Alden Brown has been at Selle Farm, near Wrightstown, New Jersey, for going on ten years. As Manager, he’s responsible for seeing to all aspects of growing, production and shipping of the four-generation family farm.
Selle Farms has about four acres of crops under glass, with the propagation part of the business a key function.
“We sell spring bedding plants, fall mums,” says Brown. “Some popular varieties are Vinca, Sunpatiens and Begonias. We’re about 85% annuals, 15% perennials and a small amount of produce.”
Alden met with Svensson at the Cultivate show in Ohio, where he was looking for a solution to improve some sporadic issues with botrytis that had been affecting the propagation house.
“It was frustrating,” he remembers. “We would bring plants almost to finishing, where they were ready for transplant and just in the last few days we’d see the botrytis affecting pockets of the crop.”
“Paul Arena turned me on the ventilation idea,” recalls Brown. “He brought one fan to the farm so we could try it out and that was extremely helpful”. Having a small-scale trial with one fan gave Brown some ideas that turned out to be critical.
“You’ve got to trial it,” he says. “It’s a vastly different concept compared to horizontal airflow which just moves the air above the plants. The ClimaFlow fans put the air onto the plant. It moves the air and the heat right down through the canopy.”
“I could position it right where the problem was,” he says, “and see it, feel the airflow, walk around it.” As a result, Brown ordered 10 Svensson ClimaFlow vertical ventilation units and the results have been dramatic. “It’s cleared up the problem for us – the botrytis is 100% gone, without a shadow of a doubt,” says Brown.
Alden Brown advises other growers with challenges to take a close look at vertical ventilation. “You’ve got to trial it,” he says. “It’s a vastly different concept compared to horizontal airflow which just moves the air above the plants. The ClimaFlow fans put the air onto the plant. It moves the air and the heat right down through the canopy.” He says that it is the ability of the vertical flow to break up tiny pockets of dead air that has made all the difference.
Variable airflow led to a unique strategy
The small trial of the single ClimaFlow fan led Brown to do adopt a unique ventilation strategy for his particular propagation house. He ordered three times the number of fans.
“Our situation is that we have a fairly low trellis and the fans would be rather close to the plants, so we increased the number of units and instead we run them on low speed – you don’t need a hurricane on your trays when you’re doing propagation.”
Later in the year, when there is a denser canopy, Brown increases the speed of the fans to get penetration into the foliage.
“The important thing for us is constantly trying to grow better, with less chemicals and we’ve made some big strides in terms of quality these past years.”
“I couldn’t be happier with the new ClimaFlow fans,” he adds. “We’re planning to expand our cultivation greenhouse and it would be a no brainer to add further ClimaFlow fans in the new space,” he says.
