing and to what is being achieved today in intensive commercial horticulture.

With land pressures set to increase in the coming decades the question that needs a solution is not how to expand our existing growing space but instead it should be about how we produce more from the growing area we currently use.

We can use matting and growing media that can be reused as a fuel. So now you can feed the Human population and with the waste product you can heat the growing units. This makes it a fantastic product as you can grow Lettuce, herbs, rocket etc and feed the product to humans and reuse the growing media for fuel, so there is no wastage what so ever.