Labour, heat, water costs | Expansion prompts owners to install a labour management system to track costs and improve efficiency
MEDICINE HAT, Alta. — The shine from within and without the 15-acre greenhouse is hard to miss while travelling on Highway 3 west of Medicine Hat.
Its glass surfaces burn like a flame during the day and glow like a jewel during the night.
Within its cozy confines, cucumbers grow year round and supply western Canadian grocery stores with Alberta grown product.
County Fresh Farms will be Alberta’s largest greenhouse once its most recent five-acre expansion is complete. Owned by Albert Cramer, Ryan Cramer and Rick Wagenaar, the facility opened four years ago with four acres.
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Another acre was added three years ago, followed by five acres last year and another five this year.
Growing produce year-round is new for most in the local greenhouse industry. Producers usually shut down for part of the winter to save on utility costs.
However, constant production of cucumbers, both English and mini, allows the local marketer, Red Hat Co-op, to supply stores all year.
“This one is different because we’re almost producing the same in the winter as we are in the summer. So we’re producing steady, year round,” said Albert Cramer.
The lights produce much of the heat needed in the greenhouse, which is also equipped with boilers. The lights are on for 18 hours a day in winter and the plants rest and cool for the remaining six hours.
“In winter you walk in, it’s just like a tropical forest. It does get wet in here. The curtains close and all that moisture goes up against the curtains and it starts to get that rainy feeling,” said Cramer.
Dissipating excess heat is one of the main challenges in summer, and those same curtains are used for the purpose.
Cramer estimates the facility produces 8.25 million English cucumbers a year.
The greenhouse is managed in 2.5-acre blocks, which are in rotating stages of growth to ensure constant vegetable production. The operation grows three crops of English and four crops of mini-cukes a year.
Half the area is planted to English and half to mini-cukes in winter. That shifts to more minis in summer when demand increases. The minis are a relatively new crop for Alberta greenhouses and have proven popular.
“We’re still shocked as growers that this is selling the way it is. It’s amazing what people will spend for a good snack product.”
Cramer said County Fresh will employ about 65 people once the latest expansion is done, most of them foreign workers from Thailand and the Philippines.
Foreign labour creates challenges with regulations and turnover, but Cramer said he couldn’t find enough Canadian employees to adequately staff the place. Other greenhouses have the same problem.
The size of the workforce prompted him and his partners to install a computerized labour management system to monitor hours of work, production and efficiency.
“Sometimes we do things just because we do things. We’re not quite sure if it’s efficient,” he said.
“But when you’re doing it on a 15-acre range and 65 people, if 65 people are doing something that’s taking them three hours longer (than it should), it multiplies phenomenally. You can lose so much money. So labour management was a must.”
Insect pests, primarily spider mites, western flower trips and white flies, are controlled with other insects that prey on the pests.
“We’re nice to them. We overwinter them. We make a very nice climate for them,” said Cramer about hungry insects.
“We always have to control our bugs, which is a challenge. And it’s pretty expensive. Bugs are relentless. They are so fast. Summertime, they multiply so fast you can hardly keep up with them.”
Constant intercropping means the facility is never entirely rid of insect pests, but pesticides are not needed.
Fungicides, on the other hand, are required to combat powdery mildew.
Cramer is intrigued by the constant invisible warfare of bug against bug and plant against predator.
“There’s quite the activity in that crop, under a magnifying glass. It’s pretty neat.”
Electrical costs are another challenge. Alberta’s unregulated power system imposes variable costs on greenhouses. Last winter, County Fresh received an electrical bill for $250,000, a piece of paper that looms large in Cramer’s memory.
Cheaper utility costs once encouraged the rise of the greenhouse industry in sunny southeastern Alberta, but those days are gone.
However, use of tempered glass is a return to earlier times. Many local greenhouses switched to double poly after a disastrous 1995 hailstorm wreaked havoc.
But glass under lights works better for heat collection and dissipation, said Cramer. He doesn’t spend much time contemplating hail, which is not common in the region.
“I think it can handle golf ball sized hail. I’m not too sure about baseball sized, though. This glass can take a lot. Let’s not try to find out how much it can take.”
County Fresh uses water from a 10 million gallon reservoir that is replenished as needed from the irrigation district.
The greenhouse captures rainwater from its roof and recirculates water collected from plant transpiration and condensation.
The 158,000 cucumber plants each receive five litres of water per day in summer. Some of it comes back through condensation.
“It’s probably a pretty efficient way of using water, and there’s no really heavy technology to capture all that water. It’s all very simple.”
That capture also helps limit fertilizer costs because plant nutrition is all delivered through the watering system.
One other cost might make farmers pale if they had to pay it for grain or oilseeds: hybrid cucumber seeds cost 63 cents each.
But Cramer, who is also president of the Red Hat Co-op, isn’t daunted by the challenges.
“We need to keep expanding as an industry,” he says, noting the Canadian industry is better developed than that of the United States.
“Canada is a very big supplier of greenhouse product. You wouldn’t think so, would you?”
