Production Record

The following table records how much vegetable we produced at 248x52 greenhouse.

Dates	Productions	Note
8/28/11	13 totes minis and long English.
8/29/11	14 totes minis, 1 tote grape tomatoes.
8/30/11	13 totes minis and long English.
8/31/11	17 totes minis and long English, 3 totes grape tomatoes.
9/1/11	data lost
9/2/11	13 totes minis, 1.5 totes long English.
9/3/11	17 totes minis.
9/4/11	16 totes minis.
9/5/11	21 totes minis, 3 totes long English.	from sunny week
9/6/11	21 totes minis.
9/7/11	20 totes minis, 3 totes long English.
9/8/11	24 totes minis.
9/9/11	24 totes minis.
9/10/11	22 totes minis.
9/11/11	17 totes minis.
9/12/11	18 totes minis, 9.5 totes long English.
9/13/11	16 totes minis.
9/14/11	16 totes minis.
9/15/11	12 totes minis, 15 totes long English.
9/16/11	6 totes minis.	plants getting old, cloudy days
9/17/11	9 totes minis.
9/18/11	9 totes minis.
9/19/11	11 totes minis.
9/20/11	10 totes minis, 6 totes long English.
9/21/11	12 totes minis.
9/23/11	13 totes minis.
9/26/11	10 totes minis, 8 totes long English.
9/28/11	6 totes minis.
9/29/11	6 totes minis, 6 totes long English.

Quick Reference:

• Full tote of minis - about 18.5kg
• Full box of minis - about 20kg
• Full tote of grapes - about 27kg

Spraying for Mildew

  It seems that some chemicals need to be approved before being used in a greenhouse, such as one for spraying mildew.  Pristine was just being used at 248 on the cucumber plants.

Carl adjusting the intensity of the spray.

  The solution mixture ratio is 40 grams per 100 liter of water.  We will add more if the mildew condition is really bad.  Some chemicals are also known to kill mildew and spidermites as well, but they may be illegal to use.  Mildew is easily killed, as just water itself can pop their spores.  We use Pristine because it stays and continually kills the spores when they pop out.

  According to Carl, to find out if the mildew infection is gone after spraying, we check the mildew spots after three days to check for the presence of brown spots instead of white spots. We usually just spray on top of the plants, but we can also spray from the bottom and then the top for more protection.

Carl spraying from below the leaves.

Carl going backwards and spraying the top of the leaves.

Carl spraying the walkway in the end.

  Currently we buy 1.8 liter Pristine for $800.

Daily Routine

Daily work done by workers.

Dates	Mark	Kyra	Yucho	Johnston
9/15/11 Thursday	Picked minis and longs, packing.	Lowered minis, picked up grape tomatoes on floor.	Clean out the TOVs.	Clean out the TOVs.
9/16/11 Friday	-	-	Went to Marom; Mixed fertilizers, learned about the water system.	Went to Marom; Mixed fertilizers, learned about the water system.
9/17/11 Saturday	Picked minis, packing, and clean out dead tomato trees.	-	Clean out the TOVs.	Clean out the TOVs.
9/19/11 Monday	-	-	Went to Marom; Mixed fertilizers, learned about buffer, looked at phase 1.	Went to Marom; Mixed fertilizers, learned about buffer, looked at phase 1.
9/20/11 Tuesday	Picked minis and longs, packing.	Lowered plants and prune minis.	Pruned minis.	Pruned minis.
9/21/11 Wednesday	Picked minis, packing.	Walking around, twiddling, checking plants for fungus/parasites.	Disposed tomatoes/plants.	Disposed tomatoes/plants.
9/22/11 Thursday	??	At Chiliwhack. Cut down and removed cucumber plants from greenhouse.	At Chiliwhack. Cut down tomato plants and pile them neatly.	At Chiliwhack. Cut down cucumber plants from greenhouse, removed plastic around plant blocks.
9/23/11 Friday	Absent.	Picked minis.	Absent.	Picked minis, twiddled.
9/24/11 Saturday	Picked minis.	-	Picked minis, twiddled, cleaned tomatoes.	Picked minis, twiddled, cleaned tomatoes.
9/25/11 Sunday	Absent.	Picked minis, cleaned up tomato plants.	Picked minis, cleaned up tomato plants.
9/26/11 Monday	-	@ Chiliwack, cleaned up tomatoes and cucumber plants.	@ Chiliwack, cleaned up tomatoes and cucumber plants.	@ Chiliwack, cleaned up tomatoes and cucumber plants.

Removing Plants in Chilliwack

  In Chilliwack greenhouse, plant removal process is much more organized than 248.  This way, it saves much of the labor cost.  The key to easier and cheaper removal of the plants is one step at a time.

