Hari, one of our vertical farmers, shows off Harvest London’s Living Wage accreditation What is a living wage? Well, it depends who you ask. In the view of the Government, the National Living Wage is £10.42 an hour. According to new rates announced recently by the Living Wage Foundation, however, a true living wage needs to be £12 an hour across the UK, and £13.15 in London. That's a big difference, equivalent to over £5,000 a year for a worker in London. How can two things with very similar names be so different? The Living Wage Foundation starts from the position that a living wage should b ..read more

William Simmonds, CEO of Harvest London's partner, ADI Plants are plants, right? You put a seed into the ground, and as long as it has water, sunlight and nutrients, it will grow on its own. To a large extent humans are simply caretakers in the farming process. Over the last 12,000 years, we have bred crops and developed machinery, but the basics have been largely unchanged. Recent dramatic developments in controlled environment agriculture, automation, sensors and artificial intelligence, however, offer a step-change in how we can monitor, protect and improve crops. At Harvest London, our st ..read more

Chris Davies (centre) at the Last Mile Conference in London, October 2023 The vertical farming industry often talks about what goes on inside the facility - the irrigation, the lighting, the crops - but less often do we look at the outside, the building actually housing the farm. It may seem like the less exciting part of story, given that most vertical farms are put in large grey boxes - warehouses that property developers affectionately refer to as 'sheds'. But it's important that vertical farmers talk to developers, architects and landowners, because availability of suitable properties, in ..read more

It’s nearly that time of year again. No, not Halloween. Not Bonfire night either. It’s COP, of course, the annual UN climate change conference, this year being held in the UAE. COP (which stands for ‘conference of the parties’ - you can see why they abbreviate it) may not be the highlight of your calendar, but it is closely watched as an indicator of the world’s attempts to get a grip on climate change.  This year, the UN will be producing a ‘global stocktake’, a review of where countries are “making progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement – and where they ..read more

Every year, on the fourth Sunday in September, people across the world get together to raise awareness about the important role rivers play in our ecosystems, and the threats they face all over the world. For World Rivers Day 2023, we wanted to take the time to look at the state of rivers in this country. You may well have seen news reports recently about sewage in rivers, and the alarming statistic that only 14% of England’s rivers were assessed this year by the Environment Agency as having ‘good ecological status’. If you’ve been following the story, you might have heard about sewage overfl ..read more

As part of our membership of the B Corp community, we have committed to publishing an annual review of our impact on the environment, our community, customers and suppliers. Harvest London Impact Report 2022 ..read more

Press Release Harvest London, which grows crops in a converted industrial unit in East London to supply restaurants and food businesses across the Capital, has achieved B Corporation certification with the highest rating of any vertical farming company in the world.  Becoming a B Corp is a rigorous process that requires a company to display socially and environmentally responsible practices relating to energy supplies, waste and water use, staff pay, diversity and corporate transparency. To complete the certification, Harvest London has changed its articles of association to embed a com ..read more

Agritecture’s Director of Business Development, Jeffrey Landau, interviewed Chris Davies, the CEO & Founder of Harvest London Harvest London, a vertical farm growing herbs and leafy greens in London, has expanded their operations beyond the pilot stage into their very first full-scale operation. In the last few years, Brexit, and now the coronavirus have shown how reliant England is on other countries for their produce. Chris Davies, the CEO and Founder of Harvest London explains, “when we first started Harvest London there was very little interest in controlled environment agriculture, bu ..read more

As the UK and the EU stretch out yet another week of “will they or won’t they?” over a trade deal, like a painfully unromantic episode of Neighbours (no jokes about Australian models, please), businesses are not only trying to plan for what happens in January, but also questioning how much we should rely on goods moving seamlessly in and out of the country.  In relatively recent times, it was common to say that the internet and highly developed international supply chains had abolished distance. This was always an oversimplification — and at a time when the global business community is wo ..read more

As a Managing Director of an expanding, popular pizza restaurant group, Gavin Smith is constantly looking for ways for making the business better – better for the customer, the team, the bottom line and the planet. Being just a dozen sites, Pizza Pilgrims is still agile and positive changes can be introduced quickly. The issue Pizza Pilgrims likes fresh herbs and every one of the 35,000 pizzas it serves a week has a handful of fragrant basil leaves adorning it. That adds up to 4.5 tonnes of the stuff a year. And it had all been imported from Israel, Italy and Spain. “I felt uncomfort ..read more