Commercial Hydroponic Production: Essential Information for Equipment Purchases
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EmailMarch 1, 2024
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Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) can be a profitable and fulfilling business pursuit for beginning farmers looking to diversify their income streams. Early success and minimal stress can be achieved through careful planning of initial capital expenditures. In this session, learn about the fundamentals of CEA equipment and how to reach profitability faster.
The 2024 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 19-March 1, 2024. This two-week program encompasses many aspects of the agricultural industry and offers a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. While there is no cost to participate, attendees must register to receive the necessary zoom links. Registrants can attend as many sessions as they would like and are also able to jump around between tracks. RUP and CCA credits will be offered for several of the sessions. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/
Video Transcript
This presentation is a reimagining of a lot of the work that I do at the consumer level, right? So what I mean by that is we get a lot of questions at MSU Extension that come to my office that have to relate to hydroponics as it relates to the home grower people who are ranching. But my original academic background is in commercial hydroponic production. So I did my master's degree thesis. I wrote a little bit of software for temperature and yield prediction models. This is very much my ball and I really, I really love to talk about it. This picture is the last class I ever taught at University, at Iowa State University. This is our hydroponics lab, right? And you can tell right off the bat, there's some really cool stuff going on here. And I had the students hold up, you know, some of the tools and equipment that they were, you know, this is admittedly a goofy little shot. But things that we had used throughout the course like measuring utensils and beakers, things that are common sites in commercial hydroponic production facilities. But I also like this picture because it's got examples of what professional LED light fixtures look like, right? Examples of, there's a beta bucket system in the back here, a temperature controller and sensor module right here, NFT channels. So it really does capture all of the different kind of variety of equipment. This is what a home hydroponic set looks like. This is a flood table that I constructed in my basement in Iowa. It looks really sketchy admittedly, when you look at like the cardboard and duct tape on the windows. But unfortunately, the high efficiency, high quality LED lights that you'll see for commercial purposes and for what you would call prosumer purposes, they're all that red and they're all red and blue diodes, which makes it look like you're growing an illicit plant in your basement. This is what a DI Y set up looks like. And I want to point out some things here that will contrast against right, cheaper, right? Led light fixtures. This light bulb here, I bought it as a teaching example of what not to buy, right? Very dangerous wiring that I've rigged together here, right? Look at this extension cord hanging from, from a two by four frame. I would never recommend having a commercial production system that looks anywhere near like this. So I included this picture as a way to call myself out for what your beginning hydroponic business should really should not look like. Okay, Just a reminder, MSU extension and Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer. You can review our policies and our stances as it relates to Title Nine and other civil rights related legislature. On our website, a little bit about me before we launch into the meat and potatoes of this. I've been doing horticulture since 2012, about 12 years now. I don't look like I've been doing anything for 12 years. I look like I just got let out of like daycare. I've got that eternally boyish cherub look. But this is almost seven years ago, working on undergrad research as an intern. This is about five or six years ago, teaching at University at Iowa State. Right. Suffice to say, I've been doing this for a long time and throughout my experiences as a teacher, I like to break things down into my classes, right? The terminology, the language that we use to talk about complex topics, the concepts that underpin the recommendations, right? How to evaluate resources for information within the topic, right? What are considered industry standards for references such as the Ball Red Book Volume 1.2 That's a hydroponic resource that everybody should have on their shelf. And then also just applied skills. We're not going to talk about DIY systems, that's from another presentation. But we will talk about hands on skills, right? Terminology, which is really just language and communication of scientific concepts. Where to go to learn those new things and then how to roll those things together into a useful skill. For our purposes, that useful skill is going to be evaluating commercial grade hydroponic equipment, what it looks like, what it doesn't look like. This is a custom made by yours truly hydroponic research system. Shall we say, primitive, but for this particular experiment, it did exactly what we needed it to do, right? What you don't see in this set up is anything going into each individual research module. So this is a plant right here. It's suspended over two cylinders of fixed volume and there's some nutrient solution in there. You don't see how the nutrient solution gets in there. If we had something like a feed line that was automatically refilling all of these things, we would also have another good visual representation of what makes up hydroponic system, right? So components for aeration, components for greenhouse environmental controls, the bench system. A lot of people don't think about the bench system when they're making their business plan. Each of these benches is, you know, thousands of dollars. Because they have to, they have to persist in this very caustic environment. And they need to last for 20 to 30 years. Okay? So hopefully we're going to, at the end of this course, we'll be able to look at product information and come up with a plan if we are, or helping somebody plan a greenhouse, greenhouse business. I do a longer overview of the history of hydroponics, but if you're attending this class today, I'm going to assume that you know, at least a little bit, you are at least enthusiastic and