October 10, 2008
October 9, 2008
Last Day
Day 4
Great Ending
We woke up this morning to a beautiful day with lots of sunshine. I was wondering if there was really anything more innovative to see, but we were not disappointed.
Our first stop was the farm of Ben Drummond who grows 140 acres of strawberries on raised beds under high tunnels. He has been facing the issue of less labor availability and the deteriorating quality of the workers that are showing up. In the past the major labor force was college students from Eastern Europe – mainly Poland – who would take time off from their studies to come to England and work the farms to raise money for their education. This was a great labor force of intelligent and educated people. With the formation of the EU and more countries joining, the economies of these countries are getting better so there are more jobs in their own country and many colleges are no longer allowing these breaks. England is now getting the unemployed of Eastern Europe who are a much lower quality of worker.
Last year Drummond decided to do something about the labor issues and purchased one strawberry Haygrove picking rig for $44,0000. He found it increased the picker’s productivity by 30% and worked so well that this year he bought five more.
The rig was designed to go down a 28-foot wide high tunnel and have eight pickers lying on their stomachs – one on each side of the four rows. A driver maneuvers the rig down the row and pulls up the trays of picked berries and puts down new empty containers. The pickers put the berries in trays that hang down beside them. Each worker has a pair of foot pedals that they use to move backward or forward while the rig is moving to get in the perfect position to find the berries. A plastic snow sled it tied to the rig with a rope and slides down the middle of the row where workers put the culls.
All the pickers are paid piecework and before the picking rigs Drummond said he kept having to pay them extra because they were not making the minimum wage because they were such poor quality workers. The six rigs have solved that issue and now they pay the whole rig crew as a team based on piecework. Using the team approach has really helped because they police each other. If one doesn’t get out of bed in the morning the crew goes and pulls him out of bed.
Asparagus production for eight months?
Cobrey Farms was the next stop and they had to be the most innovative asparagus growers I’ve ever visited. Their goal is to be harvesting the crop for the fresh market from the end of March to October – that’s right nearly 8 months of production! They started planting asparagus back in 2003 and have will have 1,000 acres by 2010 with 600 of these acres under high tunnels.
To keep an asparagus production going for 8 months Cobrey Farms starts by forcing the plants early with mini tunnels that go over each row and a high tunnel with two layers of poly – what they call a “triple cover.” Their goal is to be able to have supermarkets carry all-English asparagus by March 20 until October. After the early production from the triple covers is finished they move over to open field production.
For the summer and fall months they use a technique called “reverse season.” They let the ferns grow up in the spring and early summer to help the root ball build up energy. In early July they mow down the ferns and then start harvesting until late fall. Once production drops off with the cool late fall temperatures the fields are mowed off for the winter. This late crop is harvested around the third week of July until the first few weeks of October.
Yields vary greatly on the farm based on the growing technique used. The open field production sees 4.5 metric tons per hectare, the mini tunnels eight metric tons a hectare and 15 metric tons per hectare with the triple cover system.
To pack all of this asparagus they have invested in a $450,000 optical sorter like those used for apples. After harvesting the spears are brought in and run through a washer and hydro cooler. The spears are then put on the beginning of the sorting line on a horizontal conveyor with cups that holds one spear each. They go under the optical lens at a rate of 10 cups per second. The optical lens is hooked up to a computer that measures size, color and curvature. The asparagus then goes down the line and the spears are dropped into vertical scoops. The computer decides which scoop to drop the spear in based on customer needs. When the scoop is filled it opens up and a worker bundles it with an elastic band. The system allows the perfect spear to be chosen to make the most optimal bundle. Before the optical sorter, the bundles average 3-4% over weight and the machine has dropped that down to 1% over weight. This 2-3% savings has a big dollar value impact when attached to the amount of asparagus that goes through Cobrey Farms. The operation has two of these lines, one with 50 shoots and the other with 80. It takes 600 workers in peak asparagus season to harvest and sort the crop.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
Great Ending
We woke up this morning to a beautiful day with lots of sunshine. I was wondering if there was really anything more innovative to see, but we were not disappointed.
