Connecting young people with commercial horticulture is one of the key aims for the industry at the moment. Kent-based glasshouse business Thanet Earth is doing its bit by offering an annual research fellowship to a Hadlow College student, offering them the chance to learn practical skills and contribute to a genuine commercial project.
This year’s participant is Sean Fredericks, a BSc commercial horticulture student who came through an intensive selection process led by Thanet Earth’s technical director Robert James. He is trialling some 69 varieties of tomatoes in the hope of discovering the next big thing in terms of taste, texture, yield and fruit quality, and while much of his work will be recording statistics in the Hadlow glasshouse, he also spent three weeks receiving training at Thanet Earth itself.
The project is not just about altruism – Fredericks and his predecessors over the past four years gather information and trial data that Thanet Earth hopes will lead to commercial glasshouse trials and ultimately make it onto retailers’ shelves.
Students are paid for their work on the nine-month fellowship, which takes place around their academic course commitments. Once that academic work is out of the way, they focus full time on the fellowship. As part of its commitment, Thanet Earth supplies the seeds as well as paying the student’s wage, while Hadlow provides the glasshouse and growing media.
In addition to Fredericks, for the first time this year Thanet Earth has selected a second student, Donna Wolfe, to manage a pepper greenhouse trial.
James explains: “To date, the Discovery Fellowship students have taken an incredible five varieties of tomatoes from trials at Hadlow into commercial production. This has provided us with a genuine commercial edge over our competitors and has become a core part of our NPD strategy.” Fredericks and Wolfe follow in the footsteps of Sally Channon, who last year completed the fellowship and has just landed herself a part-time job as a new product development co-ordinator at Thanet Earth.
Another former alumnus over the four years of the scheme, Sarah Titmuss, worked on strawberries during her fellowship and went on to secure a role at Total Worldfresh, underlining the success of the scheme in getting students ready for real-world jobs.
Hadlow programme leader and horticulture lecturer Alan Harvey underlines the point that the fellowship offers “unique opportunities for the awarded students in addition to which all horticultural students will benefit from the commercial trials.”
“The fellowship students go on to promising careers within the horticultural sector using the extensive range of skills developed during their degree and fellowship programmes,” he adds.
At a time when there are still question marks over where the next generation of growers, agronomists and technologists are going to come from, it is enriching to see such proactive work taking place.
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