Far from the failed harvests, droughts and floods of Asia, Mark Diacono is expecting some good to come of climate change. On his 17-hectare farm beside the Otter river in north Devon, he is experimenting with the crops that might provide a living for farmers in the warmer, wetter Britain of the near future. So far the only thing he has really harvested is TV coverage – it only takes British agriculture, "food security" and climate change to be mentioned together for television news to be on the phone asking if they can send a crew to his orchards.
Nearly five years since he started his "climate change farm", Diacono says results have been mixed. "Two olive species did well and two not. The almonds have not worked: there were two bad summers in a row. You have to take it on the chin if you're going to try this stuff."
But at Otter Farm there are all sorts of things alien to most British gardens. Szechuan peppers, peaches, apricots, olives, persimmons, Chilean guavas, kiwis and pecans. There are grape varieties no one expected to see in Britain. Everything is organic, and he uses no greenhouses or heating. Next year he will make his own sparkling wine. But nothing is yet ready for commercial production.
Diacono is amazingly upbeat for someone who has set himself the hardest possible task in food gardening – trying to grow things that aren't supposed to work here. His Otter Farm blog is a wry account of one setback after another: peach trees with fatal leaf-curl; a pecan, thriving at last, run down by the lawn mower. "It's tough. I work 90 hours a week: on the team at River Cottage [where he is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's "climate change expert"], I write about food, I do consultancies.
"We will get a commercial crop of olives," Diacono insists. "Olives are more likely in this county as a business than apricots. Otter Farm uses varieties from Catalunya and upland Greece that are well used to cold snaps, and flower late. "It's going to work – if they grow to 10ft tall you've got half a million quid's worth of ornamental trees to sell, even if they don't fruit." He bubbles with new plans: for exotic vegetables and rare salad leaves, and planting lavender and nectarines among the trees to benefit from the nutrients.
Why do it? "Part of the beauty of it is that we're taking advantage of climate change to grow low-carbon food – and growing these plants will trap carbon and help stop the acceleration of the changes. That's why I think the expensive things – olives, apricots and peaches – might work for British farmers, because people are becoming aware of the costs of importing them."
What about the wilder predictions for new British-grown foods at the other end of this century? "There are things like avocados and bananas that I would say are impossible. But it takes someone to try something, expertise builds up."
Has climate change been proved to have reached the Otter Valley? "Spring is earlier, and things crop earlier. The rain is coming harder and more violently. We lost 40 trees and 200m of stock fence in a flood last winter. The farmers said they had never seen anything like it."
