Europe's largest grower of glasshouse peppers

Tangmere, near Chichester used to resound to the roar of Spitfires and Hurricanes; today it is barely disturbed by the quiet hum of the latest energy-efficient greenhouse heating and conditioning equipment. Europe's largest grower of greenhouse peppers operates on the disused Battle of Britain airfield. The owner claims his high-tech approach brings special environmental and consumer benefits.

The cooks of frosty northern Europe are having a love affair with the tropical pepper family. Sweet peppers - so called to distinguish them from the fiery chilli peppers used for flavouring - find their way into culinary delights from salads and soups to exotic roast vegetable dishes. In UK supermarkets, the demand for red, yellow and green sweet peppers is soaring.

The nurseries have about 20 hectares (50 acres) of the under glass. Every year 750,000 seedlings go into individual bottomless pots, each standing on a pad of absorbent rock wool. Every plant is provided with two vertical strings - a cool 1½ million lengths to tie every year. They support the plants as they climb to 3 metres of growth. The pots are fed a steady drip of very dilute liquid plant food. Any that runs off is collected and recycled. The roots grow down through the compost in the pot, into the absorbent pad; it's a high-tech version of that old-time favourite of amateur gardeners - ring culture.

But the technology doesn't stop there. Peppers are tropical plants. They're happy with the amount of sunlight they get in the southern UK but they cannot tolerate the cold, so the greenhouses have to be heated in the winter. Gas is the least environmentally-damaging fossil fuel but it would be very inefficient just to burn it in a boiler. Instead it's used to drive big electrical generators. They sell power to the local electricity grid to offset some of the cost of the operation. Only the waste heat from the exhaust - which would otherwise go up the chimney - is used to keep the houses warm. The managing director of Tangmere Airfield Nurseries, Dirk Houweling says, "In some ways this is actually a small power station that produces peppers as a by-product of generating clean, efficient electricity"...

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