Why Your Company’s Culture of Sanitation Starts at the Top
February 27, 2024 When greenhouse sanitation fails, you put at risk the people that work in our operation and the crops that you work so hard to grow. Since sanitation affects all we care about, it is important that everyone on your team is on board and engaged with the process.
The best operations have a well-established culture of sanitation. It may look different from operation to operation. However, the one thing they have in common is that it starts from the top of the company and it evolves with the input of the whole team.
This means that the operation’s owners and head growers establish and maintain systems that make it clear that sanitation is a priority, they make it easy for everyone to remember the why and the how, they are opened to feedback to improve the systems, and they lead by example.
Automation is without doubt coming to our industry; whether you are an early adopter of innovations or late adopter, we are heading towards a production system that will use robots more and more. However, the ornamental industry is also an industry that requires a lot of humans to function due to the broad diversity of crops and container sizes. We should automate where feasible, but do no disregard that fact that we are an industry that relies heavily on humans.
When training your team, explain that sanitation is a strategy to:
- Reduce the risk of pests and diseases in the crop
- Decrease curative applications of pesticides, which prevents pesticide resistance and reduces staff exposure to agrochemicals
- Protect staff from biological, chemical, and physical hazards
- Grow high-quality crops.
Learn more in this e-GRO alert from Rosa Raudales at the University of Connecticut.
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