I HAVE just read a fascinating report by Nuffield Scholar Seth Pascoe titled "Advancing British sea buckthorn".

Sea buckthorn is a perennial, woody, deciduous plant with silvery-green narrow leaves and intermittent thorns, that can grow as large as eight to 10 metres in height, although one to four metres is more common.

The fruit grows in tight clusters on female plants, typically on two-year-old branches. Sea-berries are commonly spherical, cylindrical or elliptical in shape and are attractively coloured red, red-orange, bright orange or yellow. The berry size varies according to cultivar and the season, but usually ranges between six and 12mm.

The plant prefers sandy, free draining soils and in the UK wild sea buckthorn is usually found growing in sand dune locations where it can become invasive and problematic.

Mr Pascoe's first encounter with sea buckthorn came in 2012 when he was trekking to Mount Everest base camp in the Himalayas. He had climbed up to an altitude of 4000m when the lack of oxygen in the thin mountain air had started to give him altitude sickness.

A Sherpa gave him a glass of bright orange coloured juice, telling him it would alleviate his various altitude-induced ailments.

The juice had a unique, tangy, refreshing and delicious citrus-like taste, unlike anything he had previously experienced. The following day he felt fully rejuvenated, and when he asked the Sherpa what the magical juice was he was told it was sea buckthorn.

With an ever increasingly health conscious public and the ongoing shift in consumer trends towards healthier lifestyles and diets, it seemed to Mr Pescoe that sea buckthorn and its health beneficial attributes represented a great opportunity. So he decided to establish a commercial orchard in Cornwall, but first to use a Nuffield Farming Scholarship to travel the world and learn about cultivation, harvesting, processing and marketing the crop.

Commercial cultivation of sea buckthorn reportedly started in China and Russia in the 1930s. Reputedly, 95 per cent of the global sea buckthorn population can be found in China, where the total area is thought to be well in excess of 2m hectares. However, this is not all in commercial fruit production, as it is also used extensively to prevent soil erosion.

Sea buckthorn is also grown in India, Germany, Finland, the Baltic States as well as North America as shelterbelts on the prairies and in commercial orchards in Canada. GB recorded an area of approximately 650 hectares, although the national commercial crop is currently in the region of a mere 10 to 15 hectares.

A tonne of sea-berries will yield approximately 800kg of puree/juice, 30kg of pulp oil, and 8kg of seed oil. Both oils are rich in omega oils that have applications in skincare and general health care.

The most significant challenge to growing a commercial crop is harvesting, as the fruit is not a true berry and is not easily separated from the plant. In addition, most varieties have a series of aggressive thorns that make hand harvesting both painful and slow. Typical work rates are an impractical one or two kg per person per hour. This is variety dependent, and on thorn-less Siberian varieties with larger fruits, much higher output is reported.

In India the favoured harvesting technique is to place a tarpaulin beneath the tree and then beat the branches with sticks until the berries fall off.

A variation of that method is vibration harvesting, where the berries are mechanically shaken off branches by vibrating arms, but the process damages the bark and isn't particularly efficient.

There are a variety of other harvesting techniques that include vacuum harvesters that use a combination of a comb and vacuum to persuade the berries off the branches. Some interesting work has been done on pre-harvest hormone treatment to enable berry release

Currently the most successful and feasible harvesting process is the "cut and freeze" technique. Fruit laden branches are mechanically or hand-pruned from the trees and then frozen. Using a relatively simple vibration cleaner, frozen berries are then rattled off the branches and separated from any trash to produce a clean sample.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you remove the branches. As fruiting generally occurs on two-year-old wood, by default you are removing the potential for a harvest the following season - so the orchard has to be managed in two halves.

Mr Pascoe's fascinating report led me to conclude that farming is complicated enough without getting involved in this particular crop.