World first at Yorkshire mine could turn Britain’s industrial past into its agricultural future.
More than a kilometre beneath the Yorkshire coast, in a working mine that has spent decades yielding polyhalite and salt, British scientists have just planted something rather less expected: lettuce, herbs and salad crops, grown under lights in the deepest vertical farm the world has ever seen.
The site is Boulby Underground Laboratory, near Whitby, run by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Boulby has long been one of Britain’s genuine scientific treasures, a facility so deep and so shielded from cosmic radiation that physicists use it to hunt for dark matter and study the ghostly particles known as neutrinos. Now, in a striking example of British ingenuity finding new value in old infrastructure, that same rock-shielded stillness is being tested as the foundation of a new approach to feeding the nation.
A homegrown partnership
The 12-month study is being led by the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food, working alongside the food producer Farm Urban, with backing from a UK Research and Innovation grant delivered through the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. It is a distinctly British collaboration: a national laboratory, a Russell Group university and a home-grown agri-food business, pooling expertise to answer a question nobody has been able to test properly before.
Four vertical farm units have been installed in Boulby’s Outside Experimentation Area, and researchers will spend the coming year tracking yield, energy use and running costs. The aim is straightforward: to find out, with hard data rather than theory, whether growing food a kilometre underground can ever be commercially viable.
Turning cost into advantage
Vertical farming above ground has grown rapidly in recent years, but it has always carried a heavy energy bill, largely from artificial lighting, heating and climate control. Boulby’s advantage is its constant, naturally stable underground temperature, plus infrastructure such as lighting and ventilation already built for the physics programme. If that stability can be shown to cut running costs, it would mark a genuine breakthrough for a sector that has struggled to prove its economics at scale.
Professor Sean Paling, Director of Boulby Underground Laboratory, called the venture a natural extension of the site’s scientific mission:
“Boulby Underground Laboratory is a special place for science, hosting research that can only be done in the unique deep subterranean environment. More than a kilometre underground, shielded from cosmic radiation, we conduct low background physics including the search for dark matter and neutrino studies, alongside a range of pure and applied research. And now we’re growing food.”
He added that success at Boulby “opens real possibilities for what disused mines across the UK could become for the public.”
Rebuilding communities that mining left behind
That last point is where this story becomes as much about British communities as it is about British science. The UK has thousands of disused mine sites, many sitting in the same coalfield and mining towns that lost skilled jobs when the pits and quarries closed. Jacob Nickles, co lead of the Institute for Sustainable Food’s Controlled Environment Agriculture group at Sheffield, put it plainly:
“If successful, we may be able to make use of the thousands of disused mine sites that exist across the UK. Many of these sites are located in economically deprived areas. Repurposing them could create skilled jobs, improving access to fresh produce, and supporting local communities while breathing new life into heritage sites.”
Nickles was candid about the hurdles ahead, noting the team expects challenges from the ambient salt and heat that come with a working mine environment. But the goal, he said, is simply to establish whether crops can be grown reliably under these conditions, and to build a rigorous, evidence based model rather than relying on assumption.
A boost for food security
For a country keen to strengthen its own food security and reduce dependence on unpredictable weather and imported produce, the implications are significant. Underground sites are naturally insulated from storms, droughts and seasonal swings, offering a form of resilience that open fields cannot match. Because underground farming does not compete for agricultural land, it could also ease pressure on the countryside, reducing fertiliser run-off and helping protect habitats for pollinators.
Science Minister Lord Vallance welcomed the project as an example of government backed research delivering practical national benefit:
“This Government backs science because of its power to tackle the most important challenges affecting us all. Growing fresh food while using less energy and land, and being less reliant on changeable British weather, could strengthen food security across our country and protect our environment. At the same time, this project could see more disused mines becoming hubs for skilled jobs, creating new opportunities to benefit communities across the UK.”
The verdict, a year from now
None of this is guaranteed to succeed, and the researchers are careful to say so. But that a British mine built for extracting salt could, within a generation, be extracting a harvest instead, speaks to a wider truth about the country’s industrial heritage. Given the right science and the right ambition, the infrastructure of yesterday’s industries can be repurposed to secure tomorrow’s food supply, and Britain, once again, is leading the way in finding out how.
