October 2022 - 33

THIRD-PARTY
CERTIFICATIONS
PRODUCTION
For the past eight years, Westerlay Orchids has been
working with the international organization MPS to further
its sustainability goals. The MPS-ABC program includes both
certification and monitoring tools that help companies reduce
their impact on the environment. This includes auditing and
recording usage of crop protection agents, fertilizers, energy,
water and waste. Westerlay Orchids has earned an A rating
every year.
The company has also
received the MPS-GAP
certificate, which centers
around areas such as
traceability, environment,
crop protection products
and recall procedures.
To monitor its carbon footprint and reduce its environmental
impact, Westerlay Orchids has been working with the firm
Carbon Footprint Ltd. out of the United Kingdom. In August,
Westerlay ramped up its efforts by becoming the first North
American user of the HortiFootprint Calculator, a software tool
developed by MPS and LetsGrow.com that measures the carbon
footprint of horticultural production and helps growers to make
more sustainable choices.
" MPS gets our industry, and they can help us identify
perhaps suppliers or consumers of our goods, so it becomes
the entire chain that you can look at more effectively for carbon
generation, " says Toine Overgaag, owner and president of
Westerlay Orchids. " We want to work with partners, third
parties, who are tough on us and make us better, and there is a
rigor to MPS. "
Overgaag also sees value in the benchmarking system that
MPS uses to compare like businesses within the industry and
in similar geographic areas. For the Westerlay team, it's not all
about the certifications though.
" I want to emphasize that a lot of our efforts are internally
driven, " Overgaag says. " The primary reason is we want to
get better. "
Photos: Westerlay Orchids
free energy in an environment where it's cheaper to do so than in a
high-cost country, and it's more likely to replace a really dirty source
of energy: coal. But long term, we want to just directly reduce our own
carbon footprint.
GPN: Can you talk a bit about your irrigation water and recapturing
system and the impact it has had?
Overgaag: Orchids are empathetic plants and are not grown with
sprinklers, emitters or anything like that; watering is done with
overhead irrigation. You can't get around that, but that makes capturing
runoff very difficult.
What we did, through a company in the Netherlands that designed
the system, is install a floor that we covered with an impermeable
membrane, then a drainage system, and then a permeable cover that
you could walk over. All irrigation water coming through the system
gets trapped, funneled into these drains, then processed through a
series of sand filters and then UV filters, so you're capturing all your
drain water and all the fertilizer that spills out. At the same time, you're
eliminating your pathogens or other matter you don't want, and you're
reusing that water. We've found that we recapture and reuse 75% or so
of our irrigation water.
We also heat the greenhouse not just for temperature but also for
drying the environment. The drain floors eliminated standing water,
reducing the humidity in the atmosphere, and so we ended up reducing
our gas use consumption by about 15%.
GPN: What role does automation play in your operation now and
what do you see in the future?
Overgaag: Some folks will define sustainability beyond just
environmental definitions into economic factors. I want to pay the
people who work for me a really fair wage and even a bit more than
normal wage, but in order to stay viable, we can't have more people
than we absolutely need. Automation tends to be one answer for that.
Right now everything works on the floating table system, but the
next generation is those tables are moved everywhere by robots;
individual plants can be removed from tables by robots, moved
through processing and sorted by robots. We're not there yet.
You don't want to paint yourself into a corner because of
automation. You still must be able to respond to the market and if your
customers are demanding or asking for a specific way of processing
your plants or sorting your plants. There's a limit to the benefits of
automation.
GREENHOUSE PRODUCT NEWS 33
http://www.LetsGrow.com
October 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of October 2022
