When I arrived at La Ferme des Quatre-Temps in southern Quebec, I had a lot to learn. At the time, I didn’t know how many things you have to manage for a successful growing season. I started out as an apprentice. After a year, I got promoted to greenhouse manager. That afforded me the privilege of obtaining passwords to operate the farm’s automation system.

 

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As with many market farms, tomatoes are one of the most important crops at the Ferme de Quatre Temps in Quebec.

 

I became responsible for maximizing the production of a 10,000-square-foot, multispan greenhouse, three individual greenhouses and five cold tunnels. The multispan greenhouse alone produces over $100,000 of tomatoes. No need to tell you there was a lot to learn. The pressure was even greater because of what happened the year before …

That year, we experienced a very hot and humid season, and in July the tomato greenhouse had been decimated by leaf mold. Yields were so low that we consistently lacked tomatoes at the farmers market. Imagine losing your best-seller! Working in the greenhouses became increasingly disheartening week by week as the plants deteriorated due to disease. A lot of work for too little gain.

As I started as greenhouse manager, I promised myself I would learn everything there is to know to ensure a profitable and satisfying season. I read everything I could and worked with a greenhouse consultant. Turns out that optimizing a greenhouse is quite technical, but I was eager to perfect my craft.

 

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Greenhouse automation can cut down on the number of greenhouse disasters, by automating management in response to the weather and sending alarms when conditions go out of the ideal range.

 

Since then, I talked to many farmers and realized that very few use what I always took for granted: greenhouse automation. This is something that makes the difference for us and is less understood than I imagined. So, I decided to share my experience in hope others will benefit from it.

The greenhouse that pays for itself

The first thing there is to know is that greenhouses can be very productive when you provide the right conditions for plant growth. Last year, we went up to $125,000 in tomato sales from our multispan greenhouse.

To get these yields, you need a good grip on your greenhouse climate. It can be complex to figure it out while using automation, but outright impossible if you control your side ventilation manually. Fortunately, we found a system that is simple for our team to use in the midst of everything else.

 

Dehumidification

One of the first things I set-up on my automation system is a program that would prevent ever again experiencing the leaf mold disaster. My agronomist at the time, explained that the most effective strategy to reduce the risks of fungal diseases was to program “dehumidification cycles.”

 

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The author working in the greenhouse. All images courtesy of the author.

 

Never wanting to resort to biofungicides, this approach seemed ideal to me. I was afraid it would be complicated, but with Orisha — our automation system — it is only two clicks.

That July, I was thinking about the previous year. Anticipating diseases, I monitored with apprehension the first signs of leaf mold. I should mention here that we mainly grow heirloom tomatoes. These varieties are very susceptible to this disease.

It was almost too good to be true: simply by programming dehumidification cycles, I was able to eliminate the farm’s most significant disease problem. I love the set and forget aspects of this solution.

 

Plant balance and crop steering

Throughout this first summer as a greenhouse manager, I also began studying the impact of the greenhouse climate on yields. The general concept is not surprising. If you want a plant to give you its best, you have to keep it healthy.

 

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Climate calculations to keep plants balanced between fruit and vine production can be complicated, but automation makes steering as simple as moving a slider, and lets the algorithm do the rest.

 

Avoiding temperature extremes and fixing fungal disease with dehumidification cycles are low hanging fruits because with our automation system you set it up and forget about it. After that, keeping plants in optimal shape becomes less obvious and more technical.

You need to look at maximizing photosynthesis and balancing where the energy received goes. I learned that by finding a good balance between fruit and leaf production on tomato plants, I could achieve optimal and consistent yields throughout my production season.

As a new greenhouse manager, I wanted to learn how on earth I could balance these characteristics? In the greenhouse industry, folks call this crop steering. In practice though, it means recognizing generative and vegetative characteristics of the plant.

 

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Many fruiting crops can easily start the season too vegetative, but automated climate control can help balance them early and increase yields. Though perhaps the greatest benefit of automation is peace of mind for the grower.

 

Steering is important because crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplant can become imbalanced, and either put too much energy into fruit, at the expense of long-term growth, or put too much energy into leaves at the expense of fruit production. The classic example of this is a compost pile tomato plant- they tend to be all leaves and little fruit- too vegetative- due to an excess of fertility. Why crops become imbalanced comes down to a complex interaction of factors including stage of growth, fertility, how the plants are pruned and more, but one of the best ways to balance them is through greenhouse climate management.

Greenhouse automation allows you to analyze the sunlight the plant receives versus the fruit the plant bears. And then, with this information, you can to figure out the right temperature for your plant during the day and during the night to steer the plants in the direction they need to go to find balance. When we were doing it manually, it felt like Einstein-level mathematics. Figuring this out while taking care of all the problems on the farm was not possible. I had to rely on my greenhouse consultant to adjust our temperature setpoint once every three weeks.

Then something interesting happened two years ago. A new feature that made crop steering accessible to us appeared on our Orisha greenhouse control software. Our “crop steering”  thinking is now reduced to this: comparing the beef tomato plant’s head to a AA battery. If the tomato head is smaller, you move the slider left. If bigger, to the right. I tell this to the system and a system algorithm makes the necessary adjustments to the greenhouse climate to bring the vigor of my tomato plants within the target zone.

