What is Greenhouse Management?

Commercial greenhouses are a national industry which employs hundreds of thousands of people and supplies our country with millions of food items, plants, and flowers every year. When it’s your responsibility to care for a variety of plants and flowers, you’re probably always looking for ways to do it more efficiently — how to manage greenhouses to get the very most for the very least investment. When you employ a greenhouse management system, you can control the quality of your plants, the quality of your facility, and the quality of your labor force to generate quality profits. Let’s explore what greenhouse management is and how to get the most out of your commercial greenhouse operation.

What is Greenhouse Management?

An effective greenhouse management system seeks to use all the tools you have at your disposal to create the best quality products while limiting overhead costs. This could include using your labor resources effectively, finding the most efficient organization of plants in your greenhouse, or the rotation of automated watering and feeding systems.

The better greenhouse management practices you employ, the better your profit margins — it’s that simple. If you’re looking for how to make your commercial greenhouse more efficient, boost your greenhouse management system with these tips.

Efficient Greenhouse Management Tips

Efficiency in your greenhouse management system is all about finding ways to increase production while decreasing the costs of labor and other resources like land, energy, and water. The best ways to do this are by manipulating factors in your control: managing the labor force you employ, designing a greenhouse for optimal efficiency, and using greenhouse management technologies to make your work easier and more productive.

Automate to Redirect Labor

Employ automation to counter labor shortages and reduce costs associated with hiring, training, and managing people to work in your greenhouse. Automation can include watering, potting, and packing. Use more skilled laborers for technical tasks like caring for challenging plants or packaging sensitive orders. 

Automation eliminates inefficient labor and helps your workers prioritize more important tasks. This keeps them from using time on menial tasks and allows them to do more interesting work, which will benefit your production levels and bottom line.

Design Your Greenhouse or Grow Room Facility Efficiently

You can control the layout of your greenhouse to maximize efficiency with a strategic design. Depending on the way your business needs to function, this could include making sure there are direct paths in high-traffic areas, organizing your greenhouse so that tools, supplies, and plants come in one way and packaged, finished products go out the other, or centralizing production tasks, while other peripheral functions happen in outer areas. Maximizing production with efficient greenhouse design is one of the best functions of your greenhouse management system.

Embrace Greenhouse Management Technologies

Technological advancements can aid your greenhouse management strategy by improving the quality of your plants and the overall efficiency of your greenhouse. Technology can help streamline your business by reducing labor needs and costs and allowing you more control, organization, and monitoring of your greenhouse facilities.

Modular Conveyor Belts

Modular conveyor belts are one of the best greenhouse management technologies and a simple way to reduce labor and time costs of your commercial greenhouse. Whether they’re used to simplify and speed up moving plants in and out of production facilities or used to help transport heavy, cumbersome, or numerous equipment, modular conveyor belts can help reduce strain on your employees and the time needed to do simple tasks. If your employees are freed from having to travel back and forth repeatedly to move plants and supplies, they can move on to other important tasks and their time is used more effectively.

Inventory Management Software

Plenty of software options exist which can help to manage your greenhouse layout and organization, so you know what plants are where and in which stage of growth and production they’re in at all times. This may be especially useful for your commercial greenhouse during high production times when it’s crucial to have a clear birds-eye view of production so important details don’t get overlooked. Many of these software systems for greenhouse management can also be used for collecting data for time and materials tracking or even used as a point of sale.

Environmental Monitoring Equipment

Inefficient climate control is one of the biggest cost drains on any commercial greenhouse. The energy used to keep the environment appropriately warm and humid for your plants is wasted if your greenhouse isn’t appropriately sealed to retain this energy. Also, if you can’t monitor the temperature and humidity levels of your various greenhouse climates, you risk using excess energy. Environmental monitoring equipment can track these levels to prevent wasted energy costs and can be set to either alert you when the environment is off, or automatically adjust levels to keep plants in the ideal ranges for optimal growth.

There are so many more greenhouse technologies that can help you increase your efficiency, production, and ultimately your profits. Finding and implementing the right technologies and strategies into your greenhouse is a major part of any quality greenhouse management system.

The goal of a greenhouse management system is to reduce non-value added labor while increasing profitability. Rapid-Veyor’s portable modular conveyor system can help with both. If you’re curious about what implementing this technology could mean for your commercial greenhouse, give our team a call or reach out to us online.