Like thousands of other children across the country, Jeff Stoven started his own mowing service at age 12. But unlike most kids that age, he already possessed some business acumen. He knew the importance of a catchy business name and tag line, which would eventually serve him well in his career at Bailey. Jeff was the owner and sole operator of The Lawn Ranger Grass Service: One Man and his Mower. With a name like that, who couldn’t turn down a young man looking for lawns to mow?
Jeff also got a horticulture nudge from his grandfather, who was a master gardener and doted on hybrid tea roses. When Jeff was 16, he started working summers at Bailey taking cuttings from the field, a job he kept all through high school along with his lawn service. The combination of his grandfather’s influence, running his own business, and working at Bailey solidified his career path in horticulture. He attended a horticulture trade school in Minnesota, then went to work full time as a grower at Bailey. There he worked under the tutelage of Dave Gross, who was also his boss during his high school stint.
“He is a great mentor, friend and confidant. I’ve gotten advice from him on just about anything from managing people to business strategy,” Jeff says.
He later moved to the West Coast and studied business administration at a community college and became head grower at Bailey’s operation in Yamhill, Oregon.
“I love the diversity of this industry,” he explains. “There’s diversity in people, products and opportunities. From working on spreadsheets to loading racks, or watering in the greenhouse to strategizing – it’s a fascinating industry with a lot to get excited about.”
Next, Jeff enrolled in Oregon State University where he earned an agricultural business management degree, which is an asset to his career. His education and experience have prepared him for his current role as West Coast propagation manager, overseeing three facilities in Oregon including the tissue culture lab and other propagation operations in Dayton and Yamhill.
In the fall of 2018, Bailey acquired Carlton Plants, a bareroot nursery with a 128-year history in Dayton. Jeff was tasked with performing site identities at each Oregon location and working with the teams to find the most efficient and effective way to carry out propagation. Jeff and his team have shared their experience of building brands with the Carlton team, specifically what the propagation team’s position means to branding.
Beyond Bailey
It’s not often Jeff has a crabby day, but on the off chance it happens, he can easily brighten his mood by watching one of his favorite comedies, including the classic Caddyshack or the more modern Bridesmaids flick. When Jeff’s not reviewing reports or managing team meetings, he likes to hike or visit the ocean with his wife and two young daughters. On most Sundays he’s a “committed but constantly disappointed Vikings fan.” If you check back with Jeff in about 25 years, you may find him fishing, traveling to Europe, or belting out a catchy tune on a harmonica (once he learns how to play), all of which he hopes to do after his horticulture tenure comes to an end.
Atlas’ Bill Mathis: Humble and hardworking, family-first
Faces of the Industry - Advertorial
From broad acre crops to greenhouse production, Bill Mathis is in a good spot and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Atlas Greenhouses national sales manager Bill Mathis took a circuitous path to the greenhouse industry, and yet it seems he was always meant to be a part of it.
“Yes, I am a farm kid, but it (joining Atlas) was completely out of left field,” says Mathis, who was selling fertilizer and crop inputs for a large farm supply co-op prior to joining Atlas as a sales manager. “At the time I didn’t know a greenhouse from an outhouse. Controlled environment was not even in my vocabulary.”
That all changed that fateful day 18 growing seasons ago, when Atlas founder Johnny Browning, who had some cattle and farmland that Mathis helped him secure inputs for, walked into Mathis’ office and made him the offer that would change his career path in agriculture.
“It’s really been a breath of fresh air for me, coming into an exciting and growing industry,” Mathis recalls. “The world I came from, selling commodity products to commodity growers, it’s all about bottom line price and service and who could sell it and deliver it the fastest.”
Mathis enjoys the day-to-day variations that the greenhouse industry provides.
“You’ve got everything from the backyard guy tinkering with a small greenhouse to the vegetable growers in high tunnels, all the way to these giant, sophisticated ornamental growers and vertical farmers using the most advanced technologies in these modern commercial greenhouses,” he says.
Another facet of working in the greenhouse industry that Mathis finds stimulating is the trade show travel circuit. He hopes the subsiding COVID numbers will facilitate a mass return to industry networking events in 2022.
“Even with COVID and the economy tanking and prices going through the roof, it was amazing to me that sales just continued to grow — none of these negatives really slowed our business down in any measurable way.”
