Australia
‘Plants are not just a number, they are very personal’
JD Propagation, of Victoria, Australia, had planned to pay off its first four greenhouses in five years. In fact, the business has grown so fast that within six years it has paid off its 13th house. Attention to detail, including inspecting and handling each individual plant, so customers receive top quality plants sets the company apart.
Dan Patience is passionate about his plants. He admits he has been obsessed with plants since he was 15 years old, so it was natural that he should work in horticulture including for some of Australia’s largest bedding plant and shrub nurseries. In 2009, Dan and his wife Jenny decided to start their own nursery.
They bought a paddock on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, a region rich in horticulture and home to some of their biggest customers. The climate is almost perfect, occasionally in winter it drops to minus 2-3 degrees and there is always a gentle sea breeze.
Natural gas
“We started with four greenhouses with money borrowed against their house. Luckily one customer placed orders before we even started!” His business plan was to pay off the first four houses in five years, but with a growing reputation this happened a lot faster. “We’ve grown in line with customer demand and just finished the 13th house in six years.”
JD Propagation began growing herbs and bedding plants, such as calibrachoas, geraniums and verbenas from cuttings, and did some deflasking of tissue culture. Today it produces 3,000 product lines, about 5% of which are unrooted cuttings, 80% vegetative cuttings and rest are seed-produced plugs.
These are raised in ten double skinned poly growing houses, with energy screens and southwest facing window vents, that measure four metres to the gutter. This creates a good environment, says Dan Patience. The houses are heated using natural gas and the main heater in the growing house with lighting also produces carbon dioxide. The nursery also has two mother stock houses and the latest addition was a nucleus greenhouse, all three of which are fully screened against insects.
Insect screening
“Our biggest weakness used to be the absence of insect screening so it was getting harder and harder to guarantee the virus integrity of our stock. We now have two insect screened mother plant houses totaling 1,200 m2,” he says. These were detached from each other but the latest house was built in between and attached to the two. This now accommodates nucleus material.
“We buy virus index material from international breeders overseas once or twice a year. We put this stock directly into the nucleus house and use it purely to take cuttings for the mother stock. Only two staff members are allowed to enter the house and they sterilize their tools after working on each plant.”
Patience recalls that when he worked for the big wholesale nurseries, he often found the quality of plugs and cuttings wasn’t all that great. “We first had to nurture and trim them before we could grow them on. When I started my own business my aim was to supply growers with a perfect plug that was ready to go immediately. We are so focused on quality that all our plants are visually inspected and handled by our growers. The fact that our plants are trimmed by hand, fed by hand and watered by hand sets us apart from other bigger plug producers in Australia. Plants are not just a number, they are very personal.”
Constant improvement
Actually JD Propagation has very little automation, currently just a New Zealand designed climate control system called Autogrow, which is distributed by horticultural technology and innovation company, PowerPlants Australia. It has a touch screen design panel and can be logged into it from anywhere in the world. “We have also ordered an Ellepot machine for the production of paper pots for cuttings so we’ll be installing that later this year.
“We used to make up our own potting mixtures, by sourcing our own peat and blending it with perlite to get it right. Three years ago we ran some trials with Pindstrup substrates as I had used these at a big nursery in the past. The results were so good we switched to using entirely their products and now we import three to four containers per year. We use four mixes: small cell; two general ones; and a mother stock recipe. The mixes are always the same, the quality is excellent and the cutting are really vigorous so it makes life really easy.”
The nursery also recently introduced a new form of bench heating. “Originally we used heated mats on the benches but because the pots were sitting on the mats sanitation was a problem. It was difficult to disinfect properly because of the many pockets in the matting that harbored debris. “The top of the bench is now made from plastic mesh with PVC heating pipes running directly underneath. Water can drain away and we can sanitize really easily. Also, each greenhouse has a concrete floor so it is super clean.”
Hardened off in customer climate
Patience’s main aim is to produce a quality plug that is hardened off and finished properly. Each growing compartment is 512 m2, which consists of two houses of 256 m2; once the cuttings are struck they move through each compartment. Finally they are hardened off in the exact environment as that of the customer. “If they grow outdoors we finish our plants outdoors, if they produce under cold plastic, we finish the plants under cold plastic. By the time the cutting reaches the customer it will have spent 25% of its life matching the customer’s environment so the plants don’t experience any shock when they arrive.” On average the crops are 6-8 weeks old when sold.
Light recipes
The nursery is also using several LED lamp recipes. Traditionally it used HID lighting for crops that were running behind or if plants were needed very fast. Now the interruption of day/night is done with LEDs.
“We use a few spectrums of red, a few spectrums of blue, white light, a little far red and some infrared all of which we blend together. We can produce plants very fast with the lights on at night and the heater running to produce CO2.
