Sven Bartke
speaker
20 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 May
Sven Bartke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
My name is Sven Bartke.
I'm Associate Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Edge Hill University and I'm also the Chair of the Greenhouse Innovation Consortium.
So the area of land is surprisingly small.
So in the UK sector, we occupy less than 0.1% of agricultural land that's actually being used for production.
So it's a very small industry in terms of its actual footprint, but it produces a very large proportion of fruit and vegetables in the UK.
In terms of total area, there's over 2,000 hectares of greenhouses in the UK.
In terms of food producing greenhouses, so we're talking strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, aubergines as well, it's around 800 to 900 hectares thereabouts in that area.
So in the UK, a lot of the production is tomatoes.
So that's one of the largest products we're actually producing.
And it covers around, depending on which time of the year, of course, it's somewhere around between 15 to 20% of what we actually need in the UK.
So we're only producing a very small proportion of what we're consuming in the UK at the moment.
In fact, since the 60s, there hasn't really been any bigger support schemes specifically for food-producing horticulture in the UK.
So we conducted a mapping exercise, and it appears that over 70% of greenhouses are over 40 years old.
and coming more or less to the end of their lifespan.
And now we're basically asking government to support back into the system again to allow us to go for another 50, 60, 100, 200 years potentially.
So in fact by supporting growers we can overcome a lot of these health challenges the UK is facing already.
Yes, indeed.
Food security is not part of the National Risk Registry as an independent standalone pillar.
It's not seen by government as a key fundamental risk for the United Kingdom.
And that's kind of worrying.
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