The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e77: Smart High Tunnel Management

Episode Date: March 25, 2016

This episode, veggie grower and high tunnel ninja Adam Montri of Ten Hens Farm in Bath, Michigan, joins me to talk about the finer points of incorporating high tunnels into your market gardening.  Discussed: The limitations of 12' wide caterpillar tunnels compared to high tunnels What you can expect to pay for a high tunnel, and the bells and/or whistles you should consider Ideal tunnel layout Why you should vent like crazy in the Winter and more! If you like what you hear, check out Adam's related content on Youtube by searching his name.       

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant Podcast is for people who are passionate about farming, gardening, food politics, food security, and the intersections among these topics. At theruminant.ca, you'll find a summary of each episode, as well as book reviews, essays, and photo-based blog posts to stimulate your thinking about food production. I tweet, at ruminantbant blog and email from editor at the ruminant.ca. All right, time for the show. Hey everybody, it's Jordan. All right, so on this episode of the podcast, you're going to be hearing from this guy. Hello, my name is Adam Montry. I've been growing in high tunnels on other people's farms and on our farm since 2002. Since 2008, I've been back at Michigan State in the Department of Horticulture and with the Center

for Regional Food Systems as a hoop house outreach specialist. My wife, Drew, and I also own and operate Ten Hens Farm in Bath, Michigan, which is just outside of Lansing, where we grow year-round in 17,000 square feet of high tunnel space, as well as is just outside of Lansing, where we grow year-round in 17,000 square feet of high tunnel space, as well as around three acres of outdoor space. Okay, so here's the thing. As you regular listeners kind of are getting a sense of by now, we're on this new format where one week it's a long-form conversation that tends to zoom out and talk about, you know, the broad view of agriculture and big ideas and that sort of thing. And then the next week is a series of segments that focus on the practical

aspects of farming. And I think it's working well and I've gotten some decent feedback so far, but I still have a backlog of some longer form conversations that are also focusing on the practical aspects of farming. So I am sticking with the new format in the sense that this week it's time for a long-form conversation, but it is going to be on greenhouse production. And I'm really excited to share this conversation with you because Adam was just, oh man, just a fountain of knowledge and really, as you'll learn really quickly, a really articulate guy. Before we get to the conversation, I just want to let you know that this past week or so I posted a new photo based blog post at the ruminant.ca. It features aptly for this week's topic, a 24 foot wide by about eight foot tall by 81 foot long hoop house I built for under $1,500 Canadian, which

is like $8 and 50 cents American or thereabouts. This is not a four season structure. Uh, it is a three season structure that would, couldn't possibly bear snow and is overall pretty flimsy. Um, but having worked with the 12 foot wide caterpillars that that Adam and I will briefly talk about in this conversation I wanted to try and come up with a model that gave me a little more room I really can't stand being in those 12 foot wide wide by seven foot tall caterpillar models that I know a lot of you have already goofed around with yourselves and I gotta say so far good. I've had some strong wind here this week and it's definitely threatening the structure, but I think it's going to hold up.

Worst case scenario is that it's not. And I will take the polyfilm off and then only use the structure for its other purpose, which is to be the frame for some shade cloth for the hotter months during the coming season. Anyway, you can see a whole bunch of photos and a full description of my project at theruminant.ca if you want to check it out. All right, two more housekeeping points. The first is that I was mildly mortified to notice that my monthly e-newsletter that goes out to a whole bunch of you to let you know what content has been happening at the ruminant in the last month went out automatically before I had a chance to go in and update it. So you kind of more or less got a repeat from the previous month. And I hated that.

And I'm really sorry about that. I'll try not to let that happen again. Also, when I recorded this conversation with Adam, I was on the road. I was at my friend's place who were very gracious in letting me record there but they had really noisy pipes and a few other kind of latent atmospheric noises

that are really prominent in the first 12 minutes of this conversation. And then after that, I was managed to edit a whole bunch of it out. So it won't be so bad. But I do apologize for that. Maybe it'll make the conversation sound cozy. We were kind of recording this on a cold winter day around January 2, or so. And that's it. All right, so this is a long conversation. So I don't want to take up any more time. I hope you enjoy it. All right. So this is a long conversation, so I don't want to take up any more time. I hope you enjoy it. And I will talk to you briefly at the end. Here is my conversation with high tunnel specialist, Adam Montry. Adam Montry, thanks a lot for joining me on the Ruminant podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Adam, you are a high tunnel specialist, and I've been very excited to have you on to talk about high tunnels, but we're not, we can't possibly cover everything and I don't even want to try because if people go to YouTube and search your name, Adam Montri, M-O-N-T-R-I, they'll find plenty of videos you've already recorded as well as a webinar or two and they can get really focused on many different aspects of high tunnel production. So what I thought is I would approach this interview from the point of view of someone like me, who is a serious market gardener, but who has not yet invested in any kind of serious high tunnel infrastructure. How does

that sound? I think that sounds great. Great. So Adam, in order to do that, I think we have to dispense with, um, a related topic first. Uh, Adam, I think that there are many people like me who in, if, if they have, um, messed around with any kind of tunnel production, it's been at the level of like the four foot high, low tunnels that are, um, uh, promoted by Johnny's Seeds, among others, or even the, in terms of high tunnels, you know, the six or seven foot high by approximately 12 to 14 foot wide tunnels, also promoted by companies like Johnny's. You can actually, they're very, they lend themselves well to building them yourself. They're very rudimentary. Do you use any tunnels like that on your farm, and are you an advocate for those types of tunnels?

