Throughout harvest season, Birds Eye – a part of Nomad Meals – can produce 48 tonnes of frozen peas per hour.
Reaching this capability inside a ‘simply in time’ operation isn’t any imply feat, recommended UK agriculture supervisor Richard Wilson on our current journey to Birds Eye’s operations in Yorkshire, Northern England.
However the firm doesn’t simply take delight in supplying the UK market with ‘candy and tender’ frozen peas. Along with farmer cooperative The Inexperienced Pea Firm (GPC), additionally it is incorporating sustainable agricultural practices into its cultivation, which feed into Nomad Meals’ ambition to scale back emissions by 25% in absolute phrases by 2025, and obtain net-zero emissions by 2050.
“Pea cropping itself may be very constructive when it comes to carbon,” defined Wilson. “It captures atmospheric carbon from the environment and sequesters it into the soil.” Being a member of the legume household, peas are additionally nitrogen fixing – which means that growers can cut back their use of artificial fertiliser all through the season.
The corporate can be lowering artificial agricultural inputs by investigating using biologic fungicides, primarily based on dwelling organisms and pure compounds, that supply safety in opposition to pathogens.
Different sustainability initiatives embrace Birds Eye’s dedication to the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, which sees it function in accordance with rules designed to raised the surroundings and society.
The altering local weather is one thing the enterprise is ‘very acutely aware’ of, stated Wilson, who has noticed much less conventional seasonality and extra volatility in climate patterns of late. “This 12 months…has illustrated the purpose that we’re fairly a altering local weather. We now have gone from having a really dry winter into February, which was one of many driest on file. What adopted was the wettest March on file for 30-40 years, after which that adopted into the warmest June.”
This could make planning the pea crop ‘fairly troublesome’, we have been advised: “It’s been fairly a problem.”
However wanting ahead, if adversarial climate circumstances proceed, the corporate can pull levers in conventional breeding methods. Nomad Meals owns a glasshouse manufacturing in Sellaberga, Sweden, the place it identifies fascinating traits in its pea seeds. “Drought tolerance might be a range trait that we glance to select up extra.
“If local weather change and the extremes of local weather are to develop into extra of a figment of the longer term, then these are areas we’d be must be wanting into to.”
Watch the video to be taught extra in regards to the cultivation, harvest, and processing of Birds Eye peas.