interested. This is a timeline and some key dates here. Some key years that are associated with experiments that produced fundamental knowledge that underpin hydroponics, right? It was all these discoveries that eventually led to them hydroponic technology being used, right? So finding out that plants don't create mass by absorbing the soil, right? And understanding that it's the interplay of oxygen CO, two, sunlight and water that inevitably drives photosynthesis. The fact that in 18, 60, plants were determined to be able to grow without soil, right? And then, you know, almost 60, 70 years later finally, the first documented kind of widespread use, or the first documented commercially successful use of soils culture, which is just another word for hydroponics. So really when you think about it, if we're looking at the overall timescale, we've only been doing hydroponics for 100 years, which sounds like a lot, but compared to other forms of agriculture, which we've been doing for thousands of years, it's a really, really relatively young disciplines or young science. The unfortunate part and the unfortunate implication there is that the quality of the information is very low that we have access to. Right. Okay. Hydroponic systems and small hydroponic businesses can be really attractive to new farmers because you have a ability to grow year round bypass, otherwise poor soil conditions and poor water conditions if you have minimal well water, right, or marginal well water. But really we're looking at really high yields per square foot, much higher quality produce, and faster crop time. These are the things that drive revenue. These are the things that, these are things that drive profit. Especially this middle one, the high quality produce. You can have a really fantastic, well managed hydroponic, say, lettuce facility that we have going here. If a market doesn't exist to support the price of hydroponic lettuce, it's always going to be higher than field lettuce. There's no way around it if there isn't a consumer market or a wholesale market that can support that increased prices. There's no coefficient of efficiency that you're going to be able to achieve to earn a profit, right? Really, we want to take advantage of the inherent strength of hydroponic growing as it relates to that higher quality produce. All right, Let's talk about our first purchase. And that has to do with the nutrient management system, right? We're going to start backwards and we're going to pretend that like we already have a crop planted and we need to get fertilizer to the plant, right? Regardless of whatever system it's in. The biggest question that we ask on a day to day basis is how much fertilizer needs to be added to the system? What d, what type and how do I know that I've added enough? It's an essential purchase, but it doesn't seem like it because it's a smaller thing but getting the sensor, buying the sensor so that you can make these measurements by hand. And even if you have a complex nutrient management system, you need to validate that it's working by testing it and calibrating it. I'm going to grab my sensor since I put the picture up, but I want to get my sensor here and show you what that looks like. Okay, I've got my box. This is a type of sensor, you're going to see very often, it's the probe type, right? So this is the probe right here, okay? And this is the computer that's attached to it. Getting the sensors is the first thing that you should do even before you've written a business plan. If you aren't comfortable learning how to use one of these things, you need to hire somebody who is right. You can't really guess at this. The concentrate tration of the hydroponic nutrient solution that you're going to use, a commercial grade product, is going to be so high that as you're mixing this product with water. If you don't have, if you don't have one of these sensors or an even more expensive automatic injection system, it's going to be impossible to tell if you've added enough, if you mixed it properly, if there's an issue with the beginning water quality, right? So make sure that, make sure that you're purchasing these things ahead of time. The instructions that are on the hydroponic type, water soluble liquid fertilizer, right? They include instructions for how to mix these things by hand, right? But again, you're guessing unless you have a really, really accurate volumetric dispenser that is going to dispense exactly this much into exactly this many gallons, you still need the sensor. Dissolved oxygen is also a form of a sensor that's important to include. There are certain systems that don't require a dissolved oxygen sensor to be purchased, which is fortunate because they can cost up to about three to $600 I'm going to pop some numbers in the chat as we're talking just so we can wrap our heads around some of these expenses. The meter I showed you is about $400 meter and everything that I'm showing you is commercial grade, which means that we have a five year life expectancy on it, right? That's average, meaning that we're reasonably expected to replace this after five years. If there's something that I list in the equipment considerations that is going to last longer than five years. The bench systems for example, I'll mention it as well. Okay, back to this dissolved oxygen issue. Dissolved oxygen is a measurement of how much gaseous oxygen has mixed into the water. For a lot of raft and floating based systems, it's really important that we're keeping an eye on this. Because as that number goes down, dissolved oxygen and water goes down, the roots begin to struggle a little bit, right? So this is an exceedingly expensive sensor. So if you are using a system that doesn't require it because there's so much agitation of the water, then avoid purchasing this and put it towards a different sensor because this is a $800 sensor. Can you find them for cheaper? Sure. And they'll last maybe a year. A year or two. Or they'll just stop working but they'll still turn on. Right. You want to purchase higher quality stuff? Okay. Your Ph is also really important u element of the water quality to track. The great thing about EC meters, these nutrient concentration meters, is that once you get above a certain grade and you're into the hydroponic, commercial hydroponic quality range, they almost always have a included ph sensor in them. They'll be two bulbs and two probes at the tip, right? It's really important to check the ph of the starting water and the final concentration as it's being delivered out to the plants. It has a large effect on nutrient availability. So an example of this would be, if I am managing a nutrient delivery system, right, And I'm getting the concentration of the nutrients correct as they're added to the water. But I haven't changed the H and the ph is very, very high. A consequence of that is that even though the water contains all of the elements that make up the fertilizer, the plant is unable to take them up because of the elevated ph, right? By elevated, I mean anything over 6.5 that's even that is pushing it, right? 