Skip to main content

High Tunnels Vs Vertical farms

Our farm shares many characteristics with vertical farms bar one produce variety.  We employ red and blue light, we add CO2 to our high tunnels and we heat them.  However, the biggest difference is in the type of vegetable we produce, we do everything from courgette to eggplants to some types of cabbages, what we do not produce are herbs and salads, the margins are too thin, and the competition too intense, and guess what that is 80% of what is produced in vertical farms.  There's a clue there. 

90% of our vegetable and fruit production are heirlooms, more difficult to transport but far more flavour.  Our tomatoes are a perfect example, they taste as good in February as they do in July, but they are expensive (we don't produce tomatoes in the late summer).

The conversation came about because my visitors Bernard and Peter who are here for the weekend, were visiting our high tunnels and telling me about all these vertical farms going bankrupt.   

I only know what they produce in vertical farms, but nothing much else about them.  We are relatively labour-intensive, but if you go in July or August to any fruit or vegetable farm, you will find a lot of labour around.  They also produce 80% of their total production in less than 2 months, we produce all year round.  This is our big advantage, our tomato plants produce 11 months of the year.  The same for peas or any other vegetable (we don't do potatoes).  We focus on high-value fruits and vegetables only.  This means that our profits are higher, most people would be shocked at the price of our tomatoes, but then the restaurants that serve them prepare these amazing tomato salads...

Today, at lunch we had two quiches, a vegetarian pie, and two meat pies, from our pie subsidiary.   The meat pie was a first, still a prototype since they had not begun commercializing them, we were the test subjects.  They were all delicious (they are large at 12 inches).  Our guests were shocked by the prices but wanted the website to order some after we finished lunch.  £29.69 for meat pie is a lot, but it was outstanding compared well with the competition.  We also showed them that 100% of the ingredients were natural, with no preservatives, so the pies don't keep for more than a month.

Currently, 80% of the ingredients of our cheese and vegetarian pies are sourced from our farm, with the meat pie it will be a bit lower, because of our limited porc production.  I explained to our guests that this is how we moved up the value-added chain and where most of the profits are located in the food industry.

All this to explain the difference between our high tunnel farm and the vertical farms...



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more