Our first stop was the farm of Ben Drummond who grows 140 acres of strawberries on raised beds under high tunnels. He has been facing the issue of less labor availability and the deteriorating quality of the workers that are showing up. In the past the major labor force was college students from Eastern Europe – mainly Poland – who would take time off from their studies to come to England and work the farms to raise money for their education. This was a great labor force of intelligent and educated people. With the formation of the EU and more countries joining, the economies of these countries are getting better so there are more jobs in their own country and many colleges are no longer allowing these breaks. England is now getting the unemployed of Eastern Europe who are a much lower quality of worker.
Last year Drummond decided to do something about the labor issues and purchased one strawberry Haygrove picking rig for $44,0000. He found it increased the picker’s productivity by 30% and worked so well that this year he bought five more.
The rig was designed to go down a 28-foot wide high tunnel and have eight pickers lying on their stomachs – one on each side of the four rows. A driver maneuvers the rig down the row and pulls up the trays of picked berries and puts down new empty containers. The pickers put the berries in trays that hang down beside them. Each worker has a pair of foot pedals that they use to move backward or forward while the rig is moving to get in the perfect position to find the berries. A plastic snow sled it tied to the rig with a rope and slides down the middle of the row where workers put the culls.
All the pickers are paid piecework and before the picking rigs Drummond said he kept having to pay them extra because they were not making the minimum wage because they were such poor quality workers. The six rigs have solved that issue and now they pay the whole rig crew as a team based on piecework. Using the team approach has really helped because they police each other. If one doesn’t get out of bed in the morning the crew goes and pulls him out of bed.
Asparagus production for eight months?
Cobrey Farms was the next stop and they had to be the most innovative asparagus growers I’ve ever visited. Their goal is to be harvesting the crop for the fresh market from the end of March to October – that’s right nearly 8 months of production! They started planting asparagus back in 2003 and have will have 1,000 acres by 2010 with 600 of these acres under high tunnels.
To keep an asparagus production going for 8 months Cobrey Farms starts by forcing the plants early with mini tunnels that go over each row and a high tunnel with two layers of poly – what they call a “triple cover.” Their goal is to be able to have supermarkets carry all-English asparagus by March 20 until October. After the early production from the triple covers is finished they move over to open field production.
For the summer and fall months they use a technique called “reverse season.” They let the ferns grow up in the spring and early summer to help the root ball build up energy. In early July they mow down the ferns and then start harvesting until late fall. Once production drops off with the cool late fall temperatures the fields are mowed off for the winter. This late crop is harvested around the third week of July until the first few weeks of October.
Yields vary greatly on the farm based on the growing technique used. The open field production sees 4.5 metric tons per hectare, the mini tunnels eight metric tons a hectare and 15 metric tons per hectare with the triple cover system.
To pack all of this asparagus they have invested in a $450,000 optical sorter like those used for apples. After harvesting the spears are brought in and run through a washer and hydro cooler. The spears are then put on the beginning of the sorting line on a horizontal conveyor with cups that holds one spear each. They go under the optical lens at a rate of 10 cups per second. The optical lens is hooked up to a computer that measures size, color and curvature. The asparagus then goes down the line and the spears are dropped into vertical scoops. The computer decides which scoop to drop the spear in based on customer needs. When the scoop is filled it opens up and a worker bundles it with an elastic band. The system allows the perfect spear to be chosen to make the most optimal bundle. Before the optical sorter, the bundles average 3-4% over weight and the machine has dropped that down to 1% over weight. This 2-3% savings has a big dollar value impact when attached to the amount of asparagus that goes through Cobrey Farms. The operation has two of these lines, one with 50 shoots and the other with 80. It takes 600 workers in peak asparagus season to harvest and sort the crop.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
October 7, 2008
Rain, rain go away
OK, OK, I get it already why the U.K. growers have gone to high tunnels – it is always raining here. The fields were so muddy that our entire group went to the English version of a Home Depot and bought knee-high rubber boots. It never seems to dry out here and with the clay soil it makes for a very muddy walk through the orchard. The good news is we are here to see high tunnels and it never rains under them!
