so welcome back to this special edition of tools of the trade where we are talking
about Automation in the greenhouses and today we're visiting with Vince Vince has done two
years at the fqt farm this is the training Farm where we train young people to become
really good Market gardeners and this year Vince was the greenhouse manager and so he was using
Alisha and he was using all of the parameters and setting the set points and really growing
really really awesome Tomatoes This was probably one of our best here here at the
farm so I thought it would be a great reason to introduce Vince to this series [Music] foreign
thank you for doing this thank you for taking the time do you want to tell us a bit of what
you did this year what your role was here at the farm and what you managed yeah sure
so it's my second year uh here at the farm I've had a chance to uh to be the greenhouse manager
so uh and it's been an honor it's been a really good challenge we have six greenhouses plus four
cold tunnels and the main Greenhouse which we have tomatoes in is 90 feet per 100 feet
so it's uh 30 beds total how much how much uh yield are you producing in that Greenhouse I'd
say a good week would be between six and ten thousand dollars uh yields were only for the
tomatoes and that can be higher and sometimes when fall comes and the light is going down can
be a little bit less but in the good weeks around ten thousand ten thousand dollars a year and only
in tomatoes and you showed me the numbers this year was how much you expect of sales of those
Tomatoes yeah well we expected above a hundred thousand dollars and we ended up around 125
000 so really really proud of the team really proud of everyone as well good job thanks man can
you tell us what's your what's your relationship with Alisha how you use it what are the details
of it how it helps you in the job that you had to do this year yeah so our research is probably the
best tool a greenhouse manager can have it saves you so much time it all also saves you a lot of
um of propane because right now we're heating with propane uh we're thinking about moving to
electricity but anyways uh it's really helpful to manage the efficiency of the propane we use when
you have like six or seven greenhouses you need a tool like this because if you were if you have one
Greenhouse a small Greenhouse it's doable to just like go manually but when you have six greenhouses
it's almost impossible to really be efficient in your uh in your uh in your work yeah uh because
you have to go irrigate this one you have to go open uh the openings of this one if it's manually
it's almost impossible you just run around all day with orisha what's cool is you can have different
Zone it's all connected on the application directly so I can have all my greenhouses from
my house from uh from my computer from my phone so it's really really helping for efficiency in
work and also in yields because it helps manage irrigation better ventilation better and humidity
control better so that these are all factors that are gonna make you really more productive and have
better yields and irrigation can if you have a good irrigation management you can and like you
can go up to 30 percent more yields for one crop so it's really game changing to have a
ratio because you can really control perfectly and optimize your irrigation so I think this is one of
the most uh game-changing uh with origin yeah how about you show me on your phone how you use it how
do you show us how you use it so that we can see what the software looks like yeah of course yep
so what's really cool about it is I can see all my greenhouses on the same on the same page so
basically you see the name you give to your greenhouse and then I have my temperature and
um my humidity deficit so it tells me a bit like it can alert me already when I see this
okay this is not normal or this is uh really good so right now I see 24 with 7.2 uh I'm pretty okay
with that and I'm pretty okay with everything I see there so this is a really good way to
quickly see if your greenhouses are doing good right now then if you want to go more in detail
so I'm gonna take the Tomato Greenhouse that wash Apple I'm gonna go to the control panel
so first of all you can choose well you see the outdoor temperature at the humidity level the
humidity deficit and the winds and then I can I show you here you have the you have the weather
programs so if it's a sunny day I'm gonna press the sun if it's more of a cloudy day with a little
bit of sun I'm going to press that M uh the cloudy day I'm gonna press the cloud so this is going to
change the settings for Evergreen houses that I previously set up so it's gonna give less water
if it's a sunny day if it's a rainy day it's gonna give more water if it's a sunny day and
Etc and then it's going to control the weather as well in different ways whether you choose the sun
sun and cloud or Cloud perfect then so I see my temperature and I see my Target right now
it's set up on the on the winter crop so uh We're not gonna take too much time on this and here I
see my humidity level so this is the deficit and this is the percentage of humidity I have in the
greenhouse and then I see the wind and if it's really really windy what's gonna do you don't
want all your openings to be uh to be up if it's windy so it's gonna alert orisha and everything's
gonna everything is gonna turn off and close so that the crops are not affected too much and so
that the greenhouse doesn't fly away then if I come down here I see all the equipments I have in
the greenhouse so I see here the furnace so all the the heating devices uh the the ventilation
device and all and here in the greenhouse of tomatoes I have two valves so I can control I
can set different settings for irrigation so in a greenhouse that you if you have like three or
four different crops and you have you want three or four different settings well it's
really easy to just like add another uh another valve here in the application and then I have all
the openings I can control the maximum opening so here you can see it's 60 percent maximum bidding
um uh because it's end of October so we want it to be quite like quite warm in here so we don't want
it to uh to open up too much uh so it's really easy to uh to change and to use so for an example
if I want to start so for irrigation everything is set up but if I want to start it manually all I
