Ball Horticultural



In our tour began in Stratford at a young plug producer, they had 22 acres of greenhouse space dedicated to mostly plug production with a little bit of finishing when they have the space. We went through their process for seed sowing, and we found many differences compared to home. They use polystyrene rather than polyethylene trays (they also done call them trays), these trays are less space and weight efficient but for some reason their purchasers want them.



They also are pretty seriously automated, they say that they aren’t but I was still doing seeding by hand at my old farm. The industry makes use of vacuum seeders which do 90% of the work. Trays are loaded in one end, given a serving of soil, given a hole for the seed, given a seed, then topped with soil and watered.


They also have volume at the level that they can keep entire sections of greenhouses at a certain temperature and move crop in versus controlling the greenhouse to fit the crop.


They have a rail system throughout so they can move benches to new houses if needed.


When they sell a tray of plugs a buyer wants all of the plugs to have plants, but often a plant will die or fail to germinate and so pugs have to be replaced. A machine takes a picture of the plugs from above and assesses if there are missing plants, then shoots a stream of air and knocks out the dead plug. Workers then come in and replace the missing ones.



The rest of our day was spent understanding seed operations and the office side of horticulture. Cara was very happy, not my cup of tea though (so to speak).



We did however get to see new varieties that have never been trialed before.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gilfresh and the AFBI

Image
Our last day was the most jam packed in terms of diversity. We started our day at a food processing facility. Gilfresh is a midsized vegetable processer that moves a lot of the produce in Northern Ireland. We learned a bit about how Northern Ireland is an extremely small territory, the entire Irish peninsula is smaller than the state of Michigan. Northern Ireland also has a very small horticulture industry, a majority of their agriculture is dedicated to forage grass for sheep. We got to tour their facilities and see how carrots straight from the earth are made into cubes for soup. we were not able to take pictures in the facility. We then headed to the AFBI research station for a cider tasting. These are the various ciders we tried, sweetness is an important factor in determining taste in cider. We toured an orchard and saw the differences in how Michigan apples and Irish apples are produced, they don’t need irrigation and their density is much lower.   Th...
Read more

Modern Use of Plants and Traditional Versus odern Horticulture Plant production

Image
In last week’s class we learned about how agriculture has changed since the invention of “modern agriculture”. In post last week we saw the ancient history of agriculture, the invention of the wheel so to speak. In this week’s post we see a huge event that changes the world forever, WW1. During world war one we saw companies creating chemicals for use in clearing brush as well as chemical warfare, and when these chemicals were outlawed by the Geneva Convention the companies had to look for new markets. Agriculture. With small adaptations to the structure of the molecules we could take something like nerve gas and turn it into a new organophosphate and use it on insects. As a society we also invented the Haber-Bosch process creating artificial ammonia which we could use as a fertilizer. Norman Borlaug came on the scene in agriculture and the green revolution took off, using the chemicals for a purpose of feeding the world. Good intentions do not always work out in your fav...
Read more

History of Horticulture

Image
This last week we covered the history of horticulture. Considering agriculture and horticulture are so intertwined our story begins at the dawn of agriculture 12-8 thousand years ago, when we first domesticated wheat. There isn't much written record of ancient history until we get to the Egyptians, who through the use of Hieroglyphics and paintings have one of the most detailed record keeping styles of the modern world. Their largest use of horticulture was for the production of wine, (alcohol goes way back?!). However we also see elaborate garden design for the very wealth Egyptians personal use. When we look at the next two big empires we see that the Greeks and Romans contributed to horticulture by their brilliance and their implementation. The Greeks made tremendous strides in medicine and botany and the Romans implemented the techniques of crop rotation and nutrient addition as well as “high density systems”. With the dark ages we see not a halt in agriculture o...
Read more