Photos courtesy of Bill Swanekamp

An exceptional environmental control system maintains precise readings of temperature, lighting, humidity and other components in a greenhouse. As a result, plant quality and throughput improve, says Bill Swanekamp, general manager and president of Kube-Pak in Allentown, New Jersey.

“You’ll continue to grow because the quality of the crop is better,” he says. “So it’s the whole process that leads to increased profits, not just buying a computer system.”

This is exactly what has happened since Kube-Pak, a plug and rooted cutting producer as well as finished grower, began working with Argus Controls about 15 years ago.

The system provides a level of reliability and durability that, in Kube-Pak’s experience, is second to none, Swanekamp says.

“When you’re growing plugs and rooted cuttings, you need much stricter and tighter controls so that you can hit your target temperatures, your target cooling, your target light,” Swanekamp says.

Argus Controls makes that achievable for Kube-Pak, while allowing the operation to home in on specific controls at any given time.

“We have 11 sections,” Swanekamp says. “Each section has four zones, and then each zone has two separate heating capabilities — floor heat and overhead heat. So we can control every one of those independently.”

Growers can change their greenhouses’ controls using Argus Controls with any PC, he says. While running Argus Controls software on a PC, Kube-Pak has the company’s hardware distributed in boxes throughout the greenhouse. Subject to extreme greenhouse conditions, the hardware provides lasting durability.

“At night, we have 100% relative humidity in the greenhouse,” he says. At this level, electronics are likely to “get corroded and fall apart.” But not Argus Controls.

“It has just a different level of architecture in the manufacturing so that it is super durable under greenhouse conditions,” Swanekamp says.

In July, Argus Controls unveiled a new app, Argus Live, that gives growers the opportunity to manage their environmental control system while away from a desktop computer. Swanekamp previewed it at Cultivate’19.

“... [It] is going to run on a smartphone, and you get the ability to check in and get feedback from what’s going on in the greenhouse right over the internet,” Swanekamp says. “So that’s a very valuable tool. They’re still progressing, they’re still doing new things, they’re not just sitting on their laurels.”

Photos courtesy of Green Valley Greenhouse

Green Valley Greenhouse, located in Ramsey, Minnesota, specializes in seasonal finished crops. That means, for instance, that it starts its annual production each year with Easter Lilies before transitioning to major spring crops such as patio pots, hanging baskets and various 4-inch annuals. From there, it’s onto the next cycle. 

According to Co-owner and President Aaron Davis, Green Valley’s sales are split between its own garden center — located on the same site as the greenhouse — big box stores and local grocery chains. With such an array of customers to serve, the business needs high-quality plant material to start the growing process with. 

“It’s very important to us to maintain high-quality standards,” Davis says. “We are going to let that define us.” 

That’s where Plantpeddler comes in. The Cresco, Iowa-based operation is Green Valley’s largest supplier of plant material year-round. Green Valley gets everything from begonia cuttings to geraniums to poinsettias from Plantpeddler. The relationship between the two companies dates back to the late 1990s, around the time when Davis and fellow co-owner/CEO Brad Wolf took over the business. 

“They are great with their customer service. If there’s a problem or something needs to be substituted, they let us know right away,” says grower Jamie Bloomquist. “Their quality is great. If we have any requests, they always try to fill our needs.” Bloomquist says she knows Plantpeddler’s material is always quality because it hasn’t been oversaturated with PGRs and always has healthy roots. 

Now, Green Valley is in the process of scaling up — sales have risen each of the past two years — and is adding an additional 2.5 acres of greenhouse space to its operation as a burgeoning partnership with a retail client demands more space. As that project moves forward, and Green Valley begins mapping out what it’ll be producing, they know that whatever it is that they are growing — be it begonias, combo planters or poinsettias — they know they are growing from a position of strength. 

“We’re getting a lot of different genetics from one place, and that’s huge,” Davis says. “Mike [Gooder] is very visible and helpful to us, so it’s both a great relationship and great product.” 

Photos courtesy of Bill Swanekamp

Producing about 100 million plugs every year, Kube-Pak in Allentown, New Jersey, adopted automation early to transplant plugs faster and reduce the headache of finding and training new labor.

