News article

Optimal tunnel greenhouse crop management: more yield per m²

Horticulture
03 January 2022

When growing in tunnel greenhouses, you are facing many challenges: changes in climate and nature, pest and disease attacks and unhealthy soils. All of this has an influence on the growth development of your crop. Priva has extensive knowledge of all processes needed for growing in tunnels and offers different solutions which allow your crops to develop themselves optimally. This way, you can grow a high-quality crop and maintain a consistent year-round supply of fresh fruit.

Irrigation control

It’s getting more and more important that you can control the irrigation process, especially in areas where water is scarce, water quality is poor, or water is expensive. Moreover, you want to make sure the plant always gets exactly the right amount of water and fertilizer at the right time, whether you grow soft fruit in soil or in substrate. On top of that, the water quality including EC and pH levels also plays a crucial role in the optimal irrigation process. All these, and more, can be monitored and automatically adjusted by our irrigation solutions. Making sure both your crop and your business can flourish!

Crop and harvest registration

The amount of flexible and seasonal workers has increased considerably over the past years. Nowadays, labor costs make up 20–30% of the total costs of horticultural companies. That is why it is very important to have control over the labor costs within your company. And that starts with insight into those costs. Insight increases the predictability of labor costs and allows you to better assess the effectiveness of labor. With a cost item as large as labor, predictability and insight will give you peace of mind. Priva can support you in this. Our complete, modular, and flexible management information system provides you with a clear overview. The system helps you to improve the performance of your company, to make accurate production forecasts, and to reduce labor costs.

We have been using Priva products since 2013. We chose Priva to help improve our irrigation scheduling of substrate berry crops.
Costa Berry Derek Wright

Costa Berry Category

Derek Wright

Tablet Wonderful Nurseries Smaller

Business Developer Dirk Prins about cultivation in tunnels

Having an accurate control of your irrigation strategy, can help you to provide the ideal growing conditions, to maintain a healthy crop. With our systems for tunnel cultivation, you can control your complete water management. From pre-treatment of your water supply, to high quality fertilizer dosing and from fully automated irrigation cycles to disinfection of your drain water so that you can reuse it again in a safe way. Our systems consist of high technology, but are completely tailored to your business.

At Wonderful Nurseries, we used to manually register the number of hours and quantities produced. A time-consuming job. Since we’ve used Labour Insight, we’ve saved at least 15 minutes per day per team leader and an hour each day for the data entry clerk.

Knowledge and technology

Buyers all over the world are looking for food with the best taste and a long shelf life. At the same time, resources are scarce and expensive. How to get the most out of the varieties you grow? And how to use valuable resources like labor, water and fertilizers as effectively as possible?

That is where we can help you. Our main purpose is to create the best growing conditions at the lowest cost. We support tunnel grown crop businesses with both knowledge and technology. For every solution, we are involved closely with our customers and their needs. From ambition to design, to implementation, operation and support; we share our knowledge throughout the entire process.

Consultancy

Many growers and retailers are widening their perspective. They are not just looking for technical products but want to know which technological solutions can contribute to a better yield for their customers and the consumer. Priva's expertise during the design phase contributes to solutions that support a constant product quality or for example water savings.

Together with our partners, we design installations in such a way that they are tailored to your crop, cultivation system, and local circumstances. During the operational phase Priva consultants can advise you with optimizing your irrigation strategy or growing climate.

Contact

Would you like more information? We are happy to help you!

Peter Könemann

Manager Sales Horticulture Europe

Peter Könemann