Who is Bill Mathis?
Mathis, 58, has been married to his wife Trish for 15 years now. They’ve got four adult daughters that all live within a couple hours of the farm they were raised on. Three granddaughters also keep things interesting, and, as Mathis says with a chuckle, there’s no shortage of estrogen around the homestead these days.
“Yeah, we’re still pretty tight knit,” he adds. “One daughter lives about two hours away, but she’s a nurse so she has some flexibility to come home and see us pretty much every week, and then another daughter still lives here on the farm with us, and another one lives a half hour away.”
Growing up in South Georgia and then in Northern Florida, Mathis was really into fishing and hopes to get back into the hobby once his schedule will allow it. He and his wife enjoy camping trips with their daughters and grandkids on the weekends, and they all get together annually to go shrimping on Jekyll Island.
“Last year we came home with four 48-quart coolers filled to the brim,” he practically beams through the phone. “We split them up and gift them out.”
Mathis, who notes that he is a Florida Gator fan living behind enemy lines in Georgia Bulldog country, likes to keep things simple when it comes to his free time. Weekends with the grandkids and spending time helping his wife in the backyard garden are all the excitement he requires these days.
“I’m a pretty down to earth guy,” he says. “I live about 3 1/2 miles from the office, so my world is pretty small and right now, that’s just fine by me.”
Meet Ball FloraPlant’s Derrick Nagle
Faces of the Industry - Advertorial
The international logistics manager shares his favorite parts of his job and his life.
Ball FloraPlant, part of the Chicago-based Ball Horticultural, wouldn’t be the leading breeder of vegetative propagated plant varieties that it is today without the talented people working there. One of those talented people is Derrick Nagle, Ball FloraPlant’s international logistics manager.
As the international logistics manager, Nagle is responsible for all logistics activities for Ball FloraPlant’s vegetative unrooted cuttings supply from their production facilities in Nicaragua and Guatemala, as well as their supplier partner in Mexico. These unrooted cuttings include all Ball FloraPlant Spring Garden varieties, geraniums and poinsettias.
“The main goal of my department,” Nagle says, “is to deliver a quality unrooted plant cutting on time to the expectation of the customer.”
One of Nagle’s favorite things about his position is harvest capacity planning, which involves managing their production capacities to ensure they provide their customers with the best plant cutting possible while meeting their delivery expectations.
“It is a puzzle that I get to put together every week that balances our production capacities with customer expectations,” Nagle says. Another one of his favorite things about his job is building partnerships and relationships with others in horticulture.
Nagle earned his bachelor’s in operations management from DeVry University. He attended college after he had already started his professional career in logistics. Nagle says that working and going to school at the same time was challenging, but he had the benefit of being able to apply real job situations to his studies and vice versa.
When growing up in Texas, Nagle spent a lot of time with his large extended family, including going on vacation to the Gulf of Mexico beaches. Although he now lives in Illinois, Nagle says that he and his wife still travel to the Gulf once a year. While there, he gets to partake in one of his favorite activities: body surfing.
When not working, Nagle spends a lot of time with his 13 grandchildren, attending their sports games, cheer events and dance performances.
Nagle also enjoys long-distance running, which he uses as an opportunity to disconnect entirely from technology and recharge himself, instead of his electronics.
“I am a fairly anxious person,” he says, “but in the moment of trying meet a running goal, I can fully clear my mind of all other noise. It is recharging.”
How environmental benchmarking can help your business
Features - sustainability
Tracking your energy, water and emissions can lead to better sustainability performance, improved industry reputation and increased access to capital.
Sustainability is a trending topic in all industries that is also increasingly important to many consumers. Green industry brands are making sustainability commitments while a variety of actors, including the Resource Innovation Institute (RII), study the environmental performance of the industry, with the goal of supporting producers with data-driven knowledge and peer-reviewed best practices guidance. Influencers ranging from policymakers, utilities, academics, investors, media and consumers are in many ways defining the market alongside horticulture business operators as they establish codes and standards, determine incentives on technologies, perform research to develop usage baselines and push companies to improve their individual environmental performance.
Growing operations interested in increasing sustainability efforts can take thoughtful first steps in reducing their environmental impact in an increasingly resource-constrained world and avoid common pitfalls along the way.