During that summer, I hosted a group of agronomy students in the middle of August. They observed the vigor of my plants and were impressed by how well-balanced they were. They questioned me about how I achieved such good results. And honestly, I had no other answer than: we adjust our automation system every week.

That’s really the strength of this system: it allows us to achieve professional results without having to rack our brains. The system takes care of all the complexity, leaving us to focus on other tasks it cannot perform, such as pruning and lowering the plants.

 

Greenhouse automation simplifies farm operations

My first season as greenhouse manager is now behind me. For the last four years now, I’ve been the FQT farm manager. My role is to oversee the whole vegetable production and train the new team of future market gardeners. I can’t focus on the greenhouse technicalities anymore. There is just way too much to deal with, but I still need all these details to be taken care of if I want the farm to be profitable. Indeed, our tunnels, cold tunnels and greenhouses make most of our revenue.

I have to teach new people every year to take care of … well … the whole farm. That means I appreciate anything that simplifies operations like never before. And greenhouse automation does that for me.

Productivity is always a challenge because there is always so much to do. One thing that adds up to hours of unproductive labor at the end of the week is all the time we spend walking from one task to another.

I’ve always had greenhouse automation help on the farm. I don’t know how we would live without it. Every time farmers tell me that they take care of ventilation and irrigation manually, I’m stressed out for them. Most of the time, we have to irrigate our greenhouse beds several times a day. Add to that the rollup sides that we crank up or down a few times a day during the shoulder seasons.

I am so relieved not having to think about all that and not having to teach my team when to do what. I’m even happier knowing that I can keep my employees on productive tasks. In the end, automation is way more effective, hence cheaper, at doing that kind of menial task. And that’s without mentioning reliability.

Secure your crops and sleep better

We’ve all heard of farmers losing crops. It’s inevitable. Farmers and their employees have so much to think about. At one point or another, someone is bound to forget something. A sunny July day is not forgiving. Someone is sick that day. Confusion arises and nobody opens the sides of the tunnel. Forget it, the temperature goes to 120°F. Your crops will cook and losses can easily reach $10,000.

Over the course of a day in April, you can freeze or cook your greenhouse crops. Especially with our baby summer crops. When I started as a greenhouse manager, my greatest fear was returning one morning in March or April to find all the tomatoes frozen due to a heating system failure. It had become such an obsession that I started having recurring nightmares. I would wake up in a panic, and immediately check the app of my automation system to ensure everything was okay.

Being so terrified of such a disaster occurring, I programmed alerts in all the greenhouses. These alerts were designed to call me at the slightest sign of abnormal temperatures in the greenhouses (too hot or too cold). I set these just in case, right? But just in case happens quite often.

Greenhouse automation fixes the human error problem. But still, many things can go wrong; heating system failures that are not unheard of. It’s easy to trust your automated greenhouse and not check on it after it’s been running everything flawlessly for a while.

Remember you need to keep a healthy check on your automation system. It is like an employee. Cheaper and more reliable for the tasks we use it for. But still not perfect. Make sure to have a system that will call you when something happens and like me you’ll sleep better at night.

 

Automation for weekends off

Now that I serve as the farm manager, I continue to contemplate automation, but with a fresh perspective. I am particularly pondering how I can use automation to reduce waste (in the Lean Farm sense). The best way to eliminate waste on the farm is to either delegate, eliminate or automate tasks.

One thing I have targeted is the weekend work for irrigating the nursery crops and field. If I could automate these activities, there would no longer be a need to bring in employees every weekend for what we call here “farm duties.”

I have calculated that this investment would pay off within three years, factoring in paid hours that we could eliminate. Considering that irrigating crops is not a high-value-added task when done by the farmer, it makes a lot of sense to stop doing it ourselves.

If you’re considering installing automation, I know it can be daunting. It seems really complicated. I’m not a tech geek when it comes to electricity and computer science, and I try to steer clear of complex technologies. I value simplicity above all else.

I was recently shown how to install the automation system, and I must admit I was truly surprised by how simple it is and how little knowledge, if any, it requires. And as far as the cost of automating, you can buy the equipment for greenhouse automation, or Orisha has a plan where you can pay a flat fee per month, based on the equipment you need for what you are automating, so the cost is predictable.

However you do it, there’s no way a human can make the fine adjustments to greenhouse climate and growing conditions that an automated system can. Greenhouse automation will make plants grow better, help you have fewer greenhouse disasters, save your time from making all the daily adjustments by hand, and perhaps most importantly, give you peace of mind that your greenhouse is being taken care of while you do other things.

 

Catherine Sylvestre is a professional agronomist and leader of the market garden team at la Ferme des Quatre-Temps in Hemmingford, Quebec. She develops, implements, and teaches best practices for cold season growing, specializing in crop protection and greenhouse production for northern climates. She is also the co-author of the book, The Winter Market Gardener, available from growingformarket.com.