  If we have an advanced facility like Merom, we could apply the same cleaning procedure for bell peppers to tomatoes.  But we don't in Chilliwack, so we do the cleaning one step at a time.  We start by first clipping the stems at the root.  We let the plants hang and dry for a day.  Then we cut the strings to drop the plants, but instead of collecting the strings like we did in 248, we let the strings hang on to the steel wire.  This saves labor for the workers to walk around and collect the strings on the floor, which are often overlooked and thrown away with plants.  After the plants are on the floor, we pile them strictly in between the pipes.  We cut off any part of plants that connects to any other place.  So in the end, we will have one long pile in between the pipes.  Finally, we will cut the long pile at some adequate distance (3 or 4 steel column is about right), and use 3 people to hold the front, middle, and back, and carry the pile outside to the garbage bin.  It is similar to how people carry the Chinese dragon in festivals.

UPDATE 1:   It seems that the plants did not get tangled and stacked enough to be done.  Plants would be sag while being carried, so each of us just carried 3-5 plants out at once instead of 2-3 person carrying 4-6. 

  Removing cucumber plants is somewhat simpler than tomatoes because of the way we grew them in Chilliwack.  If we grew the cucumbers the same way we did tomatoes (i.e. lowering the plants until they die), then the cleaning process would be the same.  But we, instead of lowering, threw the plants over the steel wire and let them grew downward.  So the cleaning process is somewhat simpler because the plants are not as tall as the tomatoes.  What we do is, as with tomatoes, cut the stem at the root first.  Then we cut the strings off, and make sure that any string knots will have to come off the steel wire to prevent disease carry-over to next generation of plants (note that we tied strings on the wire instead of hanging down rolls of strings because we didn't lower plants).  As we cut the strings, we stack the plants neatly in separated piles.  After all the plants came off the steel wire, we carry the piles out to the garbage bin.

  Cleaning procedures in Chilliwack was much easier than 248, and we learned that efficient process is very important to keep workers motivated and save costs.

Lowering Cucumber Plants

Lowered cucumber plants.

 Lowering is one technique to prolong the production life of the plants.  Because crops mature and get harvested from the bottom, we lower the plant to make the stems sit on steel wires that are shown below.

An example placement of steel wires where the plants
can rest their stems.

Once the crops are harvested at the bottom, we trim everything off including suckers, leaves, and cucumbers up to certain height to make the plants sit on the wires.  Eventually we curve the stems back and forth when they are too long, so they look kind of like snakes sitting.

This technique is more organized than hanging the plants and letting them grow downward.  It is also long-lasting because the latter method can only let the plants grow until it makes a round trip to the floor.  But Kyra and I doubt the efficiency of this technique because the longer the stems, the longer the distance the nutrients travel upward from the roots.  We need to verify that keeping the plants grow in one long stem and concentrating everything on top is actually worth the effort.

UPDATE 1: Note that we either use this technique or we use clippers and horizontal wires to support the mature plants.  Kyra has mentioned that we get more production from lowering plants than using clippers and horizontal wires.

UPDATE 2: Carl has mentioned that we used clippers and horizontal wires because it was easier for the workers to support the plants with. If we were to lower the plants instead, we have to do it every 2-3 days. Lowering also gives more production, and the height does not matter for the nutrients that are traveling up.

Powdery Mildew

Severe powdery mildew conditions on leaves.

Powdery mildew is the dusty white coating that appears on the top of the leaves surfaces and are usually circular.  They appear in humid and warm conditions, such as densely growing plants.  They are able to withstand really cold days during winter and release their spores during spring.  They spread by wind or contact with infected plant materials.

The fungus can stunt the growth of plants, and usually kills the leaves - the leaves turn yellow and drop from the plant.  They suck up nutrients from the plant, so this causes a decline in growth in the production of the crops.

To control this fungus, we can remove the leaves if detected early.  Pruning overcrowded plants can help air circulation, which in turns reduces humidity.  Spraying of chemicals help as well, but it is more important to dispose of the infected leaves properly and not leave them on the floor.  Chemicals that can be used includes baking soda solution or lime-sulfur.

Source:
http://www.caes.uga.edu/extension/cobb/anr/Documents/Powdery.pdf

Worker Motivation

  As an important step for management, we need to motivate the workers to produce the best output.  The most direct way is compensation because physical laborers tend to be money-driven (since there is no other job satisfaction factor).  Last year, Merom farm compensated the pickers a penny for every kilogram they picked.  So scales were located in the greenhouse, and pickers weighed their bin whenever they finished their rows.  Carl said this idea was stupid because the measuring process was a huge waste of time, which is imaginable because there must be some sort of oversight to prevent cheating.  Since the beginning of this year, Ranjit, the HR guy in Merom keeps track of three levels of workers: fast, medium, and slow.  Each type of workers get equal wage, but the bonus at the end of the year differs by the level.

  The latter compensation system works much better than the former, but workers' compensation in the latter system depends on the HR's judgement, which can very well be biased.  We will brainstorm more ideas on worker motivation program to ensure motivated workers that can result in optimum profit.

  As a miscellaneous info, one girl last year got compensated some amount between $140,000 ~ $160,000.  This means she picked 140-160 tonnes last year.  Say she picked 150 tonnes, then she would had had to pick 150,000 / 365 = 410kg everyday.  That's a lot of bell peppers for a single worker, and there are about 13 pickers in 15 acre of land (and 19 more pruners).  It only gets exciting when you do the math for the total production in weight per day per the entire greenhouse...