Located in Canada’s Niagara region, the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre is dedicated to horticultural science and innovation. The 100-year-old research facility built three greenhouses in the ‘90s that, while still in use today, do not have the environmental control needed for research in modern-day, pre-scale commercial settings. It was time for something new to help speed up the process of commercializing product.
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The differentiator for the new greenhouse at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre from other research greenhouses is the size of the spaces, which are uniquely designed to meet research and commercial needs. The facility is divided into three sections: the head house, vegetable houses, and floriculture houses.
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Head houses in research greenhouses are typically brick construction. Vineland chose to carry the greenhouse structure over the top of the head house as a cost-saving measure. The contractor built interior spaces for labs and offices and covered the head house space with a solar film designed to maintain a comfortable temperature for employees.
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The floral greenhouses are 5-meter gutter size with two propagation rooms, four medium-sized rooms, and five pre-commercial scale rooms, where crops are evaluated for performance in a commercial-type setting.
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The new greenhouse at Vineland is all glass with insulated glass-unit sidewalls. The roof is tempered single-pane glass. Gary Moffatt, COO at Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, says it was important for the facility to have the feel of a commercial greenhouse, but also have consistent light levels for research. Because they found that 90% of new builds are glass, designers chose to go with a balance between where they felt the industry was going and what the research needs were for the Centre.
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Vineland dedicated one-third of the new greenhouse space to vegetable and hydroponic production. The houses have no lighting or cooling in them, but shading is provided. This is in contrast to the floral greenhouses, where all the rooms have cooling, heating, and lighting, as well as vertical airflow fans.
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The vegetable house is a 7-meter high gutter-connect structure with spaces that are 540 feet square. It includes below-, mid- and above-crop heating.
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The head house has centralized irrigation and is where the fertilizer tanks are stored. A computerized system meters the tanks and monitors what is going on in the different houses. There are 13 different dependent greenhouses in the overall complex and each has its own control system.
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The greenhouse has a clean, open-spaced look, partly because all major process piping is buried in trenches to minimize shading. Here you see a mass array of pipes and pumps, which is the start of the process pipes. The facility has a 250-ton chilling unit that provides cold water from cooling towers and a boiler for hot water. Tank-roll units supply hot water for heating the units in the winter and cold water in the summer for cooling.
Completed in 2015, Vineland’s new Collaborative Greenhouse Technology Centre has 40,000 square feet of pre-scale commercial greenhouse space with enhanced environmental controls and a versatile layout to meet researchers’ individual needs. Technology in the greenhouse includes robotics and automation, along with state-of-the-art lighting and thermal systems. It is one of the few pre-scale commercial greenhouses in North America. The new facility will facilitate collaborative projects between companies, industry players, and researchers that focus on the development of innovative products and production solutions that meet industry needs.
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Jointly, Vineland has a Robotics and Automation program that is working to bring cutting-edge, indoor-environmental technology for the greenhouse sector to market. Learn more about the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre and see a time-lapse video of the new greenhouse construction at VinelandResearch.com.