Careers
Lorna Maybery spoke to graduate Oliver Baker, who is caring for cucumbers at the world’s first natural light growing centre John Cottle
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n a world where we have to keep up with a growing population and demonstrate our environmental credentials, British farmers are looking to new and innovative ways to improve their businesses. Company RIPE (Rapid Installation Process of ETFE) builds greenhouses using ETFE, a fluorinebased plastic polymer that transmits up to 95% of natural light with a fraction of the mass of glass. It’s an innovation RIPE hopes will transform how we grow under cover as the material lets in full natural light, is easy to install and long-lasting and not susceptible to weather damage. To prove the efficacy of ETFE, RIPE has constructed the world’s first natural light growing (NLG) centre at University of Warwick Life Sciences, Wellesbourne, to scientifically prove the impact of full spectrum natural light on crops within a protective environment.
The first crop is cucumbers, looked after by sustainable crop production graduate Oliver Baker, who tells us about his job.
Q
How did you end up working at the Natural Light Growing Centre?
I ran out of money for my accommodation while finishing my Master’s in sustainable crop production, so I was looking for work. A job came up for an agricultural assistant in a sustainable greenhouse looking to produce the next level of crop production and it tied in well with my degree. I started working 25-30 hours a week in February alongside my studies and it developed from there.
Q
What are you growing?
We have about 2,000 cucumber plants in here. The greenhouse is split into two halves, baby cucumbers and
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mini cucumbers. For the baby the sizing is 2.5cm wide and 8-12cm long. With the minis it’s done by a weight specification, and they need to be 105g to 150g – the babys are roughly 40-80g. Originally, we had two varieties; one to produce babys and one for minis, but we found the variety that we are currently growing is more resistant to disease and can produce both mini and baby cucumbers consistently.
Q
What do you do day-to-day?
I oversee everything from harvesting plants when they reach the right specifications to dropping the crop as they grow to the top of their strings and moving them so they have room to grow. We have two different harvesting cycles, one from February through to July, then July to October. The standard is three. By doing this, we can produce more, as between cycles you get a three-week window where the crop isn’t big enough to
produce fruit, so two crops a year gives us three extra weeks of production. Originally, I was measuring to make sure I picked the right size, but having picked hundreds of thousands of cucumbers, I don’t do that now!
Q
What nutrients do the plants need?
We grow the cucumbers in rockwool with a dripper that goes to each plant and individually supplies a nutrient mixture organised by one of our agronomists, so each plant gets exactly what it needs. This also feeds into a bigger slab of rockwool that all the plants have a shared root base in, so they can all get the same nutrients, even if one of the drips isn’t functioning properly. We have a variety of biological controls, mostly parasitic wasps and mites that then eat the other insects in here. Then we do a bit of disease mapping to see what is coming in and what we can change in the future.
January 2022
13/01/2022 10:27:40