We do use those types of tunnels on our farm. We have definitely used more of the low tunnels, like the four-foot-high ones like you're talking about that can cover one or two beds depending on how wide your beds are. We use those. We should probably be using them more than we do. We haven't done a lot with the caterpillar tunnels or the, you know, the six foot by 14 or 12 foot one as much on our farm. Although a lot of farms that we do work with and

a lot of farmers that we know use those also. You know, the benefits of these more rudimentary tunnels are, should be, are pretty obvious, right? They're very cheap to build. They're easy to build. And they're relatively mobile. And they can be erected and taken down very quickly. But I thought I'd like to ask you about some of the shortcomings and I want to focus on, you know, the 12 foot wide by however feet long by about six or seven foot high caterpillar, caterpillar style tunnel. Uh,

that is, is really common for a lot of market gardeners like me who haven't yet invested in the, in the larger infrastructure. So when, given that the purpose of the tunnel is to manage the environment to, to, um, uh, you know, uh, increase, uh the environment to increase the temperature for the crops inside, what are some of the drawbacks of using these smaller caterpillar tunnels? Sure. So I think it's really important to kind of repeat what you said is that there are a lot of benefits to them, especially low cost, easy to move, easy to store. You can use, you know, you can use the plastic other places.

You can put a shade cloth over those hoops if you want in the summer to grow, you know, if you're in a warm area to grow cool season crops in the summer. So I think it's important to say that while there might be shortcomings, there's also so many positives. But I think maybe some of the shortcomings are that there's, you know, maybe not as strong. So as they have a big proper high tunnel, you know, so that if you're in an area that gets a lot of snow load or a lot of, you know, freezing rain where ice is going to build up on the tunnel, you know, they're not going to be as supportive of that weight as the proper high tunnels are. So if you are in those areas, you may have more issues with tunnels collapsing if you're trying to push all the way through the winter. I think the other thing is that they're not going to stay as warm as some of those bigger structures or the bigger high tunnels. So if we think about kind of, you know, that volume of air inside there as it heats up,

you know, it's going to hold that heat longer if it's, say, a 30 by 96 or a 30 by 144 foot tunnel. It may take longer to heat up than those smaller ones, but it's going to hold that heat longer and further into the winter so that, you know, I think production in, you know, in the high tunnels is going to be able to go further into the winter or even through the winter so that production in the high tunnels is going to be able to go further into the winter or even through the winter and into the spring, depending on the crops in your location, as compared to some of the caterpillar-style tunnels, especially for maybe some of the more tender crops. Spinach, I mean, it's hard to kill spinach, right? Right.

tender crops, you know, like spinach. I mean, it's hard to kill spinach, right? So, uh, I mean, we've seen spinach in the field, you know, if it gets snow and gets insulated that it starts growing in the spring, but you know, for things like maybe Swiss chard that is hardy and cold tolerant, but isn't quite as, you know, cold tolerant, maybe that will make more sense to do in a, in a bigger tunnel. Um, that's going to hold a little bit more heat. And I think I'll, I'll, I'll stop you there you there and just ask you to expand on that a little bit. It, I, what I've learned in the last few years or I think I've learned is that

like what I've, I guess what I've begun to appreciate more is that the actual insulated value of like a six milliliter poly film over, over a tunnel it's great for heating up when there's sunshine, but it doesn't hold heat very well overnight. It doesn't have a great R value, if I understand it correctly, which is what you're getting at. When you have a much larger enclosed space, it takes much longer for the heat to dissipate once the sun has gone down. So I'd like to know if I'm roughly right about that and just

how considerable is the difference between a large tunnel and one of these caterpillar tunnels? Sure. So, yeah, I would agree completely that, you know, that that's what we're trying to do. If it's covered with six mil poly, that, you know, the bigger that area, the longer it's going to hold heat. So what's happening, right, is that the light coming in on a sunny day during the day, it's heating up the ground. You know, and if we have an internal cover, which in, you know, the colder parts of the country we use as well, you know, that we're opening on sunny days and closing on cloudy days or days where we aren't getting any sun.

