As the interview takes place autumn has only just begun and it is a busy time on Meyers Farms, a horticultural business in Ontario, in the south-east of Canada. “Cultivation of potted chrysanthemums is always an enormous workload at this time of the year,” explains Aron Hoff (age) when he can find a minute. “It’s production on a very large scale, alongside other plant species we grow as well. In addition, we are working on the creation of a new site: we’re adding another 4.5 hectares.” And, indeed, the new site will be equipped with an ErfGoedFloor, but more on that later.
Aron is the third generation in the company. His grandparents emigrated from the Nether-lands 65 years ago, starting by growing fruits such as peaches, plums and pears. Over the past few decades, Meyers has also gained a lot of expertise in the business of growing a wide variety of potted plants, for both indoors and outside.
Six years ago, Aron came across ErfGoed at a trade fair in the US. He was on the lookout for a new cultivation floor and was originally considering a concrete floor. But the ErfGoedFloor’s ebb-and--flow technology appealed to him and a visit to Dutch growers who were using the same sort of floor convinced Meyers Farms to go for ErfGoed. “I took a good look at the working method used for growing crops on an ErfGoedFloor to see whether that was efficient and could be adapted to our methods.” That appeared to be the case and Aron has been a satisfied customer for many years.
Rooted in tradition, growing with innovation,’ is the company’s slogan. “We always weigh up the options with a view to improving our methods. Labour is particularly difficult to get in our field, so I want to keep doing things smarter and more efficiently. In our new glass houses, for instance, there’ll be an automated system for packaging and shipping the plants. I see the same sort of drive in the people at ErfGoed, too.
Like me, they get excited when they discover new ways to do things even smarter. They’re always thinking along the same lines, even about other systems we work with and how we can best incorporate them into how we work with the cultivation floor. ErfGoed doesn’t just sell you a floor; they dedicate themselves to devising a working method and configuring production in a way that fits in with what we do. Together we look at the bigger picture, and that drive helps us to keep coming up with innovations in technical applications and operations.”
When Aron looks to the future, his commitment to trying to make the cultivation process sim-pler remains the same. “We want to keep quality standards at a consistent level, so that the plants grow at the same rate from corner to corner throughout the whole glass house. That way we will have crops of consistent quality, while we keep making our working methods more simple. The ErfGoedFloor is the perfect platform from which to do that. More to the point: it makes the life of individual horticulturists simpler, while the quality and growth remain consistent.”