The Shropshire Group has embarked on an extension of over half a hectare to their existing two hectare lettuce plant propagation nursery through a large investment in a bid to innovatively save energy.
The nursery, Second Willow, currently produces around 85 million lettuce plants throughout the UK season, the nursery’s £1.2 million new extension will increase output to nearly 110 plants per year. This will also include the addition of 10m celery plants - a product that it did not previously have the capacity to produce.
Now four years old, the Second Willow nursery was built in part to strengthen the integration between plant propagation and planting stages, improving overall production efficiency and quality.
The nursery is covered in unique F-Clean plastic film, the same material used at the Eden Project, which allows transmission of UV light resulting in better quality plants. In addition, the F-Clean film is expected to last at least 10 years which is far longer than other plastic coverings.
A further key environmental driver of the nursery development is the reduction in transport costs. It sits in the heart of the group’s farming operation and the production of 110m plants on-site, rather than at the original off-site propagation units, will save over 50,000 lorry miles per year and reduce annual diesel consumption by around 6,875 gallons.
Nursery Manager Will Forbes said: “The environmental benefits of on-site plant propagation are numerous. “Not only are we reducing lorry trips by 95 per cent, we are harvesting 1.7 millions gallons of rainwater every year, significantly reducing our reliance on local rivers; and we have also cut down on our peat usage by 12 per cent through the reduction of block size,” he said.
Second Willow Nursery is situated within two miles of the company’s Littleport farming business. Its Dutch-designed technology requires only four operatives further reducing the reliance on labour within the production process. The nursery itself is part funded by the EU due to its ownership by G’s Growers co-operative of farmers. The extension is currently in the early stages of development, with a planned completion date of autumn 2010.
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