Our first stop was to the Haygrove Kington Farm where they are using a VOEN system of
covering sweet cherries. It is basically a large structure of steel pipes and wires built around a block of cherries. They use a special covering that has hail net on the bottom and a landscape-like cloth in strips that work like the gills on a fish to vent out the warm air. The good thing about this design is that you never have to raise up the poly to vent it like in a traditional Haygrove high tunnel, saving labor costs. The special cover lasts eight to 10 years compared to the poly that lasts two to three years.
The temperatures during the growing season under the VOEN are cooler so it minimizes earliness. The plot we were on was 800 feet above sea level and was a cooler climate so the sweet cherries are usually two weeks later than the other farms. They normally finish picking by mid August and are able to hit the late market. They always put bird netting on the ends of the structure to stop them from entering.
The trees are all Gisela 5 or 6 and planted in single rows nine feet apart with the trees three feet apart in the rows. They used a trellis system to support the trees with wooden posts along the row with a wire at four and 10 feet high. Each tree has a bamboo stick attached to the tree and wires with rubber clips holding it all together. The bamboo is not buried and is about one foot above the ground.
Blueberries and strawberries under high tunnels were on tap for the second stop at Withers Fruit Farm. The biggest obstacle to growing blueberries in England is the clay alkaline soils, not very good at all for blueberries that need an acidic soil. Farm owner
George Leeds really wanted to grow blueberries so he decided to take matters in his own hands and grow the plants in buckets with a peat substrate and wood chips on top. He starts them out under 24-foot wide high tunnel with eight rows of pots (four on each side) and a drive middle. They are all fed by drip irrigation. The plants we saw had great growth and by the second year he is picking a crop with an average of two pounds of fruit per plant. His varieties include Duke, Bluecrop and Darrow along with others he is experimenting with.
In the third year he puts them outside because he is limited on the number of high tunnels he can put up due to zoning rules. (I will talk about that fight at another time!) The pots are put in rows eight feet apart with three feet between pots. A mini trellis has been constructed with wooden posts and one wire at about four feet high. He attaches a few of the branches to the wires mainly so the pots don’t fall over in the wind. As the bushes get bigger he thinks he will need to put a wire on each side of the plant to keep the young, tender branches from breaking off under a heavy crop load.
The strawberry system at Withers was amazing for this former strawberry grower who had to pick strawberries off the ground his whole life. They have invented a stand system to go inside
the high tunnels. The stands are about five feet high and have two horizontal pipes running along forming a sort of gutter. Bags of soil are placed on the gutter and strawberry plants are planted and then watered by an overhead irrigation system while getting established and then later by a drip pipe running along the plants. A string runs along the top of the stand to hold up the leaves and allowing the crop to hang down at about four feet. One picker can harvest 110 pounds of strawberries an hour. Wow – this was an amazing system!
The last stop of the day was Lower Hope Farm where farm manager Andy Hunt gave us a great tour as British Air Force jets put on a thunderous show above the farm. The area is home to the British Special Forces and they farm is entertained by the jets every few weeks.
The Lower Hope has 60 acres of sweet cherries under high tunnels. To save money they grow the
trees outside for the first three seasons and then cover them with the tunnels. The cherries are all planted on Gisela 5 and were a different planting system then the three-row system with a tractor drive on the right we saw at Haygrove Farms a day earlier. Hunt says he has gone to a row on each side of the tunnel with 10.5 feet between the rows for a tractor driveway. He said putting three rows of trees so close together makes it too hard to manage, however said he does give up some yield in the early years.
