2018 - The Farm

Well, I've been gone a few years from the board, and away from growing peppers, but looks like life is pushing me back that way again. 
 
I recently (last month) closed on a 25 acre farm in Central Illinois with some primo soil, and I'm going to give a commercial grow a test run. 
 

 

 
From up on the roof, when I was doing some roof repairs on the outbuildings. Not much as far as the eye can see, but cornfields...
 

 
 
Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 

 

 

 
Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 

 
Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 

 

 
 
Anyway just dropped a cold grand on seeds from pepperlover and buckeye, going to hit a greenhouse supplier up for other materials next week.
 
Have plans to build a 30x72' greenhouse in the spring, and a ~1200 sq foot dedicated grow room. Too late really to help with this year's grow, but next year it'll save me a lot of hassle on hardening off. 
 
The greenhouse, I am going to do a piped infloor heat slab, with a horizontal loop geothermal system (I own a mini excavator) that is solar powered. So heating should be nice, uniform, not create heat / cold bubbles, and not dry out plants like forced air would. I build circuit boards in my day job, so I will also build a microcontroller to handle the automated watering system with soil moisture monitors and actuated plumbing valves on the water supply.
 
Also plan on building a "deep winter" greenhouse for year round production. Got blueprints I made from a couple of years back, those are walled on three sides with heavy duty insulation, with the glass wall side angled to face winter solstice, so you can grow in the deep freeze months of the north. In the summer, those get hot enough to use as a natural dehydrator, replace the tables with racks for bulk drying.
 
Only doing a half acre or so of peppers to start with this year, the balance will be put in corn. I can't manage more than that with the labor I have available. (When you start talking thousands of plants, simple tasks like up-potting grow in to hundreds or thousands of man hours...)
 
Going to hire some local kids to help, school has a good ag co-op program for high schoolers, they can get school credit working on local farms. Since the plant out and harvest doesn't conflict too badly with corn, shouldn't have a problem finding labor around here.
 
Anyway, that's the plans.
 
We'll see how it goes.. er.. grows.
 

 

[TrentL]

Because you have to sow so many seeds, do you use any mini seed planter to make the job easier?

 
No, I use a toothpick to dig me a little divot, drop the seed in the small hole, and toothpick to push the moved soil back over it. Then I very lightly push on it.
 
Took 6 hours to do the three trays for testing, since every cell was different, including soil mixing. Will be much easier / faster when I am doing entire trays of one type of plant.
 
But the testing stuff, it's very tedious. I learned in years past that papers get mixed up, lost, wet, etc on seed trays so while I still keep a handwritten sheet of layout on the seeds, I also make a tab in Excel to track what is what. That way I have both paper and electronic copy. 

 

[TrentL]

Revised grow list, these went in to the test trays;
 
7 Pot Brain Strain Yellow
7 Pot Brainstrain Red
7 Pot Chaguanas Red
7 Pot Jonah
7 Pot Long
7 Pot Primo Red
Ají Cereza (PL)
Aji Dulce Red
Aleppo
Bhut Jolokia chocolate, brown
Bhut Jolokia Indian Carbon
Bhut Jolokia Yellow
Big Sun Habanero
Brown Moruga
Carolina Reaper
Cayenne Long Red
Chapeu Du Frade
Cherry Red
Chili
Chocolate Bhutlah
Chocolate Habanero
Chocolate Naga Morich
Datil
Dedo de Moca
Dorset Naga
Drying Serrano
Dulce Sol
Elephant Trunk
Espanola
Farmers’ Jalapeno
Fatalii Yellow
Fresno
Garden Salsa
Giant Aconcagua
Habanero Orange
Habanero Red
Harbiye
Jalapeno Biker Billy
Jigsaw
Large Red 7 Pot
Mako Akokosrade
Matay
Mini Bell Orange
MOA Scotch Bonnet
Monster Naga
Moruga Butch T
Moruga Reaper
Moruga Scorpion Red
Pimenta da Neyde
Pimiento Cristal
Poblano
Reaper Bhut
Stuffing Cherry
Sugar cane (PL)
Sweet Anaheim (PL)
Sweet Charleston
Sweet French bell
Tekne Dolması
Thai Orange
Tobago Scotch Bonnet Red
Tobago Scotch Bonnet Yellow
Tobago Seasoning
Trinidad Doughlah
Trinidad Moruga Yellow
Trinidad Scorpion Cardi
Trinidad Scorpion Yellow
Turkish Cayenne
Turkish Sweet Ball
White Bhut Jolokia
 

 

[Chilidude]

HHHmmm, let's see..You are missing Petenero, hot paper lantern and Bonda ma jacques. But out of all of those i listed, try the Bonda ma jacques as it is easy/fast growing chili and makes a tons of huge yellow fatalii kind of pods with sweet and tangy citrus flavour and the scoville rating is anything between 600 000-800 000.
 