And so what happens is that's open, the ground's heating up, and then basically all that heat that's been stored in the ground when it's cold at night, you know, that heat's coming off the ground. And if we have a bigger area, it's just going to take longer to dissipate that heat that's been stored in the ground, when it's cold at night, that heat's coming off the ground. And if we have a bigger area, it's just going to take longer to dissipate that heat out. And if we cover it inside, it's going to take even longer because that's going to trap some of that heat lower down, closer to the ground to where the plants are at. So I would say that I don't have any data to say, you know, it takes this long for a caterpillar versus this long for a high tunnel or a hoop house. But what maybe I can say is that on our farm at home, all of our tunnels, well, most of our tunnels are 30 by 96. We have 134 and 126 wide.

But on some other farms we work with, especially say the student organic farm at Michigan state, they have 20 foot wide tunnels and they have 30 foot wide tunnels. And the 30 foot wide ones, you can actually, and I know they do have some data from them, but when you walk into those tunnels, the different sizes, you can feel that those wider ones are warmer on the same day. And they have one that's a 30 by 144 foot there. It's right next to a 30 by 96 foot.

And that 144 foot one in the winter runs consistently warmer just because it has that big air volume and all that space there. So I feel like as you're getting bigger in the winter, again, it does take more time to heat up once it does get sunny. But once it's heated up, it definitely cools down much slower than the smaller tunnel. Right. And then what about, what about similarly, can you, can you tell me anything about like the edges of the length of your hoop house? Like, isn't there a significant, like the, of the length of your hoop house like isn't there a significant like the isn't there a number of i don't know a foot or two feet in from each edge of the length of the of the greenhouse where where of a hoop house of a tunnel um where it's going to be colder and therefore when you only have a 12 foot wide system you know you're you've got a foot or two on either side

that are just going to be that much more exposed uh and that which ends up making up a much higher proportion of your overall surface area. Do I have that about right? Yeah, I think I'd agree with that completely. So even if we think about, say, a 20-foot wide tunnel and a 30-foot wide tunnel, so if we have, let's just say two feet in the middle of the winter, the end of January when it's so cold and dark, and if we have a 20-foot wide tunnel and we have two feet on each edge, that doesn't sound like that much. So that's really four out of 20 feet

that is, you know, marginal and or really cold and or frozen. So, I mean, that's 20% of the production space in there, you know, or one-fifth of the production space, where if we have a 30-foot wide tunnel, you know, it's still only that one or two feet. And so there's definitely, since it's the same amount, there's definitely more usable space or less marginal space in the wider tunnel. So a lot of times when we talk with people,

we're just like how you were saying when we started this, they may just be getting into doing tunnels. They may have established market gardens. They know they have a winter market or at least a shoulder season, spring and fall market that they could take advantage of if they had products that, you know, what a lot of times, you know, what they'll say is, well, I might have the money to do a 20 by 96 or I might have the money to do a 30 by 48 or a 30 by 72 or something like that. And a lot of times we'll say we'd like to see them go wider rather than longer if you have to make that decision.

Because you can always, we did this with one of our tunnels at home, and you can take that end wall off, say you're changing the plastic, you know, in year four or year five. You can take that end wall off, add on, say, another 48 feet, and put that same end wall back on and then recover the whole thing. But if you're 20 feet wide, while some companies make kind of conversion kits to go from 20 wide to wider, they're sort of awkward and they take a lot of, you know, metal. And so we'd rather see if someone's making a decision about, you know, wider and shorter versus, you know, longer and narrower.

We'd rather see them do the wide short and be able to add on into the future. That makes a lot of sense, Adam. Well, look, that's good. Your last statement kind of segued us into the next topic I wanted to cover, which is the economics of investing in a more serious high tunnel. So you say that your preferred or the common model on your farm is the 30 by 96 tunnel. So I know that the price varies greatly on all the bells and whistles that you can add to your hoop house. But could you give us an idea of what someone can expect to spend in U.S. dollars of a 30 by 96 structure?

Sure. And it definitely depends on the manufacturer. And like you said, you know, bells and whistles, you do two layers, one layer, automatic roll-up, manual roll-up, thermostatic shutters, manual shutters, lots of different polycarbonate ends, lots of different options. But I'd say, you know, if the stripped-down version, you know, single layer, wooden end walls, metal frame that's 1.9 inch outside diameter, which is pretty standard for areas that have snow load with four foot bow

spacing. We're talking, you know, stripped down version, probably $250 to $3 per square foot. Bells and whistles version, you know, with automated everything and polycarb end walls, I'd say we could be in that kind of $7 to $8 per square foot zone. And again, it depends on the manufacturer and it depends on the bells and whistles. But, you know, I mean, even there, that's a, you know, $3 per square foot at one end and $8 per square foot at the other end. That's a pretty big difference there. Right. I just did the calculation. So for that 30 by 96 times,

let's say it's the bare model, $3 a square foot. So you're looking at around, you know, approaching $10,000 for that investment. That's actually, I realize that's the pared down version, but that's actually lower than I expected you to say. And yet it's still, that's actually, I realize that's the pared down version, but that's actually lower than I expected you to say. And yet it's still for some, for some growers, it's going to feel expensive. So at this point, Adam, I just, I'd like you, because I know you're, you're, you're a huge advocate for, for high tunnel agriculture and what it can do for the economics of a farm. I'd like you to be that advocate right now and make your case for why it's worth spending. Why it's worth spending, let's create a big range.

