Greenhouses Replace Man With the Hoe
The strains of a Mexican pop tune wafted from a radio mounted on the planting rig being towed by a tractor across the farm field. Dragged behind on runners mounted with bucket seats sat a crew of eight planters, trays of cauliflower seedlings on their laps.
As the odd assemblage moved along, the planters dropped seedlings into eight moistened holes punched into the rows by jets of water.
By day’s end, eight acres will have been transplanted with already flourishing seedlings at the Jack Adam Farms in this temperate valley, where vegetables grow all year.
This seated and serenaded planting crew is transplanting vegetables that actually were sprouted and nurtured for weeks indoors before being brought to the Jack Adam field for transplantation--a technique that some in California agriculture see as the wave of the future for many of the state’s vegetable crops.
Gone Are Stooped Workers
The new technique also demonstrates how banning a tool--in this case, the short-handled hoe outlawed in California nearly a dozen years ago--can both bring more humane labor practices and enhance productivity. Gone are the platoons of field workers stooping nearly in half to plant and cultivate by hand with the hated and crippling el cortito .
The planting machine was built and operated by crews provided by neighboring Greenheart Farms, which specializes in growing seedlings such as those produced under contract for Jack Adam.
The precisely laid out planted field will later enable mechanical cultivators, instead of squads of stoop laborers, to trundle along the furrows to cut away weeds without harming the crop. Nor will the planting require thinning, as when fields are seeded directly. And use of rooted seedlings also increases uniformity in growth, easing harvest chores.
Under controlled conditions, Greenheart germinates seeds, provided by its customers, into flourishing plants.
Before they are returned to the growers or transplanted, the plants will be moved outdoors to adjust to nature.
“It works well for us,” George Adam of the Santa Maria farm said of the seedling transplantation system. “You don’t have a lot of variation (among plants) and you get a more concentrated harvest.
“You also get more use out of your ground: If your crop spends its first six weeks in the greenhouse, you save maybe four weeks in the ground and get, maybe, another half a crop or so a year.”
Jack Adam Farms now uses transplants not only to start its cauliflower crop but to give a head start to some of its broccoli and all of its celery--a notoriously tough crop to germinate in the field.
The 6-year-old Greenheart Farms is one of only a handful of major transplantation operations at this point, said John Inman, a county farm adviser and agricultural engineer with the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Salinas.
Ironically, Inman said, the major traditional reason for transplantation--getting an early start in regions with harsh winters and short growing seasons--doesn’t apply in California. Moreover, he pointed out, the cost runs significantly higher than direct seeding.
A Balancing Act
So what’s the attraction?
“There’s no one thing that makes transplanting viable,” Inman explained. “It’s kind of a balancing thing.”
Among the factors that growers consider:
- Where land rents run high, use of transplants enables farmers to squeeze in an extra crop a year and get more product out of the ground.
- Use of sturdy seedlings requires less water, fertilizer and pesticides after transplantation.
- The cost of improved hybrid seed continues to rise, putting an ever-greater premium on successful germination.
- A uniformly maturing crop reduces the number of times that workers must pass through a field to complete the harvest.
- Use of seedlings also helps large growers meet production schedules by starting crops in greenhouses when storms make fields unworkable.
“These are the trends that have been pushing toward transplants,” said Henry Katzenstein, a founding partner of Greenheart Farms. “All it takes is a 5% improvement in yield to pay for the cost of transplanting seedlings.”
In an era of generally low farm prices, farmers will be the main beneficiaries as a result of more cost-effective cultivation techniques, he added. For consumers, who already enjoy low prices for fresh produce, cost benefits will likely be marginal at retail.
The prospect of improved yield and continuous production despite bad weather were what initially lured some of California’s major lettuce growers to adapt seedling technology to their crops in the early 1970s, according to Vince Rubatzki, a vegetable specialist with the UC Cooperative Extension in Davis.
A farmer who can transplant well-rooted seedlings as soon as the rain lets up has the edge on growers who are then just seeding their fields, he noted, and produce coming to market in one of these weather-inspired gaps in production can fetch premium prices.
The same is true of such seasonal crops as melons, where transplantation may give a San Joaquin Valley grower early access to the market when supplies are low and demand is high.
Greenheart Farms grows its seedlings in plastic trays. The trays are divided into little cells in which individual seeds are germinated in a combination of peat and vermiculite (a mineral also used in cat litter boxes).
