Emerald Coast Growers, based in Pensacola, FL, recently added a seed house to increase production efficiency at its Florida operations. The new facility gives the company the efficiency of having everything together, according to Josiah Raymer, General Manager.
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Emerald Coast’s new seed house, built by retrofitting and expanding an existing X.S. Smith greenhouse, puts all tools under one roof.
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Having the seed room comes in particularly handy in fall, says Josiah Raymer, General Manager of Emerald Coast, adding at least another month to their production cycle. For example, Cortaderia won’t germinate in the September Florida heat, so they bring the seed in to germinate for a month until temperatures cool off in October. One particular challenge in Emerald Coast Growers’ new seed rack room is airflow. “We had to increase airflow, so we installed supplemental fans and experimented with different airflow patterns until we found the one that worked,” says Raymer.
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A Bouldin & Lawson flat filler is located in the seed house, which allows for on-demand changes, so the seed grower can vary media mixes for specific seeds for even the smallest batches as needed.
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Emerald Coast Growers’ seed grower adjusts the Blackmore seeding machine for seed size and tray size. The seed house can handle upwards of 15,000 seed trays a year.
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The house’s efficient design means a single grower can operate the entire seed line by himself, a job that used to require multiple people.
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Seeds flow to the LED racks, sometimes stopping for only three or four weeks until they germinate, sometimes longer. The LED room holds more than 800 trays, about the size of one greenhouse bay in a much smaller footprint. Emerald Coast Growers designed the LED racks for maximum efficiency and lower power consumption: They don’t pull a lot of energy and don’t generate a lot of heat. Construction was kept surprisingly simple, using basic Global Industrial warehouse racks and generic LED strip lights (66% red/33% blue, or 2 reds to every 1 blue). All seed racks are on timers for controlled day length.
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If needed, seed makes a stop in the stratification cooler. Some seeds, such as Carex and Sporobolus, won’t germinate in warm temperatures (though the plants themselves grow better in warmer temperatures). Stratification allows Emerald Coast Growers to produce them in spring.
“It increases our control over inventory, sowing rates, germination percentages, and our growing conditions,” Raymer says.
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The new seed house, built by retrofitting and expanding an existing X.S. Smith greenhouse, puts all tools under one roof. Some seeds benefit from a temperature-controlled germination room that allows them to germinate in moderate conditions when it would otherwise be too hot in a greenhouse. The new four-bay facility provides this, as well as an in-house seed tray filler and a cooler for stratification of seed trays for hard-to-germinate seeds and day length control. Each bay holds about 860 trays.
Emerald Coast Growers added small touches to further enhance the efficiency, such as a table-based Netafim irrigation system with Vibromist watering heads.
“It allows us to water our 5-foot tables accurately — important with small cell sizes,” Raymer says.
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In addition, the company installed a custom-built monorail through the seed building that connects all areas to the adjacent seed greenhouse, where seed trays are finished off before being sent out to ranges to be dibbled into trays. This allows the majority of the work to be carried out by a single grower. Flow is from one end of the seeding building, out into the greenhouse and out the other end of the greenhouse where trays are pulled for production, whether they’re transferred to another location or potted up on site.
With the change, all seeding for the company’s three Florida locations is done in one facility, giving the company more control over greenhouse variables including lighting, watering needs, fertilizing, cut backs, scouting for pests, and disease management.
015An Inside Look at Emerald Coast Growers' New Seed House
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Joli A. Hohenstein ([email protected]) is marketing and PR specialist for Pen & Petal, Inc., a marketing, advertising and public relations agency for the green industry who regularly produces turnkey catalogs of all sizes for clients across the globe. See all author stories here.