Many years ago i had one huge Bonda ma jacques plant and tried numerous times to start new one from seeds, but failed every time. The burn style of the pod for me was something horrific, but the taste is also very good... But this year i finally managed to get one seed to sprout.

 

[TrentL]

Didn't really care much for paper lanterns when I grew them before.  There's other Habanero plants that produce bigger, meatier, tastier pods for sauce making / etc.
 
Bonda ma Jacques are known to need some shade to do well, all of these will be grown out in a field subject to long, intense summer sun, with no shade covers. So it was eliminated out of hand during planning.
 
Part of this 'experimental' grow is to weed out cultivars which are either incapable of contributing to their own shade canopy (resulting in lost pods from sun scorch) or plants which are too easily sunburned. There are no way shade covers are going to be feasible on the wide open windswept midwestern plains. So until I have some grow houses built which allow me to do that safely they will be eliminated from grows after the first year.
 
 
 
 

 

[Chilidude]

Didn't really care much for paper lanterns when I grew them before.  There's other Habanero plants that produce bigger, meatier, tastier pods for sauce making / etc.
 
Bonda ma Jacques are known to need some shade to do well, all of these will be grown out in a field subject to long, intense summer sun, with no shade covers. So it was eliminated out of hand during planning.
 
Part of this 'experimental' grow is to weed out cultivars which are either incapable of contributing to their own shade canopy (resulting in lost pods from sun scorch) or plants which are too easily sunburned. There are no way shade covers are going to be feasible on the wide open windswept midwestern plains. So until I have some grow houses built which allow me to do that safely they will be eliminated from grows after the first year.
 
 
 
 

 
Then we are pretty much similar in that fashion. I have tested many varieties in my growing place, over time pretty much skipped over anything that didnt do well in the growing season and started to grow only those that did well in the following year, so it is selective growing to find the best varieties for your growing place.
 

 

[TrentL]

When you're talking acre-scale, yeah, it's an absolute must to sort out what is too fragile to make a commercial go with. 
 
In the midwest we routinely get strong winds (some storms, 70+ mph gusts are seen; that's over 110km/h for you Euros).. plus the assorted hail, hot summers with intense heat, and all of the wrath mother nature can bring down on us. 
 
A garden is one thing but I can't run around an acre sized field and repair plants when they get damaged by wind. So fragile stuff which simple stakes aren't enough to control, will get sorted out in future grows. 
 
E.g. this one was damaged by wind, which took out half the plant. I managed to splice it and it survived, despite the branch being broken completely off;
 

 

 
It went on to survive and produce normally on that big branch. A few weeks later I removed the rope and plastic and you nearly couldn't tell that it'd ever been done.
 
But I can't do that level of manual attention on a field of peppers. 
 
Or train kids to do that stuff.
 
It'll be tough enough teaching a green crew how to properly stake the damn things.
 

 

[Chilidude]

How are you staking them in the field, we have these kind of very long things in the open field for the purpose of supporting raspberries or similar kind of berry bushes from all kind of weather conditions:

 

 
I hope these pictures will give you few bright ideas.

 

[TrentL]

Those would tear plants apart swaying in the wind.
 
And a single deer running through the field would take out a whole mess of plants. We get very large whitetail herds here, and each deer is very large.
 
When I stake peppers I use a single wooden stake driven 18" deep extending up 24", roughly 4" away from the main stem (to avoid punching through too many roots), then tie the main branch and forks to it (not tightly so, don't want to strangle the plant as it grows). That way there's a sturdy post to support the plant as it grows. The goal is to support the plant below the first fork, and at the second fork, to stabilize it in the wind. Droopy branches (heavily loaded with pods) get supported either off that stake or off of other higher branches. 
 
Bamboo proved too flimsy (had to double up on many of the plants using it)  to make good use of it so now I just use 2x4's cut to length and ripped down to form the stakes. 
 
Regarding those deer, best deterrent I found was (oddly) marigolds. Plant marigolds around the perimeter of the field and it serves a dual purpose; keeps deer away, and attracts bees.
 
 

 

[Chilidude]

Ok, you made me laugh very hard just by reading your text...So thank you very much for that.
 
Then i can imagine, that also this would tear your chilis to million pieces and then the deers would take the rest of the chili bush with them:

 
You growing place sounds like hell to me, even if it is warm most of the year.