“By using the correct spectrum we can achieve the results we want with low energy input. Energy costs are rising so anything we can do to save on these costs is important. If we can keep our energy costs down and speed up our cropping time we can achieve more plants per square meter.”
Experimental
The company ships across Australia to around 80 customers. Having grown nearly 30% every year for several years it is now in a consolidation phase. “We have grown so fast we don’t want to outstrip the skills of our staff and we need to ensure that we keep on top of our quality. We are now focusing on growing skills and making sure everyone really understands what they are doing before we expand any further,” he says. The company employs 25 people including five experienced growers.
Nevertheless, Patience is further experimenting with plug grown camellias and producing them in 24 cc volume plugs. “This is not traditional but because of our liquid feeding regime we can get them to the grower with a lot of vigor. When the grower pots them on they have a better growth rate than those produced in a larger pot or tube. “We work hard on getting the protocols in place and mastering any new cultivation that a customer requests. We enjoy a challenge”
Summary
Australian company, JD Propagation, checks every plug tray and plant by hand to ensure quality is maximised. The cultivation strategy, including attention to substrate, hygiene and LED light recipes, helps create optimum growing conditions for the production of vigorous plants. Each crop is hardened off in the same conditions it will experience at the grower.
Text: Helen Armstrong. Photos: JD Propagation
Sundrop Farms most inspirational tomato grower of 2016
Sundrop Farms from Australia was elected most inspirational tomato grower of 2016 during the Tomato Inspiration Event held in Berlin on 4 February. The 100 most innovative tomato growers in the world gathered in Berlin for the third edition of this event. This year it was up to the guests to elect the inspirational winner.
The Tomato Inspiration Award was presented to Philipp Saumweber of Sundrop Farms at the Puro Skybar in Berlin. As there were no specific themes associated with this year’s event, there was no call for the appointment of an international jury. Instead, the participants themselves were invited to cast their votes for the grower who inspires them more than any other.
Previous winners Windset Farms (2014) and Duijvestijn Tomaten (2015) contributed to the event alongside the organisers of the event in the compilation of a long list of the most inspirational producers and product organisations. This resulted in four nominations: APS Salads from Cheshire (UK), the Flandria label of the joint Belgian auctions (LAVA) from Leuven (Belgium), Sundrop Farms from Adelaide (Australia) and Zeiler Gemüsevertrieb from Münchendorf (Austria). Sundrop Farms ultimately won the most votes and was acclaimed the winner.
High-tech in the desert
This year, Sundrop Farms will be opening a state-of-the-art production facility in Port Augusta, in the southern part of Australia. The site will feature four controlled greenhouses (each covering five hectares of land), a desalination system and a field of solar panels that consists of a tower 115 metres high and over 23,000 mirrors to capture the sun’s energy. The new site is unique in the world and will offer employment to some 175 workers and produce over 17,000 tonnes of tomatoes annually. The facility will make use of solar energy, seawater and natural crop protection agents. You can follow the construction of Sundrop Farms from close by on YouTube.
The Tomato Inspiration Event is organised by KAS Tuinbouwcommunicatie and HortiBiz, and sponsored by Bayer, Delphy, Koppert Biological Systems, Oerlemans Plastics, Priva, Saint-Gobain Cultilene and Svensson.
Source: Tomato Inspiration Event. Photo: Sundrop Farms.
Australian marketing success supported by Dutch cultivation know-how
Greenhouse horticulture in Australia is growing considerably. Flavorite was one of its pioneers and continues to lead the way. The company emerged from the trade and has strong connections with its customers. The entire greenhouse technology comes from the Netherlands and Dutch ex-grower Toon Oomen is a valued consultant. Yield and quality has sharply increased thanks partly to his advice.
As a vegetable trader some 20 years ago Mark Millis had nothing good to say about the quality of the products he traded. His son and manager Chris Millis says, “My father said: ‘I want to get the taste back into the tomato.’ Therefore he started to grow for himself. The breakthrough came when he teamed up with fellow trader, Warren Nicol. They started with a small greenhouse and that has expanded to the 24 ha of greenhouses today in Warragul near Melbourne.”
Own brand
If you can point to the start of professional covered cultivation in Australia then it is the founding of Flavorite in 1994. Since then, the company has always been at the forefront of developments. “We are a plant propagator, grower and trader,” says Millis. “But the focus is now on the cultivation. In addition to our own tomatoes and peppers we sell products such as eggplants and cucumbers that are grown by a network of colleagues, who together have 25 ha glass. We also supply herbs, mango and pineapple. We sell to Australian supermarkets; just one per cent is exported to Singapore and Hong Kong."
