"Looks like the weather's turning more autumnal..." says Oli Pascall, walking back to his truck in a farmyard at Yalding.

Casting an eye to the greying sky above the barn, he could be any other farmer from centuries past; only he's not any other farmer, this is not any other farm, and that's not even a barn - it's a £10 million power plant, and it's the reason why he's slightly less bothered about the onset of autumn than his predecessors might have been.

While traditionally the end of summer would bring the growing season to an end, Clock House Farm's river source heat pump allows Oli and his team to heat their polyhouses with renewable energy and keep growing soft fruit – and their business – into December.

The largest of its kind in Europe, and maybe even the world, to be used in fruit growing, the system extracts heat from the nearby River Medway, and sends it up to a plant room where six heat pumps increase the temperature of a separate water system to 45 degrees and pump it up to the farm's polyhouses. The river water is sent straight back into the river, four degrees colder.

"Do the fish get cold?" I ask Oli, surveying the machinery at the water's edge. It's probably a stupid question, but extracting heat must have some impact on the river ecosystem.

"We had to do thermal modelling of the river, and of the discharge water," he explains. "There's quite constringent licensing with the environment agency so they worked with us for about 12 months to make sure what we were doing is ok.

“They were very pro using the technology but they were quite honest and said we haven't really seen this before. We don't really know what you need to apply for but let's work together, let's work it out, so we applied for an extraction licence and a discharge licence, and we had to do all sorts of things like impact assessments to gain those licences.

"As humans we actually cause the rivers to warm up. If you hear what's happening with effluent and so forth, that's actually increasing the temperature of the river. This fractionally decreases the temperature of the river but within 12 metres of the discharge it's within the mean average temperature again. In terms of the whole river, it's not that significant."

Which is a more scientific way of saying, no, the fish don't get cold.

It's a typically in-depth answer from the 33-year-old director, who clearly cares about the impact of his work on the environment not just in Gooselands, Clock House's site in Yalding, but at their eight other sites in Kent, and the wider world beyond.

The great-grandson of Clive Murdoch, who started the family's original family farm at Coxheath 120 years ago in 1903, Oli took over as director 10 years ago although dad Robert is still heavily involved as chairman.

Clive would surely be proud, but the scene at Gooselands is a far cry from Clive's traditional mixed farm of crops, fruit and livestock.

Hectares of fields have been levelled to make way for an estate of polyhouses, while a few more adjoining hectares of land lie flattened and bare, ready for another development.

It's fair to say Theresa May wouldn't have much fun running through these fields, and no doubt a few others in Yalding have been less than enamoured with the new view.

But listen closely, no not to the hum of the power station. While Gooseland's central yard might be dominated by the drone of renewable innovation, a few steps away brings another hum – that of insects, together with the sound of birdsong.

The greenhouse system might be intensive, but part of the Clock House Farm ethos is land sharing, so alongside 10 acres of fruit production are a further eight acres of hedgerows, wildflower meadows and woodlands.

"This is perfect habitat variation for all sorts of species," says Oli, pointing out a swathe of wild area between the farm and the river. "You've got young trees, you've got more established trees behind us over there, and you've got different heights in the grass cover so the sunlight's getting right down to the floor as well as some areas of shade, so that variability of habitat is very beneficial.

"It's quite a significant area – it goes all along the southern strip of the site.

"It's a philosophy I suppose. We're a business that's been here for 120 years, and we want to leave the planet in a better place than we took it on. We're here for a very short time in reality and I think doing things well is very important to us, so it was an important part of this project that we're looking at the whole thing collectively and delivering on that."

So perhaps any critics of the Clock House system need to look beyond the plastic walls of its greenhouse – literally.

Inside those walls is a robot, Thorvald, capable of delivering insects into the fruit crop to combat specific pests, and of treating the crop with UV-C light to combat mildew.

Sharing its name with a legendary Viking explorer, Thorvald is part of a groundbreaking high-tech scheme developed with Saga Robotics in an effort to eliminate the need for pesticides and is just one of the innovations being trialled within Clock House’s greenhouses.

Bumble bees and honey bees buzz in and around the crop, most of which is itself an innovation in its own right as extra productive varieties of raspberry, strawberry and blackberry developed by Clock House and its sister propagation business, Linton Growing.

Beyond the greenhouses, a new reservoir is being dug with the company committed to making a reservoir a year for five years to help with water management, filling the new reservoirs with run-off from those hectares of plastic roofing and mitigating the water it takes from the river.

It's a huge and complex operation, but at its heart is a straightforward, logical vision – green energy means more sustainable production, which means more home-grown food for British tables, which means less imported food and fewer air miles, and more jobs for people in Kent, and of course more money for Clock House Farm.

Which is why Oli is on a mission to spread the word about Clock House's innovations.

"There are lots of different opinions on how we use the countryside and as a farmer you have to consider all that," he adds.

"We enjoy the countryside as much as everyone else does – that's one of the reasons we work in the business we do, but we also have the responsibility of sustainably feeding the population, that's what UK agriculture must deliver on.

"It's projects like this that will keep driving our food security as a country. I see this as an example of agriculture doing what it needs to do for the population.

“UK food security has been in the news much more recently. During the Covid years everyone became very focused on it because all of a sudden it was very tangible. They realised that if production's not there our food's not there. It's one of the first times in a long time that's become a little bit real.

"It's something that's still really important to the UK population – to make sure we have a good level of food security and backing projects like this is quite an exciting thing to be delivering in Yalding."

Is it an exaggeration to say that Oli's power station could herald a new dawn for British agriculture and help save the world?

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as they say but there's no faulting Clock House's ambition. And those blackberries look like they could make a great pudding.