What if we could all grow our own produce from the comfort of our living rooms
Home Harvest’s founders want us all to farm from our own kitchens. Is this the future of agriculture, asks Will Hosie.
When Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne became the first duo to row from Peru to Australia in 2025, they were also the first to use a floating farm to sustain themselves at sea.
Growing their own salad over an 8,000-mile journey was made possible by one of their sponsors, Home Harvest, a tech firm whose flagship product allows consumers to grow herbs and leaves directly from seed mats. The company, which uses hydroponic technology to produce fresh leafy greens in days, adapted its product to be solar-powered and directly attached to the racing shell, to great effect: together, Jess and Miriam raised more than £120,000 for educational charity Outward Bound Trust.
Jess Rowe with the onboard farm.
Jess Rowe Miriam Payne and Andrew Johnson with their Home Harvest-kitted out boat.
Home Harvest’s flagship product is different. A three-tier box, powered by LEDs, it has a filtration system that disperses water to professional-grade seed mats; one prototype features a different salad crop growing on each level. The boxes connect to an app, which offers recipes and nutritional advice tailored to individual goals (such as to lose weight or increase vitamin C intake), as well as more generalist advice rooted in Home Harvest’s core belief: that our current agricultural system is as bad for us as for the planet.
A camera is built into each box to monitor the growth of the crops, accessible via the app. ‘We offer a direct-to-consumer business,’ explains Hedley Aylott, the firm’s co-founder and marketing director, ‘one that bypasses the need for a middleman and reduces the carbon footprint of imports.’
Hedley is keen to stress the anti-pesticide virtues of indoor hydroponic growing and invites me to sample the radish, rocket and pea shoots that have been grown by a Home Harvest box. ‘The technology works by using higher seed density in the paper seed mats to achieve faster growth,’ co-founder Andrew Johnson, nicknamed ‘The Salad King’, told Country Life last year.
‘The system creates the perfect growing environment with controlled temperature and light. You simply add water and can get fresh, leafy greens in a matter of days, rather than months.’
The colourful three- or one-tier boxes supplied by Home Harvest come with seed mats, from which pesticide-free, leafy greens will sprout.
The market for such a product, according to both founders, is huge. ‘With the weather becoming more volatile and hard to predict,’ Andrew says, ‘it is becoming harder for consumers to rely on crops that are grown outdoors.’ As such, the firm subscribes to the same beliefs as were touted by Michael Gove when he was Defra Secretary: that vertical farming, ‘with vegetables grown in temperature, moisture and nutrition-controlled environments’, can ‘guarantee improvements in yield’ and reduce the risk posed to crop production by freak weather incidents.
‘Vertical farms not only minimise land use,’ Michael told the Oxford Farming Conference in 2019, ‘but can, of course, be located close to the urban population centres they serve.’ Home Harvest, then, stands at the frontier of what the minister teased as the fourth agricultural revolution. Founded in 2021, the company is on the verge of stateside expansion. ‘We launch in America this month,’ Andrew beams.
The US market, roughly five times the size of the UK’s and facing similar issues, could be poised for British invasion. There are, however, important differences to account for. Britain is far more reliant on agricultural imports for fresh fruit and vegetables, taking in about 65% of the latter and 83% of the former. The US, by contrast, is more independent: 59% of its fruit and only 35% of its vegetables hail from international markets.
It would be a great English success story if Home Harvest were to take off across the pond. The more immediate question, however, is whether the British smallholder could suffer from such innovation. If, indeed, the consumer becomes his or her own grower, does this render the work of our own farmers obsolete? Moreover, if this becomes society’s chief way of feeding itself, is it utopian to assume that an endless supply of professional-grade seed mats would become available? The market is likely to do as it always does: split into categories that distinguish between higher-quality, more expensive items and lower-quality, more accessible products.
The root of Home Harvest’s success so far — with £1.2 million secured in pre-seed funding — is the quality seed mats sold with the subscriptions, which are sourced from CN Seeds near Ely, Cambridgeshire. For those banking on this being the future of agriculture, exploring possibilities in the seed space could be a cunning move. The three-tier box costs £399, then £15 per month for seed mats; the one-tier box is £300 and £10 a month.
This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