In 1999, TTA USA made a 64-gripper transplanter specifically for the plug, rooted cutting and finished plant producer, says Kube-Pak General Manager and President Bill Swanekamp.

“We had probably 25 to 30 people manually transplanting — so, again, this is going back 20 years,” he says. “And it’s expensive, there’s a lot of management issues with people and we wanted to get away from that.”

Over the years, TTA USA’s technologies have continued to aid Kube-Pak’s operations.

This December, Kube-Pak will receive TTA USA’s PackPlanter Split-Frame Wireless 48 Gripper. It’s an upgrade — transplanters are faster now and the market has changed. Kube-Pak used to transplant 1,200 flats per hour. Now the business has significantly reduced its number of transplanted flats at 30,000 per week.

“Part of what has changed is that the demand for bedding plant flats has gone down and the demand for five-inch has gone up,” Swanekamp says. “So we don’t need as big of a machine now as we used to.”

Kube-Pak still does some hand-transplanting but has cut out about 90% of it. It has also automated about 70% of its plug-fixing with TTA USA’s CombiFix Gen II that it bought in 2018.

The plug-fixer works for growers who sell plugs, Swanekamp says, adding that Kube-Pak is one of about 10 major plug producers in the United States.

“We bought [plug-fixer] because we were having such difficulty getting labor to fix the plug trays,” Swanekamp says. “So that’s the main reason we got it. And the second reason is it has cut our expenses for fixing.”

Swanekamp, who calls the plug-fixer an “impressive piece of engineering,” says it has a two-step process to fix plugs significantly faster than even well-trained human labor could.

In the first step, the plug-fixer uses an infrared camera to map a plug tray to determine whether the tray has plants in it or just soil. It also uses jets to blow soil out of cells where there is no plant.

In the next step, the plug-fixer tells the user how many donor trays — which have plants in all their cells — he or she will need to do the fixing.

“Then there are these grippers that come down and take a good plant out of the donor tray and put it into the good tray,” Swanekamp says. “And then all the cells that were blown out are now refilled with good plants.”

After 20 years, Swanekamp says TTA USA continues to be a great vendor to do business with.

“They have good service, good equipment [and are] very reliable,” he says.

Photos courtesy of Alan Waller

When Battlefield Farms got its start in 1990, it was a hydroponic plastic range of 6.5 acres. Now, it’s the largest greenhouse operation in Old Dominion, growing and selling numerous crops for spring and fall, as well as holidays from Easter to Christmas.

Some of Battlefield’s success is attributed in part to its partnership with plant brand Proven Winners, says Alan Waller, director of sales and marketing at the greenhouse.

Between products like Supertunia Bordeaux, Bandana Lemon Zest and Superbells Holy Moly!, Proven Winners selects quality genetics for its offerings, he says.

Waller has been with Battlefield for seven years. When he arrived, he says, the company already had an established relationship with Proven Winners.

“It’s gotten bigger as we’ve seen success with sell-throughs and seen success with growing the crops and finishing the crops,” he says.

Waller says Proven Winners is a top brand at retail because the company’s brand is well-recognized and offers high performance products for consumers.

“We live in such a P.O.S.-based world that we’ve got to be very sensitive to what our customers are seeing — and not just our customers, but our customers’ customers,” he says. “As they’ve had success, we’ve continued to grow.”

Waller adds that when Proven Winners names a National Plant of the Year, it does well at Battlefield. For instance, Lemon Coral Sedum was Proven Winners’ 2019 Annual of the Year, and it sold well.

Proven Winners sells a strong portfolio of crops in both its Grande program and finished product, Waller says. “A lot of the growth we’ve seen, not surprisingly, has been in specifically their cali programs and their Supertunias,” he says. “A lot of the varieties that they offer are very unique.”

Waller applauds Proven Winners’ consumer research, which he says is strong because the company grows and sells much of its own product.

“I think they have a good understanding of what’s going on in the marketplace, [whether] being from a genera standpoint or even a color palette,” he says. “They are very willing to share their successes. They give us traction to new ideas because they want you to be successful.”