Tomorrow we head off for our last farm visits and a trip to a hard cider maker before going to London for our last night before flying home.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
Our first stop was to the Haygrove Kington Farm where they are using a VOEN system of
covering sweet cherries. It is basically a large structure of steel pipes and wires built around a block of cherries. They use a special covering that has hail net on the bottom and a landscape-like cloth in strips that work like the gills on a fish to vent out the warm air. The good thing about this design is that you never have to raise up the poly to vent it like in a traditional Haygrove high tunnel, saving labor costs. The special cover lasts eight to 10 years compared to the poly that lasts two to three years.The temperatures during the growing season under the VOEN are cooler so it minimizes earliness. The plot we were on was 800 feet above sea level and was a cooler climate so the sweet cherries are usually two weeks later than the other farms. They normally finish picking by mid August and are able to hit the late market. They always put bird netting on the ends of the structure to stop them from entering.
The trees are all Gisela 5 or 6 and planted in single rows nine feet apart with the trees three feet apart in the rows. They used a trellis system to support the trees with wooden posts along the row with a wire at four and 10 feet high. Each tree has a bamboo stick attached to the tree and wires with rubber clips holding it all together. The bamboo is not buried and is about one foot above the ground.
Blueberries and strawberries under high tunnels were on tap for the second stop at Withers Fruit Farm. The biggest obstacle to growing blueberries in England is the clay alkaline soils, not very good at all for blueberries that need an acidic soil. Farm owner
George Leeds really wanted to grow blueberries so he decided to take matters in his own hands and grow the plants in buckets with a peat substrate and wood chips on top. He starts them out under 24-foot wide high tunnel with eight rows of pots (four on each side) and a drive middle. They are all fed by drip irrigation. The plants we saw had great growth and by the second year he is picking a crop with an average of two pounds of fruit per plant. His varieties include Duke, Bluecrop and Darrow along with others he is experimenting with.In the third year he puts them outside because he is limited on the number of high tunnels he can put up due to zoning rules. (I will talk about that fight at another time!) The pots are put in rows eight feet apart with three feet between pots. A mini trellis has been constructed with wooden posts and one wire at about four feet high. He attaches a few of the branches to the wires mainly so the pots don’t fall over in the wind. As the bushes get bigger he thinks he will need to put a wire on each side of the plant to keep the young, tender branches from breaking off under a heavy crop load.
The strawberry system at Withers was amazing for this former strawberry grower who had to pick strawberries off the ground his whole life. They have invented a stand system to go inside
the high tunnels. The stands are about five feet high and have two horizontal pipes running along forming a sort of gutter. Bags of soil are placed on the gutter and strawberry plants are planted and then watered by an overhead irrigation system while getting established and then later by a drip pipe running along the plants. A string runs along the top of the stand to hold up the leaves and allowing the crop to hang down at about four feet. One picker can harvest 110 pounds of strawberries an hour. Wow – this was an amazing system!The last stop of the day was Lower Hope Farm where farm manager Andy Hunt gave us a great tour as British Air Force jets put on a thunderous show above the farm. The area is home to the British Special Forces and they farm is entertained by the jets every few weeks.
The Lower Hope has 60 acres of sweet cherries under high tunnels. To save money they grow the
trees outside for the first three seasons and then cover them with the tunnels. The cherries are all planted on Gisela 5 and were a different planting system then the three-row system with a tractor drive on the right we saw at Haygrove Farms a day earlier. Hunt says he has gone to a row on each side of the tunnel with 10.5 feet between the rows for a tractor driveway. He said putting three rows of trees so close together makes it too hard to manage, however said he does give up some yield in the early years.Tomorrow we head off for our last farm visits and a trip to a hard cider maker before going to London for our last night before flying home.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
October 6, 2008
Sweet Cherries under a high tunnel
Our second day just ended after 10 hours of tours of more high tunnel fruit production than I ever imagined. Haygrove may be known for their high tunnels in the U.S., however they have a huge growing operation with sweet cherries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries and cut flowers under more than 7,000 acres of high tunnels. The company employs about 500 workers who come mainly from Eastern European countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.