Why it's worth spending $10,000 to $30,000 on a 30 by 96 high tunnel. And I want to point out to listeners, I've read in your bio, it's not like you have a massive farm with massive economics, right? I mean, at least when you got started, you were, what have you got?

You're growing on a few acres? Yeah, we're on three acres now and about 17,000 square feet of high tunnel space. But when we started, we were on a quarter acre and one high tunnel. Right. So, okay. So you're one of us small scale growers. I just, do your best to make the case. Like, if you really, like, can you make the case?

I mean, I assume you can. You know, why is it worth taking that leap of faith and spending that $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, even $40,000 on a big high tunnel? The way we look at it is that things that we invest in on our farm are the tools that we invest in are invested on so that they can generate more revenue, right? So we buy a tractor, say, so that we can move things more efficiently, or we can cultivate things more efficiently, we can spend less time weeding, we can be more efficient with our time. And so what we think about with the tunnel, and we can potentially have more high quality products, you know, if it's not covered in weeds, if we don't have disease pressure. And so what we think about with the tunnels is, yes, there's the season extension aspect. Yes, that means that you can grow in the spring or the fall and in some places all the way

through the winter, at least harvest all the way through the winter. So you have this opportunity cost more or less that you can take advantage of and have product in the marketplace when less people have product or when there's less product there. So you may be able to get a higher price for it. On the other side, we could even say, let's not do any off-season production. I know where you're at. I used to live in the Pacific Northwest and there's lots of rain and not that warm of temperatures. And in the Midwest, we have really high humidity and pretty consistent rainfall. And so there's disease issues, especially, you know, as market gardeners and market farmers, we know like tomato is king, right? And so when we have tomatoes, that's when the farm starts making money. Well, in the tunnel, I mean,

that crop is king in the tunnel too. And so what we see is not only increased production in tomatoes, but also a really, really, really high increase in the quality of those tomatoes. And it decreases, goes hand in hand with that in disease pressure. So I think that even if we don't think about just having, if we don't think about the year-round production opportunities with a tunnel, even if we just think about what we can do with warm season crops, which would also include cucumbers and peppers and eggplant and those types of crops, that the tunnels not only mediate the temperature and we can get things in and we don't have to deal with this, like how close to frost date can I get my warm season crops in because we know they're going to be protected. But we also have this such a

drastic increase in quality and yield from the tunnels that I think just growing only warm season crops in them would make them worthwhile. And I think we can say something along the lines of, you know, if we planted tomatoes in there only, and let's just say we had wide spacing. Let me think. We'll do a little math problem here if I can think through it here. So, you know, if we had, let's say, six rows of tomatoes, you got to get a pencil for this, six rows of tomatoes, and let's just say they're even at two feet apart, which is pretty wide in the tunnel. We're more like 18 inches. But's just say they're even at two feet apart which is pretty wide in the tunnel we're more like 18 inches but let's say they're two feet apart so in a 96 foot house let's say we get 45 plants per row times six rows is 270 plants and let's just say we get 20 pounds

per plant which is a high yield but it's also in the tunnel. And it's also, you know, we can push yields in there pretty well. So we've got, you know, 5,400 pounds of tomatoes coming out of that tunnel, you know, and that's with wide spacing. And we can usually get another row in there too. So that's wide spacing, decreased rows. And we're at 5,400 pounds. When you start saying you have tomatoes, you know, four weeks ahead of time, are ahead of the field and four weeks after the field, I mean, you can start saying, you know, what's your price for those? You know, and that varies by your market, but even at $2 a pound, which I think is low for early tomatoes, you're talking about $11,000 right there in gross. And yes, there's costs that go

into it, obviously, you know, there's labor that goes into having a lot of tomato houses full of tomatoes. But I think you can start to push the pencil and kind of say, okay, well, you know, if I start to grow only tomatoes in there, you know, maybe that pays, you know, that pays a good amount. So if I say, let's say there's 11,000 or $12,000 in tomatoes, and then you throw a spinach crop in there and you get another $6,000 to $7,000 out of there, you can fairly, I won't say easily, you have to have the developed markets and you have to move that product, but you can be in that $15,000 to $20,000 per tunnel, per year in sales, in gross sales. So even if we net half of that or even if we net 40% of that, we're talking $8,000 to