The cells force the seedling’s roots into a neat ball of growing material, ready for transplantation. The root ball greatly reduces transplant shock compared to the traditional “bare-root” transplantation, in which seedlings must be cut out of the flats in which they are grown and their roots shaken free before planting in the field, said Don Bahl, Greenheart’s nursery manager.
Vision of Future
Katzenstein is a practicing physicist and amateur gardener who decided about 10 years ago to make an investment in agriculture that could carry him into retirement from the high-tech world in which he remains active.
His explorations brought him into contact with a young farmer named Hoy Buell, who was trained in ornamental horticulture at Cal Poly in nearby San Luis Obispo.
Buell convinced the investor that seedling transplantation “was the way the vegetable row-crop world was going to go,” Katzenstein recalled. And Katzenstein persuaded Buell to give up his small greenhouse operation nearby to become president and general manager of fledgling Greenheart.
The first greenhouses went up in 1979 on the eucalyptus-dotted dunes that make up the Nipomo mesa, about 20 miles south of San Luis Obispo.
“The land we’re on is considered marginal and unusable for any other agricultural purpose,” Katzenstein said. But the location, Buell added, offers a number of attractions.
For one thing, an expanding market for the transplants is adjacent in the fertile Santa Maria Valley, and the Central Valley lies just east beyond the coastal range.
The ocean, which is three miles away, also moderates temperatures and provides cooling offshore breezes but little fog. In addition, the absence of farms to the west reduces the threat of wind-borne agricultural pests (which are further deterred by nature in the form of the mesa’s stands of hostile eucalyptus trees).
Finally, the area is blessed, Buell said, “with water that’s almost nothing but hydrogen and oxygen.”
But growing vegetable seedlings is far from a perfect science, observed Buell. “There’s very little ‘cook book’ in this business. You have to figure it out through trial and error. There are a lot of tricks.”
First Test Failed
An initial experiment with grape cuttings proved a “financial disaster,” Katzenstein said. Subsequent tests at raising celery achieved barely a 60% success rate, until it was discovered that germination was enhanced by “torturing” rather than coddling the seedlings.
Today, Buell and nursery manager Bahl supervise a year-round staff that approaches 50. And Greenheart produces more than 25 million plants a month--enough, he calculated, to provide a celery, cauliflower, bell pepper, lettuce or leek for every ninth man, woman and child in the United States.
The company claims that about 75% of the row vegetables grown in the Santa Maria Valley now enter the field as seedlings, and that Greenheart provides 80% of them.
The present operation occupies 12 acres, but the company is negotiating for 10 adjacent acres and expects to erect four more greenhouses within the next month.
“I can’t see the end of growth,” Bahl said as he showed visitors around recently. He pointed to a greenhouse measuring 35 feet by 150. The virtual carpet of plants it contained will soon fill 45 acres with cauliflower, he estimated.
It would take far more seed, Bahl said, to produce that much cauliflower through direct seeding--not to mention tying up a lot of farmland that might be producing another crop. “And if there’s a bad rain at the wrong time, you can lose the whole thing,” he added. “We’re absorbing a lot of the risks.”
If the weather turns bad for transplanting as the seedlings mature, Bahl said, the rooted seedlings, or “plugs,” can be held at the greenhouse for a week or two. By cutting down on watering and leaching out fertilizer, the plant can be put “on hold.” A similar tactic under field conditions would likely kill the plant, he said.
Greenheart currently is growing 11.3 million cauliflower plugs on just five acres--a crop that would require more than 800 acres of field seeding. Outside the greenhouses, an additional 16 million lettuce and cauliflower plugs adjusted to the natural climate.
Expanding Market
Elsewhere, bell peppers were being prepared for planting next year in San Diego County. Labor foreman Andres Preciado supervised crews mowing leeks and celery to enhance the seedlings’ uniformity and allow vital air and light to reach the roots in the densely planted trays.
The leeks would meet their destiny in Moorpark, just north of the Los Angeles County line.
The longest resident at Greenheart is celery, which stays 10 or 11 weeks.
Hoy Buell said he expects the market for vegetable seedlings to continue to enlarge. “As farmers become more efficient--not just in growing techniques but as bookkeepers tracking costs--they will come to see that the up-front efficiency of transplanting plugs is worth the up-front cost.”
Inman, the Monterey County farm adviser, concurred. “The technology is here to stay, but it’s not sweeping us like wildfire,” he said. “I see this as kind of evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”
