Meet the man pioneering vertical farming in an effort to save our food production | House & Garden

James Lloyd-Jones photographed at his company’s Innovation Centre in Bristol, where different crops and new technology are trialled

This month, entrepreneur James Lloyd- Jones is opening the world’s largest vertical farm in Gloucestershire. His business, Jones Food Company, already supplies around 30 per cent of the UK’s cut basil, which is grown at an existing site near Scunthorpe. However, this new farm, at 15,000 metres square – the equivalent of 75 tennis courts stacked one on top of another – will be recordbreaking in both size and technology, enabling the company to supply British supermarkets with hundreds of tonnes of super fresh herbs and salad leaves.

‘We import over 50 per cent of our salads, herbs and flowers in this country. It’s crazy,’ says James. ‘The nutritional content of the food goes down, the longer it waits to get onto the shelves. With our system, the crops are harvested and on the supermarket shelves within 12 hours. We are cutting out a whole chain of events that consume huge amounts of energy – from flying produce in by air to transporting it in large trucks. We are also using considerably less water than traditional agriculture and there is less food waste, which is one of the biggest culprits for carbon emissions.’

Vertical farming is a form of soil-less hydroponic growing that has been practised for hundreds if not thousands of years – some people believe the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were based on hydroponics. Crops such as strawberries, tomatoes and salads have been widely grown in hydroponic greenhouse systems for many years, cultivated in inert substrates soaked in nutrient-dosed water. But large-scale vertical farming, using more advanced lighting and watering technology that allows the