Crop Recipes

Starting an indoor farm can be quite a challenge as all technical aspects have to be perfectly aligned with each other. If you think you know everything about a certain type of crop that is grown in a greenhouse, there is a lot more to learn and achieve when growing that crop indoors. For this particular…

Simply Salads farms cherry and mini plum tomatoes in 3,5ha of greenhouses in Barberton, Mpumalanga. The location has two key advantages: a warm climate, which reduces the need for heating, and its proximity to a sawmill, which delivers the sawdust that the tomatoes are planted in.

Nevertheless, with their narrow profit margin, tomatoes are not regarded as a lucrative crop, and careful management of inputs and output is required to make a success of producing them.

Simply Salads follows a short cropping programme where two crops are planted annually, each on a six-month cycle, from January to June, and July to December respectively.

Peter Bakker, owner of Simply Salads, admits he would prefer a long cropping system of only one crop a year, as it would reduce input costs, but the expense makes it unaffordable.

“It would require significant investment to modify our greenhouses so they can handle a long crop,” he says.

Introduced about two and a half decades ago, the idea of using a sharp temperature drop to encourage fruit production is still a source of contention. As a teacher of the “HNT (Het Nieuwe Telen) Learning Groups”, an educational program where Dutch growers are taught the principles of Next Generation…

To get the right amount of fertilizer for your plants requirements and then to change them as your plant grows, and to prepare stock solutions, needs a lot of calculations. The solution is the Fertilizer Calculator, which was created as an easy and fast solution to understanding your soil and hydroponic…

Strawberries are a high demand crop for both pick-your-own and local retail markets. While this crop commands premium prices, growing strawberries in southern West Virginia has been tricky due to challenges like deer and weed pressure, labor demands and planting time conflicts. With their Northeast SARE…

500Foods shared this story from Hort Americas.

Commercial production of leafy greens is getting more and more competitive every year. Therefore, it is important to seek the best options in order to compete in this market.  Production of leafy greens inside greenhouses and plant factory systems are great options to produce high marketable products. Why? There is one specific reason why customers […]

Root morphology and its components’ behavior could show a considerable response under multiple water application points per plant to help the ultimate effect of fruit yield and fruit quality. In this study, a comparison of a single emitter per plant was made with two, three, and four emitters per plant under drip irrigation and two irrigation levels (full irrigation 100% and deficit irrigation 75% of crop evapotranspiration) to investigate their effects on physiological parameters, root, yield, and their associated components for potted cherry tomato under greenhouse conditions in Jiangsu-China. The experimental results showed that the plants cultivated in the spring-summer planting season showed significantly higher results than the fall-winter planting season due to low temperatures in the fall-winter planting season. However, the response root length, root average diameter, root dry mass, leaf area index, photosynthetic rate, transpiration rate, fruit unit fresh weight, the number of fruits, and pH were increased by multiple emitters per plant over a single emitter per plant, but total soluble solids decreased. Besides, a decreasing trend was observed by deficit irrigation for both planting seasons, and vice versa for the case for tomato total soluble solids.

The dynamic change in root growth of plants plays an important role in their adjustment to soil conditions. Depending on the location, nutrients or moisture can be found in higher or lower soil layers. This is why, depending on the situation, a short or a long root is advantageous. Caroline Gutjahr,…

As a result of climate change, drought and heat significantly reduced plant growth. Therefore, this study aims to explore and provide more insight into the effect of different arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) strains (Rhizophagus irregularis, Funneliformis mosseae, and Funneliformis coronatum) on tomato plant tolerance against combined drought and heat stress, as well as combined drought and heat shock. A pot experiment was performed under controlled conditions in a growth chamber at 26/20 °C with a 16/8 h photoperiod. After six weeks of growth, one-third of plants were put in non-stress conditions, while another one-third were subjected to combined drought and heat stress (40% field capacity for two weeks and 38 °C/16 h and 30 °C/8 h for 5 days). The rest of the plants were exposed to combined drought and heat shock (40% of field capacity for two weeks and 45 °C for 6 h at the end of the drought period). All data were evaluated by one- and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Means were compared by Duncan’s post hoc test at p < 0.05. The obtained results showed that combined drought and heat stresses had no significant impact on root colonization.

Hort Americas is currently working on a germination and propagation project of leafy greens and culinary herbs. The project is in collaboration with their demonstration greenhouse partners, The State Fair of Texas and the Big Tex Urban Farms. Big Tex Urban farms provide the labor needed to grow and…

Growing tomatoes in the desert using nothing but sunlight and seawater is a quantum leap forward for agtech innovation. So how can this technology be scaled and how can remote labour be found to help power Australia’s low-carbon food system? Imagine farming vegetables all year-round in Australia’s…

After only four months Autogrow’s FarmRoad platform has developed several new techniques resulting in an additional five percent improvement, with some growers hitting 95% yield accuracy. “A five percent improvement may not sound big however when you are talking about scale that equals hundreds of…

“We’re here to empower cultivators worldwide to explore the interaction between light and life, increasing their yields and plant quality while achieving new margins and profits,” says Steve Graves, VP of Business Development at Fluence by OSRAM. The company was founded in 2013 in Austin, Texas, by…

Thai startup Wangree Fresh has been in the market for over two years now. Krisana Tamvimol, Founder and CEO has done research on more than 200 local vegetables. Eventually, he decided to grow four different vegetables in his Wangree Fresh farm: kale, spinach, rockets and swiss chard. Wangree Fresh has…

Seed germination is a critical developmental phase for seedling establishment and crop production. Increasing salinity stress associated with climatic change can pose a challenge for seed germination and stand establishment of many crops including lettuce. In a recent study, researchers show that water…

In June team AuTomatoes won the second edition of Wageningen University’s Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge. There was no discussion about the team’s win, they scored highest on all three grading criteria, making them the absolute winner. In their strategy the team applied the principles of Plant…

Plants need water and fertilizer to grow. In the hi-tech glasshouse industry, growers apply both at the same time. A fertilizer injection system provides the fertilizer, and the drip irrigation system distributes the water evenly to the plants. How hard can it be? When Godfrey Dol, he is writing the…

500Foods shared this story from HD.com.

Summer is nearing its end and fall is approaching. This means shorter days, lower temperatures, and a change in the rhythm of life. And it’s no different for your crop: it will be transpiring less and its water requirements will decrease. These factors must be taken into account so that the crop and its root system stay healthy…

People’s living standards rapidly improve because of the development of economy in China , consumers demand for high-quality and safe agricultural products. Shanghai Lankuaikei Technology Development Co., Ltd. and Wageningen University in the Netherlands started a 4-year cooperation project “Big Data…

In 'The Road to Digital Green Fingers' project, researchers increased the pre-night temperature in a tomato cultivation by one degree for four weeks. In this way, the crop was 'bullied' to see how far it could go, but especially also to understand the physiology behind the measurements. The better that…