Climate change: South’s wasabi and wine producers face challenges

Jon Old, founder of the Wasabi Company, has been growing wasabi in the UK for over a decade.

Known for its mustard-like kick, it is an aromatic spice traditionally eaten with sushi.

It is an aquatic crop, much of which grows alongside Japanese mountain streams.

His family have been watercress farmers here since the 1850s, but until a chef told him of a farm he had seen in Japan that grew something similar, he had not grown anything else.

Flowing through the beds on Mr Old’s farm is natural, mineral-rich water fed by springs more than 40m below the ground.

“It just planted a seed in our head and we thought ‘well if wasabi grows in water, then maybe it’s something we can do’,” he says.