$10,000 on under 3,000 square feet of space. Right, right. So managed well, these tunnels can quickly pay for themselves, I guess, is sort of what you're suggesting. Right. And I think that's where, in my mind, that's where the fun part starts coming in is this, you know, when we first started farming it, we used to think about how quickly can we pay something off? Like, we don't want to carry debt. How quickly can we pay this off so that we're debt free? But now, we start to look at things, and I think this is the business piece that comes in from having people help us and talk to us about

how their business is run and also just gaining experience as a business owner, we can start to say, okay, well, I could pay off, let's just say I could pay off this high tunnel in one year, but interest rates are so incredibly low right now, even though they just were raised a little bit, like maybe it makes more sense to pay, you know, invest in a different tool or invest in another tunnel and pay off, you know, just a portion of that tunnel each year over, say, a four-year period. You know, and that's the fun part that I like about being a business owner is you get to play those puzzles of, you know, do I carry debt? If I carry debt, how, how does that impact the farm? And is it better to have that cash on hand? And like, like we,

we took a loan out for three tunnels, three production tunnels, a small tunnel that we use for our wash, pack and storage and a walking cooler. And it was a four year loan for $15,000 because we got everything used but it was like and it's going to be paid off this year but it only cost us $1,500 in interest over four years because interest rates are low you know so it's like well what if we paid that off in the first year we could but but it seems like that cash you know instead we bought uh you know some cultivating equipment for the tractor and thinking about, you know, so there's those kinds of things that I think.

So it's not only can the tunnels pay for themselves, but it's also can the tunnels generate more revenue that can be invested back into the business. Adam, one last economics question. You talked about that base model, 30 by 96 tunnel, the bare bones model that is going to run $8,000 to $10,000 by your estimates. and it's their first tunnel, is there something you would recommend they focus on in terms of getting the first one or two features that they would get beyond the base model? Yeah, that's a good question. I've never really had that question. It was always sort of a what are the options, but not a what would you choose. I think the automatic roll-up sides are really nice, but they run about $2,000,000, or $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. So I think that while they're nice and I think more and more people are doing them, you know, that would be an option,

especially if, you know, they're far away from where, you know, if your farm is spread out or they're a little bit away from where your production fields are or that, so that you're not, you know, on days where it might be, you know, warm and cold and warm and cold and cloudy and sunny that you're not running back and forth. But again, that's, you know, that's not a cheap addition to add on to them. I think that if you have shutters up in the peaks, you know, putting those on automatic, uh, you know, thermostats would be an option too. That really helps with venting, especially in, in, especially in the winter, you know, it's, we've been now at more or less when the tunnels get to be 40 or 45 degrees or, you know, around five degrees centigrade that, that we've been, um, in the winter so that

we don't get this big humidity buildup and have high temperatures and then really cold, freezing temperatures at night. So I think that those would be two options, although what comes along with those is, while there's some solar options, we also mostly have to get electricity out to the sites, which also costs money and an electrician's skill as well. Okay, so it sounds like, if I could summarize, and that also assumes that there's electricity available right up to the site, but if that's the case, then it sounds like venting should be a high priority if you're going to spend some more beyond the base model. Yeah, I think so.

Right. Okay. Well, look, let's move on. We're going to talk about, I'd like to talk about humidity a bit later, but I'll save that for a bit later. I just want to spend a little time on some of the practical and functional considerations of building the hoop house and on how the beds are laid out and that sort of thing. Adam, my first question is, okay, so you're, I know that a lot of the companies that sell the infrastructure also offer to install it. And I'm wondering if these larger high tunnels or something you recommend that can someone build it themselves very easily? Is the pro installation, the professional installation worth the money?

Where do you sit on that? So if you're a farmer who has lots going on in your farm, which most farmers do, it may be worthwhile to have it installed. I think that clearly people can build them themselves and that saves some costs, but it also takes time. I think that if there's someone or multiple people that are close to you that know how to build them, we definitely know that if you have someone who's experienced, it goes a lot faster than someone having a group of people who can still build it and do a great job of building it. But it's just going to go a lot faster if you either have someone to build it yourself or someone to build it with you that knows what they're doing, or if you do have some funds available to be able to have someone build it also.

I think it's kind of a trade-off. Do you have the time and want to save the money, or do you have other things going on that you value your time worth more than what it's going to cost to pay someone to install it? What we like to say is that it's a lot easier than building a barn or hanging drywall because you get to cover it with plastic. So, you know, it's not like if things are a little bit off. You don't want them really far off, but if things are a little bit off, when you put that sheet of plastic over it, you can't really see that, you know, this post was a half, a half inch further out than this post or that. So I think the important part, if you are going to build it yourself, which I think people can do, and we've built a lot of them with people and

know a lot of people who have built them on their own also, that it's just really important to take that first step of when you're squaring up the tunnel or the hoop house to make sure that you do it square make sure you measure the diagonals multiple times because if you build it you know put the post in out of square kind of each step going on is going to get a little bit harder and a little bit more out of whack and and so you know just taking the time know, to make sure that the posts are squared up and installed correctly, that from there it's kind of like a big tinker toy, you know, until you get to covering the plastic. So, but yeah, I mean, I think people can do it.

Yeah. Great. Thank you. So my next question is, I've seen in one of your videos that you, you know, you, you, you advocate in terms of how to orient the, the hoop house, you, you advocate orienting the length of the hoop house from east to west. in the winter, when you're extending the season. And I'm just wondering if you can explain why it's important to consider orienting your hoop house east to west. Sure. So like you said, if it's just for summer production, it really doesn't matter.

