'I think about sprouts every day': Inside the Dutch factory growing your Christmas vegetables

In the world of Christmas vegetables, nothing is more divisive than a Brussels sprout.

And here, as I look out over a factory in the Netherlands, they are everywhere.

It is like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but recast in sprout form.

They roll along conveyor belts, get poured into huge machinery and tumble into chutes.

They're photographed and lifted, sized and sorted, packed and chilled.

It is relentless, like watching a green magma flow. As more and more sprouts are delivered from farms, so they are fed into the machinery, and so the slow march goes on and on.

If you like sprouts (spoiler alert: I do) then this is a mesmerising sight.

Sprouts of all sizes are whizzing around us, being divided into huge wheeled tubs that fill up in minutes. The Dutch like the small ones. The biggest are off to Germany.

And there, in the middle, are the containers for the British. We like smaller Brussels sprouts with a crisp taste.

The fine sprouts, as they are described to me.

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The world centre of sprout-growing

Peter van't Woudt is the site manager at the Primeale factory in the Netherlands - the world centre of sprout-growing.

As the sprouts roll in, he studies them constantly, running his hand through the vat as it fills up.

This is a crucial time of the year in the Brussels sprout world.

"We are running for 24 hours per day," he said, looking round his factory.

"This is the time of the year when we all have to work hard because everyone wants the sprouts. But here, we are a team."

On a good day, it can take 34 hours for the sprouts to go from entering this factory to the shelves of a British supermarket, and being snapped up soon after.

It's reckoned that British shoppers buy something like 750 million sprouts over the Christmas period, but that only around half of them will actually be eaten.

It is the vegetable that you either love or hate and, yes, even within the sprout factory I met some people who love them, despite spending the whole day staring at sprouts, and others who couldn't bear the taste.

How do you even harvest a sprout in winter?

Then there is Jack's Gravemade, whose job is to use infrared cameras to weed out the bad sprouts.

He said he used to hate them as a child, but has now become a devout fan.

This has been a tough year for them, he said, with the long hot summer affecting sprouts.

Last year, only about 8% of sprouts were deemed unacceptable: now it's double that.

That's tough for the farmers. Half an hour away, we are standing in a muddy field, talking to Frederique Sonneveld, Primeale's product manager with oversight of Brussels sprouts, and she is worried.

Her parents worked in sprouts, and so did their parents before.

There is nothing she doesn't know about these thin