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Origin Organic Farms
Clean Environmental Organic Technology
Information Technology Gives B.C. Vegetable Producer an International Advantage
Origin Organic Farms Inc. is the largest organic greenhouse vegetable producer in North America, with 42 acres of greenhouse production in British Columbia and California. Origin started in 1997 with 10 acres, and has since grown to 42 acres of indoor production and annual gross revenue of $20 million. The company's nearly 200 employees produce roughly 15 million pounds of organic peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes annually, and Origin organic products can be bought in major grocery chains throughout North America.
Challenge
While organic food products are generally thought of as being healthy, they are often of questionable quality and exhibit poor shelf life. Open-field organic products face a number of threats, including: contamination as a result of cross-pollination with genetically modified pollens in the air; bacteria and chemical contamination from neighbouring crops.
Origin Organic Farms saw the need to produce a consistent, high-quality organic vegetable crop based on an environmentally beneficial and sustainable process.
Solution
Over the past five years, Origin has developed technology and processes - which it calls its Clean Environmental Organic (CEO) technology - to support the production of high-quality organic vegetables in greenhouses year-round. This has included extensive research and experimentation to identify and develop ideal nutrients, fertilizers, soil media and a growing environment most suitable for consistent organic production.
One part of CEO is Origin's proprietary Smart Microbial Process. It produces an all-natural liquid fertilizer from the organic waste stream of another industry. The process, which takes place in reactor vessels controlled by real-time process control technology, also makes use of 100 per cent of Origin's own waste materials and yields a nutrient-rich organic fertilizer.
Origin's research team developed a process that produces the company's proprietary organic growing soil media, also part of CEO. While most farms produce compost just as a matter of waste management, Origin uses all the leaves, stems and plant prunings from its greenhouse operations to create high-quality compost that is used as the growing soil for its crops. The compost is produced in a composting system where process-control technology provides perfect conditions to accelerate and enhance the composting process.
Origin's technology monitors the external environment -- solar radiation, temperature and humidity -- and its impact on the closed environment system, so it can adjust the same parameters in the greenhouses for optimal plant growth and production.
Origin also developed an effective method of irrigation that delivers the organic fertilizer to the soil in such a way that microbes in the soil have sufficient time to break down the fertilizer so the plants can absorb the nutrients.
Results
As a result of its efforts and innovation, Origin's Clean Environmental Organic technology won the B.C. Export Award for Sustainability and the Canada Agriculture Excellence in Innovation Award. This technology has enabled Origin to establish its organic products as the highest quality products on the market, resulting in great responses from retailers all over North America, including Wholefoods, Wild Oats, Safeway and Publix in both the United States and Canada.
Origin's organic tomatoes exhibit approximately 20 per cent longer shelf life than conventional hydroponic tomatoes, and can be shipped from coast to coast without any spoilage.
Innovative Use of Technology
Origin is the only greenhouse grower in the world that has developed its own fertilizer and soil for organic production. This innovation was required because commercially available fertilizer and growing media are not suitable for Origin's growing environment.
Origin brings together the essence of soil and natural organic nutrients from traditional farming and the innovative, computerized climate and biological control technologies from hydroponics production in a unique and sustainable way. Information technology is critical to Origin's success, and specialized process-control equipment and proprietary control algorithms are at the heart of Origin's organic fertilizer, compost and soil production processes.
These process-control systems all operate in real time and require a continuous stream of input data to set the optimum conditions for the fertilizer and the soil development. Origin also uses a unique phyto-monitoring system with many sensors to capture crop data such as fruit growth, stem flux, leaf temperature and soil humidity. This data is fed wirelessly to Origin computers, where custom-developed algorithms determine if climate and irrigation are being controlled optimally.
A 2007 CIPA Winner!
For its industry-leading creativity in applying information technology to control and enhance processes and bring benefits to its stakeholders, Origin Organic Farms Inc. has been awarded the 2007 CIPA Exceptional Innovation Award in the for-profit sector.
Technology partners
Vision Envirotech International Co. Ltd.
Climate Control Systems Inc.
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