Benchmark baseline performance
The first step in improving your environmental performance is to understand your current environmental performance. As the saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Start with where you are so you can manage your way to where you want to go.
Resource benchmarking is the process of tracking an operation’s annual energy use, water use, waste and production output year-over-year in relation to itself and/or other similar operations. Like stepping on a scale, benchmarking is a critical step in a brand’s sustainability journey. If a business is not measuring performance, it cannot continuously improve. Assessing your performance baseline must be your starting point.
Establishing your baseline enables you to use data to inform your path to a more efficient, productive and profitable operation. From your baseline, you can set goals and establish plans for improvement. Without a baseline, you will be flying blind — and you may be flying in the wrong direction.
A good baseline is standardized and representative of your environmental footprint. That way it can ultimately be comparable to other companies and enable you to track your competitiveness.
RII’s PowerScore resource benchmarking platform is a secure and vetted tool for this purpose. The not-for-profit PowerScore tools provide growing operations a free and confidential competitive ranking of efficiency performance along industry-standard key performance indicators (KPIs). PowerScore generates KPIs for energy, water and emissions, including solid waste and CO2e (measuring carbon associated with energy use). Soon, the platform will conduct performance verification to certify records for potential investors and other auditors.
Performance benchmarks are stored in RII’s database of benchmarking records. Information from individual records belongs to the user who created the record, and portfolios of records can be analyzed on RII’s dashboard reporting platform. Records with data that pass quality tests are added to the data set, and outlier KPIs are removed. RII analyzes the aggregate performance of the ranked data set to generate insights on the performance of indoor, greenhouse and outdoor grow operations. PowerScore Pro users can see how they compare to the average performance of their peers using the same growing style (indoor/greenhouse/outdoor).
KPIs calculated by PowerScore for cultivation efficiency and productivity include resource efficiency and resource productivity.
Prepare for ESG reporting requirements on the horizon
Tracking your progress is not only good for your sustainability planning, but it can help you solidify your Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) reporting. Companies are required by governments around the world to track and improve their environmental performance as part of ESG reporting. ESG reporting, which includes metrics such as carbon emissions, water and waste management, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and intellectual property protection, is valued by investors and can help you access new sources of capital.
While specific ESG reporting requirements may vary around the world, companies generally are expected to provide information that is material to their business, consistent, accurate and complete. Adopting and integrating industry-standard KPIs into your operational planning sets you up for success.
Investors see businesses that track performance as lower risk. Metrics to quantify sustainability for ESG reporting are quickly becoming business imperatives for fund managers across multiple sectors, adding significant value to investors’ due-diligence team’s research, risk and portfolio management. Companies demonstrating a genuine effort to incorporate sustainability into investment decision-making reduces risk and adds extraordinary value to investors. A 2020 report from global communications firm Edelman found that “88% of [U.S.] investors believe companies that prioritize ESG initiatives represent better opportunities for long-term returns than companies that do not.”
Increasingly, more and more companies in the cannabis industry (specifically in the cultivation and controlled environment agriculture sector) are integrating values, goals and ESG metrics into their business strategies to mitigate risk, innovate, increase efficiency and quality, and even reduce cost. Purpose-driven companies witness higher market share gains and grow three times faster on average than their competitors, according to data from cannabis investment firm TRESS Capital, all while achieving higher workforce and customer satisfaction. S&P Global also reported that ESG-focused funds were better shielded and beat the overall market amid COVID-19 shutdowns. According to the TRESS report, of the ESG exchange-traded funds and mutual funds with more than $250 million in assets under management, “19 of those funds performed better than the S&P 500. Those outperformers rose between 27.3% and 55% over [the period of March 5, 2020 and March 5, 2021]. In comparison, the S&P 500 increased 27.1%.”
Benchmarking data: Setting standards
In addition to company-level benefits, benchmarking data helps establish standards for the green industry at large.
Individual company benchmarking and ongoing analysis of aggregate data ultimately support the development of standards against which the industry and stakeholders, including governments and media, can assess operational and environmental performance.
Voluntary actions, such as the development of leadership recognition systems like the LEED green building rating system, can be initiated by the industry, ideally with transparency and in collaboration with non-governmental organizations and/or the public sector. Regulations, on the other hand, generally arise because of perceptions or concerns about an industry’s environmental impact.