Currently there are some 200 ha of high tech greenhouses in Australia and the sector is growing rapidly. This year alone has seen the acreage increase by 25%. Flavorite has always remained a family company but many other big nurseries have been set up by external investors, such as D'vineripe and Blush. “We are in this at the right time. Previously the supermarkets didn’t like private labels. Now they differentiate themselves on sustainability and family companies. With our approach and own brand this is a perfect fit,” says the manager.
Knowledge from abroad
Australia is a country without any greenhouse tradition. Father and son, Millis, realised very quickly that they then needed to acquire knowledge from abroad. That led to tours and courses in the Netherlands. Fifteen years ago they met Toon Oomen, who was then still a grower in Galder, Brabant. Oomen had tomatoes running through his blood: he attained high yields and good quality. That attracted the attention of breeders, who organised numerous trips to his nursery often with foreign visitors. Therefore when he discontinued his nursery he was approached immediately. “I was asked from various sides if I would like to be a manager in Australia. That was not my ambition but after a visit to a large number of these nurseries I saw another solution: Advice given remotely.”
Now he supervises six intensive nurseries, two of which are in New Zealand, and three extensive nurseries. Three times per year he flies across the world and visits them all. For the rest of the year he supervises them via Skype.
Power of persuasion
“Each week they take ten photos of a few plants, taken at the same time on each day, which they send to me via email. In addition I receive all the details about greenhouse climate, settings, watering, heating, cooling, screens and even the pollination (which occurs manually because no bumble bees are present in Australia). The biggest challenge with this supervision is to teach the growers to read the plant.” He does this himself too: first he carefully studies the photos, even before he looks at the climate and production data. He then gives the grower on the nursery his opinion on how the plants are looking and what should be done.
At Flavorite he was initially responsible for 3,000 m2 as a trial area. That has been extended to 11 ha, nearly half of the nursery. In various steps the way of cultivation has changed as a result of his advice. “Substrate, varieties, planting density: all have been adjusted. After that we discussed the cultivation strategy,” says Oomen. “They have a very extreme climate with a high radiation and so they created a robust plant to get through the hot summer. As a result they lost yield during the summer. It takes some persuasion to get them to enter the summer with a bare plant. The diffuse coating Redufuse became available just in time. That made it a lot easier. After a trial they were convinced: the difference was an extra four kilos.”
Greenhouse from the Netherlands
Chris Millis says that the tomato yield over the last seven years has increased from 45 to 80 kilo per m2. “At the beginning we concentrated on improving the quality, irrigation, heating and labour efficiency. Now we focus more on yield,” he says. He doesn’t want to lose Oomen as an advisor. When Oomen indicated that the long plane trips were becoming too much, the nurseries that he advises immediately said: Then in future fly in business class.
It’s striking that the entire greenhouse, including the equipment, right down to the concrete poles, comes from the Netherlands. Even welders were flown in from the Netherlands.
“The greenhouse sector here is still very small and is spread out in clusters. A supply industry is starting to develop but the distances are great. The Netherlands simply has the best equipment; you don’t find that quality here. We keep a careful eye on developments in the Netherlands and each year we offer work placements to two Dutch students. We are always looking for international talent,” says Millis.
His nursery has grown very fast in recent years. Now it’s time to consolidate, he says. “We have taken on a lot of new people and we have to train them ourselves because no formal training is available here. We are now paying attention to improving propagation, packing and automation. But along side that we continue to expand but at a more leisurely pace.”
Lessons for the Netherlands
The whole world looks to the Netherlands for horticultural technology and cultivation. But in other areas Dutch growers can learn from their Australian colleagues, says Oomen. “The nurseries have a strong connection with the trade and the supermarkets. Varieties are chosen together with the buyers, who, five times per season, carry out taste trials on the nursery. Furthermore agreements about the supply are made throughout the year and there is a total openness about the approach. The customers can see everything, for example the implementation of the integrated crop protection measures including the complete registration of substances used, quantities, and times of spraying moments."
Also in the area of finance, Dutch growers can get ideas, he says. “Now, when there is a transfer of nursery, it has to be financed each time again. You always have to go to the bank. You can do it differently: Through more cooperation between growers; through external financers or through a system of ‘sharemilking’, a cooperation whereby a company slowly moves from one owner to another. The Netherlands may well lead the way in the field of technology and cultivation, but in the financial area there is much to improve."
Summary
Flavorite was one of the first professional greenhouse nurseries in Australia. The company was set up by traders and it still has a trading function. Because the country does not have a greenhouse tradition the company obtains its knowledge from the Netherlands. The entire greenhouse is Dutch and ex-grower Toon Oomen advises on cultivation techniques. Conversely the Dutch can also learn from Australia in terms of financing and connecting with customers, he says.
Text: Tijs Kierkels Photos: Flavorite