Sphagnum Farming UK - A Sustainable Alternative to Peat in Growing Media

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This project seeks to establish a method for growing Sphagnum moss on a large scale to provide asustainable alternative to peat in horticulture. Natural peat is expected to run out within 2 decades, andharvesting is causing great harm to the environment. Sphagnum grown on a commercial scale offers anfast, effective and sustainable solution to this market need for horticultural growing media because peatis merely old preserved Sphagnum. This is an innovative approach, as Sphagnum is difficult topropagate, and is relatively slow growing. However, our propagation methods have shown that we canmass-cultivate successfully and we now wish to determine optimum Sphagnum strains and growingconditions to create a much larger scale product which can be used to cultivate a crop at field scale andgenerate a cash crop for landowners/farmers in the form of a growing medium to replace peat whilstrestoring wetland and peat-forming conditions.