Growing Media Companies on Research and Partnerships to Invest in Grower Needs
November 26, 2025 The right growing media can make or break your greenhouse crop. Beyond achieving reliable performance, growers today must also navigate sourcing challenges, material availability, and shifting expectations around sustainability.
We reached out to growing media suppliers to get their perspective on many of these concerns. In this final part of a series of articles, we look at how these companies are partnering with universities, growers, and others to address future substrate needs. You can check out previous parts of the series here.
Vijay Rapaka, Ph.D., Director of Global Grower Operations and Research, Smithers-Oasis/Oasis Grower Solutions: “Research and partnerships are at the heart of everything we do. We invest heavily in research and partnerships, in-house and off-site. We are actively working with several research universities providing funding. We also have several ongoing partnerships with companies that have capabilities that we are lacking. So, we have multiple off-site experiments happening in partnership with these companies, so we can bring those solutions to growers.
“Of course, partnerships with growers in field trials and demonstration trials are a very important part of our process to provide growers with the solutions they tell us they want and need.
“We also have our own Research, Innovation & Development (RI&D) facility on campus here in Kent, OH. We’ve had a research greenhouse on site since the mid-1980s, where we constantly have plant and product trials happening. We added a dedicated plant scientist, Dr. Erin Yafuso, to our team a year ago. We’re currently in the process of filling a new greenhouse research technician position to support our on-site greenhouse research. We also draw on the expertise of all the researchers available to us as a division of Smithers-Oasis.
“We’re always interested in hearing more from researchers and other potential partners that can help us serve growers now and in the future.”
Frederic Gagnon, Agronomist, Lambert Peat Moss: “We are always looking at trends and new products in the market, and what we should consider as improvements to satisfy requests for efficiency. We also partner with growers for on-site, real world testing where the grower selects the product and system. We can concentrate on the test, but the real world operations may have factors that impact reality. We can follow up on positive results. To get comments from a grower is perfect.”
Jennifer Neujahr, Senior Director, Global Business Development Horticulture, Profile Products LLC: “Profile Products is involved in several research partnerships:
- Wageningen University (WUR) modeling: demand could quadruple by 2050
- Equipment R&D: lowering the barrier to integrate wood fiber.
- Grower trials: documenting reduced water use, faster crop cycles, stronger root quality.
- Policy advocacy: securing tariff exemptions and sustainable supply frameworks.
- Exploration of new, not-yet-identified substrates — WUR estimates 40% of what will be needed by 2050 doesn’t yet exist. Likely these will be localized materials blended with the “big three” (peat, coir, wood fiber).”
Josh Peoples, Sun Gro: “I would say the answer to your question lies in multiple fronts. One is an investment in understanding where the industry is going. This means working not only internally on our own research practices, utilizing university and academic partners, but also growers, to be able to find the proper mixes, aggregates, and substrates that make sense for the future and address grower needs in terms of availability, consistency, cost, performance, and sustainability. I think we always have to be taking a future look at where things are going and making sure we’re delivering on that.
I think a second big piece is making sure, from a operational standpoint, that we continue to be heavily invested in modernizing our infrastructure and the capabilities, not only on the front end, which is the mixing and packaging and distribution, but on the back end as well, which means making order processing more turnkey for all of our growers.
I think a third piece of our investment continues to be making sure that we’re providing the right technical resources for our growers. We continue to interact and understand their practices and what they’re doing, and how we can adapt to make things better for them.”
Søren Møller Nielsen, Sales Director Americas, Pindstrup: “Pinstrup has quite a few different projects that we are working on, some in partnership and others independently. Being a European company, we are focused on going peat free, finding peat alternatives, and trying to understand what is possible and how it can be managed. We work with different universities in the U.S. where we are focusing on the U.S. market. Wood fiber is a very high priority for us, and we have several factories in Europe producing wood fiber as a peat alternative.”
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