M&S has announced plans to sell lower-carbon parsnips following a fully autonomous farm trial.
The retailer will be the first to farm and sell a lower-carbon vegetable following an ‘autonomous field’ trial.
In partnership with supplier Huntapac, M&S will sell lower-carbon parsnips grown in Yorkshire in selected stores this November.
The team brought together the latest technology to farm with a significantly lower environmental impact including two robots for bed forming, planting and weeding, two different types of drone to monitor and maintain crop health, and the latest scientific testing on soil health and carbon impact.
“Agriculture is one of our biggest contributors to emissions, so it’s important that we find new lower-impact farming methods,” said Andrew Clappen, technical director at M&S Food. “Trialling new ways to support our Plan A roadmap to net zero is an important step on the journey and this project has helped deliver more parsnips at M&S quality and a carbon reduction, and brings together new technologies which if adopted more widely would create more highly skilled jobs and attract new talent into the sector.”
The retailer said the new technologies offer a future of farming that will aid farmers, create more highly skilled jobs in the industry and attract new talent.
They used a minimum till approach to help keep carbon locked into the soil, a green fertiliser and the new tech, which uses significantly less diesel than a traditional tractor.
The green fertiliser has a lower carbon impact and also removes nitrogen oxide from the air, converting it to nitrogen used by plants for photosynthesis.
The new technology also improved quality and quantity of crop yields, as well as improving weather resilience.
“Not only are we seeing a reduction of the carbon impact but more parsnips at higher quality, due to us being able to plant the seeds despite bad weather earlier this year,” said Stephen Shields, technical & sustainability director at Huntapac. “This would have a fantastic impact on our business at scale and we’re aiming to deliver multiple fields farmed this way for next season.”
The field also includes various measures from M&S’s Farming with Nature programme to improve biodiversity of both wildlife and the soil, including agrisound boxes monitoring pollinator numbers and wildflower borders.
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