And if you're more or less below 40 degrees north latitude, it also doesn't matter but the further we get north um the the more and the later we want to grow into the year through the winter the more important it is to orient it east west and the reason is that the sun is really low and you can kind of pitch if you picture you know kind of close your eyes and put your a hoop house you know if you have the sun really low in the southern part of the sky and if let's just say you orient it north south you've got this very straight end wall that you're trying to get this light to pass through and go let's say it's 96 feet go all the way down to the other end of the tunnel and we know that the further from 90 degrees that light hits the surface, the more reflection and refraction we get. So the more bending of light, so we get

less light kind of infiltrating and getting into passing through the plastic and getting into the tunnel. And we have to remember since we're not heating that heat is light or light is heat for us in the winter. So we were saying we need to get things thawed out. We need to get those temperatures up to be able to harvest. So what we're trying to do is maximize light. So if then we picture it oriented with the long end east and west, we can think about the sun in the south, low on the horizon, and it's passing along that whole side of the tunnel throughout the day, even when days are short, when days are short, say, you know, nine hours or less, you know, the further you go north, we're about, you know, nine hours is

as close to the shortest days we get. But the, you know, you get it passing all along that side of the tunnel and you have trying to get it to say, move 20 or 30 feet across the tunnel and trying to capture more light so that, you know, when it's hitting that kind of angle on the side of the tunnel, you know, that you're getting more light passing through. So that's why we like to orient them east-west if we're above 40 degrees north latitude. I think that it's important to say, you know, that being said, we also know people who have done them north-south that are where we are or further north because of other things like they may have a tree line or they may have an outbuilding or they may have another type of structure that if they did it east west part of it would be in the shade

all winter long from this building and so let's say it's a barn you know it might cast a shadow on that and if we casting a shadow we're not going to warm up at all in there so you know it's a barn, you know, it might cast a shadow on that. And if we casting a shadow, we're not going to warm up at all in there. So it's not saying that we should, that you absolutely have to do it east west, but that that maximizes the light and therefore the heat inside there in the winter. Right. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Thanks, Adam. All right. I also, I also noted in one of your talks that you just talked about making sure you think when you're selecting the site, you want to think about whether you might be putting in another tunnel after you discover how much you like tunnel production and think about where that tunnel would go. And if you're going to be hoping to get it near to the first one,

there's a certain width you want to leave between the tunnels. And there's a little formula you use. Can you tell me about that? Sure. So we know on the, yeah, so like you said, if we're going to put them kind of close to each other and they're going to be going, you know, they're oriented east-west, let's say we're stacking them, you know, north of each other, or we've built the far north of the field and we're going to go south so that they're in front of each other that way,

that we know that the shadow on the shortest day of the year, so December 21st, 22nd in there, that the shadow is twice the height of whatever structure. So if we have a hoop house that is 15 feet at the peak, that we know we want to leave 30 feet until we build the next one. If it's 20 feet wide, they tend to be around 11 or so feet at the peak. So if you're 11 feet, then you want to leave 22 feet or so between the tunnels. So and what's nice about that is that that space between sort of forms this little micro

environment where it's a little bit warmer in the fall. What's nice about that is that that space between sort of forms this little micro environment where it's a little bit warmer in the fall. It's a little bit cooler in the spring because it's shaded from the tunnels, but it's a little bit warmer in the fall and a little bit more protected from the winds. And a lot of times that's where we like to do some of our low tunnel stuff, you know, going into the fall and winter is between the tunnels. Because what's really nice about it is, well, if we had a 30-foot wide tunnel that was 15 feet,

we also have a 30-foot wide space between there. And so when we start calculating yields and how many rows per bed, how many beds fit in there, it's really similar. It's almost like a tunnel that's not covered for planning-wise, bed number, yield number, number of plants needed, um, and a little bit protected. Cool. So speaking of, of beds and, and more specifically bed layout, Adam, uh, you, I believe are an advocate for orienting your beds, uh, across the tunnel. And I think a lot of us are used to thinking of

bed layout in a hoop house as going front down the length of the tunnel. Uh I think a lot of us are used to thinking of bed layout in a hoop house as going down the length of the tunnel. And I saw some photos from your talks. And I'm just wondering, do I have that right? Are you still an advocate for, do you recommend going across? So we do all of ours the length now, and that's been as we've scaled up. So, you know, as we've gotten more tunnels, as we've gotten more, basically more markets that can move the same crop as opposed. So maybe we could say that when we were doing them the short ways across, we were a much smaller farm. We had smaller market or less markets that we were in taking less volume of single crops. So what I liked about the short ways across was that it gave us kind of a way in my head to manage those beds for rotation. So in a 96 foot long tunnel, we get about 23 beds going to short ways

across. And we get, depending on how wide they are, five or six or even seven if we run them the length. And so when we were doing, say, four beds of carrots and four beds of spinach and four beds of radishes and four beds of turnips, and I could think of those blocks as field, kind of as field. So for rotation, they could just move. I didn't have to have my head like, well, did we plant, you know, 20 feet of carrots in this first row last year? Did we plant, you know, 30 feet? So where do I move them to so that I'm not planting carrots in the same place? And so the short ways across, I think, works really well for farms that have less volume of more crops in the tunnels. for farms that have less volume of more crops in the tunnels.

