An early crop of Driscoll's Lusa strawberries is set to hit UK supermarkets this week.
Herefordshire Berry Gardens' grower James Waltham of Haygrove Farms says the business has seen increased productivity in the variety after investing in more environment-friendly growing equipment.
Haygrove invested in two new 990kw biomass boilers that were installed late last year. The renewable energy boilers, fuelled by woodchip and recycled wood, are heating four hectares of fruit, which is grown in glasshouses across two different sites.
Waltham says that replacing oil with wood has significantly reduced his farm's CO2 footprint, and that the biomass boilers can also use clean plant waste as fuel.
'Every business has to reduce carbon emissions to help the UK meet its environmental obligations, and what we have done makes environmental sense as well as economic sense with the cost of heating oil having risen considerably in the last decade,' said James Waltham, MD of Haygrove Growing UK.
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