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Raw or cooked, sweet or savoury, carrots are one of the most popular root vegetables consumed in the UK with over 700,000 tonnes grown every year. This is the equivalent to 70 times the weight of the Eiffel tower. On the UK’s National Carrot Day, people will be encouraged to buy, get creative, cook with and eat carrots.

Roger Hobson, chair of the BCGA, said: “It’s time to make a bit of noise about the nation’s favourite vegetable - the carrot. We are making a rallying call to the nation. If every household nibbles their way through just a few more carrots each year it would be a huge help to farmers and help keep home-grown carrots on the shelves.

“This multipurpose vegetable is iconic. Carrots are such good value for money and extremely versatile with high nutritional value. I challenge the British public to find anything better value than 6p - the price of a carrot - to consume one of their five a day.

“We want to communicate both the challenges and joys of growing carrots, which has a high disease susceptibility, high input costs and a conflictingly low price on the supermarket shelf, which means making a viable return a struggling reality for UK carrot growers. Boosting consumption by even small volumes, across many homes, will support the farmers and keep domestically grown carrots firmly planted in the UK.”

Four fun facts about carrots:

• Each year 22 billion seeds are planted in Britain, producing around 100 carrots per year for every member of the population.
• If you laid all the carrots grown every year in the UK end to end, they would stretch 1.4 million miles – that’s two and a half trips to the moon,
• The ancient Greeks called the carrot ‘Philtron’ which is derived from the work philein ‘to love’. They used it as a love medicine to make men more ardent and women more yielding.
• According to the Asian tradition of classifying foods as yin, yang or neutral, carrots are regarded as yang food, known for their tendency to warm the body, tighten muscles and speed up movement.