And again, as we've scaled up, we've moved to now basically instead of blocking, you know, four or five beds, we're now blocking tunnels. So we do, you know, in the summer we do two tunnels of tomatoes, you know, a tunnel of cucumbers, and a tunnel of strawberries, tunnel of peppers. So now for us, the rotation is by house as opposed to within the house. So that's when we kind of switch to moving them the length, you know, doing them the long ways, especially for direct seeded crops. So for things like salad mix in the spring through, you know, the fall through the winter and into the spring, you know, being able to run a seeder, the, you know, 90 foot beds, as opposed to 30 foot or 26 foot or 27 foot beds, you know, is obviously more efficient and,

you know, less turns. So, um, so again, as we've scaled up, we've switched to that. Um, I think it's also just, um, I think it's a management preference. We've done the, the math on it. Um, we had a person here who was really good and really liked doing layouts and that. She figured out that whether you run the bed the lengthways or the widthways, you're basically using the same square footage of production space if the beds are the same width. So I always thought if you ran them lengthwise, there were less aisles, it was going to be more production space, but I mean, you just have longer aisles is there anything now that you've switched is there anything that you miss i mean it makes total sense why you switched to

to planting along the length but is there anything you miss about about the uh the the crosswise orientation uh i feel like when we're doing tomatoes it's a lot of walking because they're all strung up you know so it feels like you know if we're at one end and the tomatoes are you know eight or nine feet tall we can't step over to the next aisle we have to walk to you know i mean one end or the other end um to kind of get around them where when they were the short ways you know you could kind of hop around each of the ends it felt like there was almost less walking does that make sense yeah i don't know if there was, but just like a psychological thing. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we, we did when we used to do tomatoes, the short ways we'd walk to the

end and hand them out the side of the roll upside and someone would come along and pick them up. You know, now it's, we have to walk them down to the front of the tunnel, you know, every time, because we can't, especially when they're, you know, peaked in and really tall and it's just kind of a, you know tomato walled in there. So Adam, I want to move on to something you referenced earlier, and that's making sure you're giving proper attention to, I guess, well, managing temperature and humidity properly in those shoulder seasons. So let's talk about when you're trying to grow in the winter.

shoulder seasons. So, you know, let's talk about when you're trying to grow in the winter. You mentioned earlier that you can't, you have to at least be thinking about how high you're letting the temperature get during the day, especially in places with high humidity and actually having to limit the temperature to maybe only five or 10 degrees Celsius, because you don't want the difference between day temperature and night temperature to be too great. Can you explain why that can be problematic? Sure. So it's especially true in the winter. And I think, you know, the temperature and then we can, and the humidity, which are somewhat linked. So in the winter, our light levels are pretty low. They're lower than we need for really good plant growth. So we need about 10 moles per meter squared per day of light to get good plant growth. And when we, for us, where we're at more or less mid-October, we start to get below that. So we still get a little bit

of growth after that, but we don't get a lot of growth. So in the winter, the idea of the tunnels without heat in them is that we're basically trying to plant early enough in the fall to get things large enough that it basically is going to act like a big refrigerator for us. We're going to get a little bit of growth, especially on the really cold tolerant stuff like spinach and some kales and some mustards and those kinds of things. But mostly we're trying to just hold things where they are and harvest out as we need them. So if we get really high temperatures in the winter, especially, say we let it get up to, you know, 70 degrees or so Fahrenheit that that's, and then we're down at say 15 degrees at night, that's not going to, getting that for one day isn't going to make our plants grow anymore. And it's really

going to stress them out because they're going to have, you know, a 60, say 55, 60 degree temperature differential from night to day. So, so we're not getting any added growth and we're stressing the plants out, which are, you know, things, something that we don't want to do. And, and so the other thing that starts to happen in the tunnels is as we get that increased temperature, we start to hit the dew point. We start to get a lot of condensation and we start to get high humidity and we start to get a lot of moisture on the plants and on the tunnel, on the plastic itself and then on the plants as well. And so we definitely want to be managing that through venting in the winter because if not, what we're basically doing is making a, you know, not dark like a dark room or anything, but it's dark in

the winter, so to speak, compared to the summer. And it's cool, you know, and we have plants that are really densely planted with each other to try to maximize that space. So basically what we're getting at in the winter is kind of creating a great environment for fungal growth, right? Cool, moist, and not a lot of airflow. So what we try to do in the winter is again, start to vent at, you know, 5C or, you know, around 41, 42, 45 Fahrenheit. We'll open up the vents. We have vents in the end, some that are on thermostats, some in the end, some that aren't thermostat, some that are automatic, some that aren't automatic that we just prop open. And what

we're trying to do there is one, decrease the, you know, not prohibit the temperature from getting too high and building up, but also trying to get that humidity out of those tunnels as well. It just, from watching some of your videos online, I just gathered there's venting is crucial all through the year because really tunnel production is about, yes, raising the overall temperature a little bit, but really trying to control it so that the plants haven't evolved to deal with wild swings in temperature. And I imagine that a really good hoop house grower really wants to try and exert quite a bit of control over temperature changes through the day. Definitely. And I agree with exactly what you said is that, you know, even in the summer and in shoulder seasons, especially, you know, it's this game of playing. Like how long, you know, how long can you keep it open? How big are the plants?