have to do is press here say I wanna it's a really sunny day and I think it's dry so I want to add a
little bit more a little bit of water so I'm going to be I'm gonna put for example 30 more minutes
and boom boom it's opening irrigation's on at the moment I press that button so I can be in
I can be in Japan and I can control Irrigation in the greenhouse here and then yeah what happens if
there's a is there if there's a problem does obisha call you what what goes on if there's
a problem so I'm gonna give you an example here I have a warning in the in the top of my screen it
says temperature and humidity sensors batteries are low so it's going to tell me go change your
batteries otherwise if you don't have any more batteries there's no uh there is no data so it's
not going to be able to control so this really helps uh being ahead of any problems that can
occur and if you have like for example I'm gonna sit in the Tomato Greenhouse a maximum of 30
degrees Celsius so as soon as the temperature in the greenhouse goes above I'm gonna get called
I'm gonna have a notification from orisha telling me that it's too hot in there and we need to open
more or irrigate more or do something about it so I set up my own limits so I can control uh
easily all the all the climates in Evergreen houses and then if you want to go for example
in if you want to see what happened in the in the last couple of days in your greenhouses I
can go in the history here let's say you can see the temperature the last yeah 24 48 the last week
yeah exactly so it tells you a bit if you need to adjust some of your settings so for example here
I can see that from Midnight to about 10 or 11 the humidity level was Zero of deficit so it was
a hundred percent of humidity so this is a problem so what I need to do about it is just change my
cycles of the humidification so in order to do this well just to finish up here I can have all my
24 hour temperatures the average day temperature the average night temperature and this helps me
manage where I wanna change my settings so if I can show you how to to set the settings I'm
going to go in the programs here and I can set up all the temperature all the irrigation cycle
and the ventilation and the humidification cycle I want in each greenhouses so for example in in the
greenhouse that is uh already uh set up for winter I'm gonna go so on a sunny day I want I want it to
be between 1 and 16 never go will need underneath that because otherwise it's going to gonna freeze
and we don't want this so it's always going to stay in between 1 and 16 and we don't want it
to go too high because otherwise the plant is going to get stressed if it's one at night and
30 in the day so it's gonna open up as soon as it gets to 60. jam I could show you a lot more but
one thing to know is just that amazing and it's been saving me so much time so yeah orish is a
obviously a really good tool so pretty amazing one thing that I I wanted to ask is humidity
the set points was that complicated because that for me in my years of growing in greenhouses was
always tricky yeah was that's how is that now well knowing in real time all the time on your
phone what humidity you have in your Greenhouse is really important in order to prevent all the
diseases and uh also to make sure that if there's a need for the humidification well you you do it
now because if you wait like a couple hours with a lot of humidity this is where the disease are
going to come out so uh it's a really useful tool because it's going to automatically dehumidify
your Greenhouse thing is you need to you need to to look how uh how big you open up your your
openings to make sure it's really efficient so the the historic data yeah tells you that it tells you
that so you just have to follow that and see okay did the cycle I set up is efficient or not if not
you just improve it and manage a way to uh to make it work you know and then yeah okay so I
I know the answer to this but I'm going to ask you but yeah do you think it would have been
possible for you to grow the amount of produce that you've grown this year without without a tool
like ohisha no I don't think it would have been possible honestly and I think I would have ran
a lot more than I did and I'd be in a lot better shape than I am right now you're in better shape
so uh so yeah no I think it's honestly it's really really useful and uh the people are really nice at
Alicia as well the customer service is awesome so as soon as you have a problem you call them they
get they give you the the right the right answer in the right direction where you need to go and uh
yeah really uh really fun to use as well okay well I think we're going to cut it at that Vince yeah
thank you uh if if you guys want to learn more about orisha you can check out their website uh
they're distributed in Canada and in the US and not yet in Europe if you are in Europe or other
parts of the world but check out their website everything's there they have great customer
support it's a company that I've been following over some years the progress is really interesting
they're they're they're going strong with AI AI really it's all of this to help us Growers make
better calls and just get more yields so that's it and again thank you again Vince welcome okay
all right everyone so that's it for this three-part series of tools of the trade I hope
you appreciate the information that I'm sharing again my goal with these is to help you in your
farming adventures and sometimes knowing what you don't know is the first step in taking action in
educating yourself to some of the practices that are out there some of the tools that are there to
help you in your in your farming but definitely uh the climate controller the greenhouse production
and having all of these the the skills to get that done is a major major step towards becoming
a successful Market Gardener or small smell small scale Growers so I hope you appreciate
make sure to connect with us through the market Gardener Institute again if you want to learn
more about Alisha check out their website it's an amazing company I highly recommend going with them
and they're evolving rapidly so that's exciting great customer service that's also important so
that's it for me Jay I'm out hope everything is going well and I'll see you next time
[Music]
thank you