The first stop of the morning was one of Haygrove’s high tunnel organic sweet cherry plantings. The structure was 28 feet wide and 15 feet high. The sweet cherries were on a Gisele 5 rootstock with three rows per bay. The trees were planted six feet apart in the rows and six feet between rows. Each tree was staked and they used nails off this stake to tie string to branches when training the tree. Drip irrigation went down each row and black plastic was used for weed control. On the right hand side of each bay of cherries was a drive row for a tractor. Some of the major issues for the organic plantings were the increased mite and aphid problems. Brown rot is much less of a problem under the tunnels, which works well with organic production because there is no organically approved control for the disease.
The plastic is put on over the tunnels right before bloom and taken off in August so the trees will get enough light to produce fruit buds for the next year. The plastic over the trees stops the rain from cracking the cherries and they have seen marketable yields increase 25-30%.
The raspberry production was spectacular. Each high tunnel bay had three rows with six feet between rows. All of the varieties are ever-bearing and they mow them down each fall. Haygrove has been raising them organically for three years and have been battling phytopthera and verticillium wilt. They have been using raised beds and trying plants in pots with a peat-based soil. The raspberries can grow to eight to 10 feet tall with the berry production coming in the top of the canes. This makes it perfect to pick the fruit standing up.
They have made a special cart that pickers can stand on and is wheeled down the rows as cartons are filled.Haygrove has 25 acres of lilies under tunnels with nine different varieties grown on raised beds and drip irrigation. This was the first year they tried to go to an all-organic production system, however are going back to growing them conventional because they cannot get a premium price from the retailer and acceptable weed control was impossible using organic methods.
Strawberry production at Haygrove takes on many forms. The main system involves high tunnels with five rows of raised beds on plastic per bay with drip irrigation. They can have production from the end of June until the third week of October. Many United Kingdom growers have switched to table production in greenhouses to make picking easier, but Haygrove has devised a five-row machine that enables their workers to pick strawberries at ground level. The company is also experimenting with several different substrate systems that use hot water to heat the soil for earlier production or forced air heat in high tunnels. They feel this will be much less expensive than putting up greenhouses. Another system involved using telescoping trays with the plants in substrate mater. The trays are kept at ground height when they are first started and move progressively up to waist height when picking begins. So far they are just in the experimental phases, but they hope to settle on a system in the next few years.
The last stop of the day was plums under high tunnels. The main variety grown for the United Kingdom is a European variety name Victoria. A local grower installed tunnels over established trees and didn’t see any significant results the first three years. However the past five years have shown the plums are much less susceptible to wind damage. Marketable yields in a conventional system may reach 80%, but under the tunnels are 98%. Significant frost protection is another benefit of the system and it has clearly proven itself as a worthwhile system.
It was a very education experience and I think the take-home message is that if you want to grow crops in high tunnels you need to understand that it is a totally different growing environment and will need to change cultural methods that work best with this system and be ready to try news things. If you take on this challenge however, the reward will be well worth the risk.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
October 5, 2008
Day One
It was the first full day in England and our group of 18 headed from London toward Hereford, which is about an hour and a half west. And since we were in England we had to stop and see a castle - Warwick Castle (http://www.warwick-castle.co.uk) and its 1,100 years of history. We walked up the 560 steps to the top of Guy’s Tower that was built in 1395 and looked over the beautiful rolling countryside. The interesting thing about the castle experience was how the owners have made it very entertaining and interactive with Halloween ghost tours, a restaurant, a fortress looking playground, four gift shops, a falconer, jousting and an interactive walk through the castle with live and animated characters. Just as farm marketers have turned to agri-entertainment to attract visitors, so have the castle owners of England turned to castle-entertainment.