In either case, a trusted dataset containing aggregate facility performance data gathered via individual facility benchmarking can shape a reliable framework that drives efficiency improvements in a functional manner for operators.
The more the industry shares aggregate data about actual impacts, the more it can be on its front foot rather than on its heels.
This article originally appeared in the September issue of Cannabis Business Times magazine. It has been edited for length and subject matter.
Authors’ Note: This article is the fifth of six guest columns authored by the Resource Innovation Institute (RII) in 2021 for Cannabis Business Times. Key terms introduced are described in more detail in the guides at ResourceInnovation.org/Resources.
What growers can learn about using LEDs against pests
Features - Lighting
Researchers share their findings on how LEDs affect pest control agents in the greenhouse.
After 40 years of supporting Canadian greenhouse growers, the annual Canadian Greenhouse Conference returned in 2021.
Two lighting-focused sessions that caught our attention were “Optimizing Orius Performance in Greenhouses” by Dr. Rose Labbe, greenhouse entomologist at the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Harrow Research and Development Centre, and “Modifying Parasitoid Behaviour with Artificial Light to Improve Biological Control of Aphids” by Jessica Fraser, a master’s student in plant biology at the University of Laval. Both sessions featured information about LED lighting that growers can use in their greenhouses.
It’s well known that LED lights are crucial components for many greenhouses that operate in areas that don’t get sufficient natural light for their crops. But LEDs can also affect insects, too, and that’s what these two researchers set out to investigate.
Labbe on Orius effects
Labbe and her research team are working to identify both the most effective and sustainable ways to manage the diversity of pests present within Canada’s greenhouse and vertically farmed crops. In her talk, she shared how LED light can make Orius species perform more effectively. Being predators of more than 20 different insect species, Orius bugs can be valuable to growers in need of control agents against thrips, whitefly, lepidoptera and more. If LED light enhances the effectiveness of Orius species predators against pests in greenhouses and vertical farms, growers will have another tool in their pest-fighting arsenal.
Labbe found that Orius species do in fact respond to selective light spectra. Specifically, blue light was the most stimulating to Orius laevigatus, while violet light was most stimulating to Orius insidiosus, “suggesting that short wavelength of light has the power to better manipulate physiological and behavioral responses in insects.” Labbe also noted that, while not observed in the study, it is possible that in short-day seasons, high-intensity green LED light could improve Orius population growth.
Of course, the work of researchers is never really finished, and Labbe says there is more that needs to be done. Going forward, Labbe says that “future work should evaluate performance of O. insidiosus from different latitudes,” as an Orius’ latitude of origin affects its development. According to the researcher, there is still a great deal of investigation to do, but “the future is bright for lighting and arthropod research as the Canadian greenhouse industry continues to produce better and more effective lighting conditions for both improved crop production as well as effective year-round crop protection.”
LEDs and parasitoids
Fraser shared her master’s research on how LED light can change the ways parasitoids and their pest hosts behave. Fraser set out to experiment using LEDs to test different lengths of day extensions as well as different colors of light. If Fraser finds an LED regime that benefits both crops and parasitoids, but doesn’t benefit the pests, then the parasitoids can potentially control pests more effectively. This would mean that growers would be able to implement the LED regime in their greenhouses to help control pests and protect their plants.
Fraser and her team chose the wasp Aphidius matricariae as the parasitoid, the green peach aphid Myzus persicae as the pest host and the bell pepper Capsicum annuum as the crop.
Fraser and her team found that aphids didn’t respond to the LED light in any observable way, but the wasps did respond. Under broad spectrum white and red/green/blue (RGB) extended days, female wasps increased their activity. Males’ activity, on the other hand, increased under red/blue (RB) extended days. Fraser also determined that “shorter day extensions may promote more activity [in wasps] than longer ones.” These results of increased activity in the parasitoid wasps with no benefit to the aphids indicate that a light regime with a short white, RGB or RB day extension might increase the wasps’ biocontrol effectiveness.
And although Fraser says that “it’s still unclear how this will affect the wasps and their hosts at the population level, and whether this will change biocontrol outcomes,” she plans to keep exploring the subject.
Both Labbe’s and Fraser’s research offer promising results for growers looking for new ways to control pests in their greenhouses. Since many operations already employ LED lights in their greenhouses to aid in plant growth, using them as a biocontrol tool could be a great way for growers to get the most out of their investment.
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