Do you need to close it a little bit early in the fall because you got stuff in a little bit late? But then how do you, you know, you're pushing the temperatures a little bit in, say, October because you planted stuff late, but you don't want it to be too humid. So there's, you know, it's just like, it's like field growing, right? Every year is different. Every day is different. It's just like field growing, right? Every year is different. Every day is different.

And, you know, as farmers, we're all making decisions as to, you know, how are we going to, you know, best grow these plants and give them the environments that they're going to kind of blossom and prosper in so that, you know, we can harvest and we can have decreased disease and we can have decreased pest pressure. But each of our decisions that we make definitely impacts, you know, how well the plants do. Now, earlier, Adam, you talked about, you know, if you were going to recommend, you know, what people would spend their money on if they're going to add certain features to the basic model of the hoop house. And you talked about venting being pretty important. I know that at least early on in your farm, you and your wife spent the money on automatic venting, electricity supplied venting with thermostats because of the freedom it gave you. Because as you've just described, venting and temperature and humidity control is really important. And by adding the automatic systems, you didn't have to be constantly there worrying about it. And yeah, I think that the description you just gave of some of the problems that can

come up is an illustration of why people might consider spending that money. Because I have to imagine it took a lot of stress out of your life. Yeah, it did. And I think it's really important, too, to say at that time, we were both working off farm full time. And so we weren't and we didn't have any employees at that time. So we weren't I mean, it was us and we weren't there. We just weren't we had traveling for work and traveling for conferences, plus just, you know, day in and day out off farm work. work. And so, you know, now as we've, you know, I've, I've decreased my time at MSU and I spend more time on the farm and we have three employees, you know, now five of our tunnels don't have an, or six of them, cause we have that storage and wash pack one does don't have automated anything on them, but we still have this one that's got the automated sides and the automated shutters. And, and so it's definitely been a, you know, as the business has changed and developed,

And so it's definitely been, you know, as the business has changed and developed, that's something that a way, you know, away they go. At the end of the day, they check the tunnels. In the morning, they check the tunnels. And otherwise, you know, the sides and the shutters are doing their thing. So, Adam, before we wrap up, are there any resources, either ones that you've produced or ones that others have produced, that you recommend for people who want to learn more about mastering high tunnel production? Sure.

I mean, I think obviously, you know, Elliot Coleman's books are out there. I think a lot of us are in the place that we're in because of the things that he did and continues to do. I think that Paul and Allison Wiedeger, who are in Kentucky at O'Natural Farm, they've been doing it for 20 plus years. They do a great job. I think Paul and Sandy Arnold out in Pleasant Valley Farm in Argyle, New York, they're putting presentations and experience out there. And the same thing, they've been doing it for a long, long time. And so I think that those are some great resources. And then Louis Jett, who used to be at University of Missouri, who's now at West Virginia University,

he's got a lot of warm season stuff, tomatoes, melons, cucumbers. He's got some strawberry stuff that he's working on. And he's got great publications that look at the economics of it all. So I think, you know, what I think about it is that that's kind of where we started this conversation is I'm really glad to be farming in the Internet age because I think farming 20 years ago, you know, with trying to find the information, especially about small scale diversified farming, you know, is so at our

fingertips now. And there's some great people doing great work and we can really access that information easily as opposed to, you know, 20 years ago, trying to, you know, figure out where and how we can find those things. Well, I think it's clear you're one of the people doing great work, Adam. And I just, I want to thank you again for, for, for giving us so much of your time today. Well, thank you very much. And, you know, I've been enjoying the ruminant lately since I found out about it also. And so thank you for bringing on, you know, and bringing kind of consolidating lots of information from lots of great farmers and people out there doing different things.

And I really appreciate you asking me to be a part of it. All right. That's all, folks. Hey, Adam Montry, that was terrific. I really enjoyed re-listening to that a couple months later. So thanks again, and I hope you all liked it. And I'm going to just shut up and let you listen to the outro, and I will talk to you next week. Ciao. of thieves live life like it was meant to be. Aw, don't fret, honey.

I've got a plan to make our final escape. All we'll need is each other, $100, and maybe a roll of duct tape. And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches. We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll own up into this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry

We could be happy with life in the country with salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands i've been doing a lot of thinking some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.