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From Vertical Farm to Field: A Harsh Lesson in Transplant Shock · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
• 0:06
  I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, and I'm the founder of Utrema.
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  My sales manager, Matthew, has been under the weather. He has basically broken his leg.
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  And so today I went on a tour of some of the growth shops in Liverpool on Merseyside,
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  where he would normally be, out visiting customers.
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  And we went together. I drove him round. I was his chauffeur for the day.
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  Got to meet loads of interesting people and some
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  very interesting people from some
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  very interesting sites we saw on our tour of liverpool
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  but what was most interesting
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  in relation to the podcast was an it was a conversation i had
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  with a farmer on the way home traveling back
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  to the midlands and he is
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  a one of our carrot customers we sell a lot of products into organic
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  carrots here in the uk and he
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  also grows hemp for oil
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  production hemp for fiber production and
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  rhubarb organic rhubarb and
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  he was telling me a story from last year that relates to hydroponics and he
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  was the price of the rhubarb has gone up so he was investing in the rhubarb
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  crop and but But the people who provide the young rhubarb plants had noticed
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  this, and they were all gone up in price.
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  So he found one supplier that was really good value, it was like 40% of all the others.
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  So he bought them a load, and I think it was like 10,000 plants,
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  and they said it would be 6,000 pounds.
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  Then three weeks later, these rhubarb plants have not been delivered.
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  So he phones them up, and he says, oh, I'll phone you back in a minute.
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  Anyway, this salesman's manager phones him back and says, oh,
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  we made a mistake on the pricing.
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  It's now going to be £16,000, or no, it's going to be a lot more than that,
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  £30,000. It's going to be £3 a plant.
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  So they were like, no way. And so what they did is they ended up buying the same amount,
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  they bought seed equivalents to the same amount of plants that cost them in
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  total 90 pence or one pound, one dollar, which is crazy.
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  And then they got a guy who's got a small vertical farm to grow the rhubarb
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  plants for them into young plants that they could then plant out in the field. So far, so good.
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  Everyone was looking like geniuses in my business
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  i always say never give the customer time
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  to think if you give them time to think they'll find of an alternative and
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  you've lost that customer forever and you know
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  i say the same to suppliers if you let me think i'll come up with
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  a way of not having to use you ever again if you
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  don't supply me or you raise the price i said
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  never let a customer think this customer had time to think and they
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  got a vertical farming system underway with the
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  help of this collaborator in the local area up in
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  scotland and they got all these plants and
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  they grew them up and they wanted to the the family
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  that owns the farm there was debate about when they
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  should plant them and they were decided the that they
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  should go in early and so they planted out 80 of
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  the plants they didn't have time to plant out the rest
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  so 20 went into a polytunnel and this
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  farmer's wife was looking after them for a few weeks while they
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  planted all the rest so they planted them all in and then
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  three weeks later they had opportunity and labor
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  to plant the ones that had been in the polytunnel and what was interesting
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  is that and this is the reason why i wanted to do the podcast on this today
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  is that it was cut and dry a hundred percent of all the plants that were planted
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  out initially straight from the vertical farm died and virtually all the plants
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  that had been in the polytunnel survived and that just is just a really dramatic.
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  Lesson in how important hardening plants off
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  weaning them is to transitioning
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  plants from indoor hydroponics through
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  to outdoor conventional cultivation in a hybrid growing
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  system so we talk about in micropropagation weaning
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  getting the plants from that super sterile environment
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  to an outdoor environment in micropropagation that's super
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  brittle that's the hardest part of micropropagation and in
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  vertical farming if you're going to go from vertical farming and put those
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  plants outdoors again it's going to be super critical they're not
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  going to be tolerant of any drought any uv any
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  wind it's just going to blow them to bits
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  dry them out the stomata are going to be fully opened
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  the stomata are not going to have not learned how to open and
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  close properly that there's been no ab
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  residual aba the stress hormone in them and so
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  this farmer's wife had put them in
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  the polytunnel the polytunnel you get through
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  polytunnels you get loads of uv she might not water them
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  every day so they get a bit of stress they've got some wind movement but
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  they won't be ripped to shreds and so they
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  were whether that was not by design
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  but they were they were stressed and they were primed ready for transplant shock
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  and so fantastic example there of if you're if you're thinking about saying
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  growing strawberries indoors and then moving to outdoors whether that's in cocoa
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  or in the ground or any sort of crop always be really careful to.
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  Wean them or stress them maybe it's a uv light
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  in the grow room or something like this but you really want to be doing
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  that transition and really toughening them
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  up before they go out you don't want ideal conditions right up until
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  the point they go out so a short
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  and sweet one today hydroponics daily a real world example
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  of transplant shock and how important weaning
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  is for plants going from hydroponics to
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  field cultivation hopefully my
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  colleague matthew will get better soon i'll be visiting lots more grow shops in
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  the uk and worldwide uh i'm
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  trying to think what else i don't know what tomorrow tomorrow's topic is going to be but hopefully
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  be a good one we're going to be doing a lot of um i'm going to be painting the
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  laboratory tomorrow for more micro green and small propagation experiments so
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  that should be fun i'll be high on paint fumes by the end by the time it comes
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  to recording the podcast so god knows what the podcast episodes will be like
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  thank you very much for listening today and i'll see you again tomorrow goodbye.