We also walked into the town of Warwick for lunch and visited the Collegiate Church of St. Mary where people have been worshipping for 1,000 years. (www.stmaryswarwick.org.uk) It was filled with tombs of former Earl’s of Warwick and was breathtaking in its size and beauty. As an American it is hard to fathom the historic legacy that encapsulates this country.
After a few hours at the castle and town we headed off to Hereford to a Rugby clubhouse for an overview of the tour by the Haygrove staff. John Berry, one of the two owners of the company, talked about the roots of Haygrove that started when he and his college buddy started growing strawberries the traditional way - on open ground where the season lasted 6-8 weeks. For anyone who has grown strawberries on open ground you know about the erratic and unpredictable nature of this system. The largest demand for strawberries in England comes during the Wimbledon tennis championship at the end of June when the English enjoy their tradition of eating strawberries and watching the tournament. If the berries weren’t ready for this timing the stores would get upset and they’d lose the best prices of the year. The large chains expected a consistent, high quality, reliable crop and the English lost nearly all of their market to Spanish-grown strawberries because they just could meet those standards.
To try and change this they decided to import a high tunnel from Spain and put it over one hectare (2.47 acres) of strawberries. Unfortunately it wasn’t big enough to drive a tractor through and was not strong enough for the windy conditions on the island country. After modifying it to fit their needs the Haygrove high tunnel was born. In 1996 they sold their first high tunnel and have now sold the systems to growers in more than 30 countries.
The impact of the introduction of the high tunnel system on the English strawberry market has been huge. Under the Haygrove system they have extended the season to 20-26 weeks, dramatically increased quality and have been able to steal back their own market from the Spanish. England has increased strawberry production by 60% in the past 10 years because they are no longer controlled by the weather.
The Haygrove farming operation has also been expanding over the past decade and now grows 250 hectares (600 acres) of fruit under tunnels including strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cherries and flowers.
Tomorrow will be a full day with stops at their growing operation, packinghouse and a local grower who is growing plums under high tunnels.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
We also walked into the town of Warwick for lunch and visited the Collegiate Church of St. Mary where people have been worshipping for 1,000 years. (www.stmaryswarwick.org.uk) It was filled with tombs of former Earl’s of Warwick and was breathtaking in its size and beauty. As an American it is hard to fathom the historic legacy that encapsulates this country.
After a few hours at the castle and town we headed off to Hereford to a Rugby clubhouse for an overview of the tour by the Haygrove staff. John Berry, one of the two owners of the company, talked about the roots of Haygrove that started when he and his college buddy started growing strawberries the traditional way - on open ground where the season lasted 6-8 weeks. For anyone who has grown strawberries on open ground you know about the erratic and unpredictable nature of this system. The largest demand for strawberries in England comes during the Wimbledon tennis championship at the end of June when the English enjoy their tradition of eating strawberries and watching the tournament. If the berries weren’t ready for this timing the stores would get upset and they’d lose the best prices of the year. The large chains expected a consistent, high quality, reliable crop and the English lost nearly all of their market to Spanish-grown strawberries because they just could meet those standards.
To try and change this they decided to import a high tunnel from Spain and put it over one hectare (2.47 acres) of strawberries. Unfortunately it wasn’t big enough to drive a tractor through and was not strong enough for the windy conditions on the island country. After modifying it to fit their needs the Haygrove high tunnel was born. In 1996 they sold their first high tunnel and have now sold the systems to growers in more than 30 countries.
The impact of the introduction of the high tunnel system on the English strawberry market has been huge. Under the Haygrove system they have extended the season to 20-26 weeks, dramatically increased quality and have been able to steal back their own market from the Spanish. England has increased strawberry production by 60% in the past 10 years because they are no longer controlled by the weather.
The Haygrove farming operation has also been expanding over the past decade and now grows 250 hectares (600 acres) of fruit under tunnels including strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cherries and flowers.
Tomorrow will be a full day with stops at their growing operation, packinghouse and a local grower who is growing plums under high tunnels.
– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing
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