 

[Chilidude]

Go check this topic, if you have not already:
http://thehotpepper.com/topic/66307-hello/

 

[TrentL]

That's a pretty big grow! 

 

[Chilidude]

That's a pretty big grow! 

 
Very interesting topic indeed and there is much info about how they support the plants in Indonesia and how they do the chili rows.

 

[randyp]

Trent when you jump into the big end of the pool you don't mess around.Im following this for sure.A couple buddies and I are having a hell of a time finding dried habanero for a spice at our copacker.I may be able to take some of that dried powder off your hands in the future.Our big problem has been the grind.I hope you all the best.Your close enough where a road trip may be in my future buddy.

 

[TrentL]

Had my first sprout at 4 1/2 days today. Was a turkish cayenne in the peat-vermiculite-pearlite-azomite mix.
 
Of course it's a seed head. Gonna have to do surgery on it if it doesn't manage to pop that seed off.
 

 

[TrentL]

Trent when you jump into the big end of the pool you don't mess around.Im following this for sure.A couple buddies and I are having a hell of a time finding dried habanero for a spice at our copacker.I may be able to take some of that dried powder off your hands in the future.Our big problem has been the grind.I hope you all the best.Your close enough where a road trip may be in my future buddy.

 
Hell you're welcome to stop by anytime this year once the grow gets going.
 
I should have no problem hooking you up with habanero, fresh or dried. I have 400 habanero plants lined up on this year's grow, I'll be swimming in the damn things by August.

 

[TrentL]

Been a busy week at the farm, doing insulation and starting wiring. 84 rolls of R-19 up now in the 2100 sq foot garage / grow house.
 

 

 

 
Got a surprise when I cracked open the service entrance today, someone didn't plug empty holes when they built the place.
 

 
Big old mouse nest at the bottom of the breaker box.
 

 

 
Got all that crap cleared out and started running the sub panels
 

 
First one is ready to start pulling THHN upstairs
 

 

 

[TrentL]

Turkish Cayenne in the peat-vermiculite-pearlite-azomite tray won the race to first sprout in 4 days.
 

 
 

 

[randyp]

Your only 5 hrs away, talked to my guys and once you're up and running and the weather warms we will do a feild trip Trent

 

[TrentL]

Your only 5 hrs away, talked to my guys and once you're up and running and the weather warms we will do a feild trip Trent

 
Right on man. Hoping to get a dehydration house built this summer. Been looking at different models of commercial dehydrators. At some point this spring I'll get in touch with the county health department and see if they want anything specifically set up for it, kitchen-wise. I'm sure they'll want to 'certify' the kitchen even if it's just stainless steel tables and dehydrators, since we will be slicing up pods to put in the dehydrators. As soon as you cut in to produce, you are now "processing" it. Should just be a matter of periodic inspections to make sure we are storing, cleaning, and handling in accordance with best practices. 
 
I'm not TOO worried about liability on selling powders and flake, because the dehydration process involves an inherent "kill step" for bacteria so long as the proper temperature ranges are observed. That shouldn't be a problem with commercial dehydrators. 
 
The bigger problem is "how big of a building do I need" square footage wise to process the harvest. A moderate harvest on just a half acre (3-4k plants) could yield some 400,000 pods over a 2 month stretch. There's simply no way in hell we'll move tons of produce through local farmers markets; and without wholesalers or any purchasers lined up I have to be prepared for long term storage, which means processing it to a stable form (powders, flake). 
 
So I'm trying to figure out the math involved on what I need for dehydration equipment and processing space and labor. It's a non-trivial mental exercise. Not to mention the electrical feed. That scales rapidly as dehydrators draw a lot of energy. I have 400 amp service to the property which should be good for a small scale operation but eventually I'll need to get solar up and running to cut down on that energy bill.

 

[TrentL]

GrowAce.com finally is getting the light situation sorted out. I had a long delay on getting the T5 High Output 4ft. 8 6500k Tube Fluorescent Grow Light Kit (YC-11T5L001-4F8), and when it finally arrived, it had the wrong bulbs in it; 3000k instead of 6500k. They're shipping me new bulbs for free.
 
BTW, that was the cheapest / worst light assembly of any of the 4 that I ordered. The build quality on that was horrible. The reflector is junk, the connectors for the T5 bulbs junk, etc.
 
The lights I'm going with for the scaled out grow house are the YieldLab T5 4' 8 bulb 6400k assemblies. They were the least costly but have the best build quality and reflective mirrors of any of the 4 types I have tested.