6.2 is a good compromise. Adjusting ph and adding in the products that either raise or lower the ph of the water, right? They use the exact same equipment for metering as the nutrients do, the fertilizer does, right? And this is what it looks like. This is all the basic components of your nutrient and metering, which is how much or how less and distribution system. It starts with the inline filtration and pressure valves and pressure regulator to make sure that as the water goes in it's both clear, right? And it is going in at a fixed known pressure that the rest of the system can handle. So we're not over pressurizing fittings, mixing bowls, or injectors which are the next components. Injectors, right, take up nutrients from stock tanks. They're set to meter it into a certain amount, goes in, There's some turbulence here to have it mixed in, and then it goes through the same process Again, my guess is that for this particular illustration, they have a mixing bowl here. And they have a mixing bowl here because whatever it is that they're mixing in on this first stage does not dissolve as readily as the other three combined, which is why they have two mixing bowls. Everything has been injected. There is a series of valves, sensors, and engages, right? So the sensors are checking that after everything has been injected that the EC and the Ph is correct. On very advanced systems, this computer, this small sensor here, will actually feed back into an actuator that adjusts the, the problem after everything has been mixed in this way. It's only going to tell you the total fertilizer concentration. It's not going to tell you which of these things is out of calibration. Again, that's why you really need the manager's sensor. The most expensive sensor you own is the one that you're going to use to calibrate the rest of these things on a weekly basis and to check that everything is running at the right rate, okay? Pressure gauges tell us that everything is functioning normally. If one of these components gives out, right, it can create excess pressure in the system because now everything has to work a little bit harder. Good system will use bypass valves, so if there's too much pressure here, it can go around it and not be, and not be affected by the system. As we're looking at this array here. I've actually priced this out before. This entire system right here, component for component, this many valves and this many injectors. A sensor engaged system. This is about $5,000 right? So let's add that to our bill here. Our running total dollars for nutrient metering and delivery system. Okay? Indicators of quality. We're looking at tolerances for these injectors. I want to see information from the manufacturer that says, over the course of five years, how accurate did these things stay? We're looking for good warranty information for the commercial products needs to be at least two to three years. What we're looking for compatibility with off the shelf hardware. So whatever company that you decide to work with, you're going to want to make sure that you can either one call somebody that's close by that can maintain and repair it. Or that the parts that are needed to service, maintain, and repair it are available off the shelf from a big box store, right? So the little fittings right here, all the little PVC connectors and all the valves, right? So compatibility is something you want to pay attention to. Okay, let's talk about another aspect of the growing environment, which is the climate. The temperature should be at the forefront of everybody's mind in their equipment budget because it makes up one of the biggest capital expenses when you're writing the business plan. These systems can be so expensive that they will affect your bottom line and they'll affect your profitability. The procurement process, finding where you're going to buy this from and actually getting it installed and everything, that is going to be the first place where you will make or lose money, right on a new hydroponic business. Why is the temperature issue so important beyond just the basic survival of the plants in cold climates? What we know about edible hydroponic crops because of the research that's being done at Michigan State University and Iowa State University is that as we can get closer to a hydroponic crops, optimum temperature, we're going to see significant increases in both yield and a significant decrease in time to market size, right? The time that our product needs to be before it is being harvested, prepared for packing, and then sent out. Right? It's a real driver of profitability. It's also a driver of quality in non edible plants, for hydroponic productions. Managing the day in the night, temperature is so important for canopy height control crops that grow dense canopies. An edible crop example would be something like tomato or cucumber. I've seen eggplant before, I don't know how profitable that is. But controlling the height by controlling the temperature is an important technique that you can only have the capacity for when you build out the facility. Because once you are in a scenario where you need to do temper regulated hype control and you don't have an adequate heating system, ventilation or cooling system, you can't even do this. You just have to accept whatever the weather hands you, right? Humidity and air flow also very important more to do with pest control because without adequate control of humidity and air flow, you create environmental conditions that favor most greenhouse pests. Or if you're in a completely enclosed facility, fungal and bacterial pests will tend to thrive. It's also a plant productivity issue when you have insufficient air flow and very high humidity. The stomata that make up all the plant tissues. Stomata are like plant sweat pores, right? If the plants can't sweat like us, they overheat. And when they overheat and they don't like to do photosynthesis, right? They can't exchange the gases out and they just stop being productive. If it's too humid, the stomata, the sweat poor is shut down. If there's not enough air flow, the sweat is shut down. Right. In terms of sensors, right? Humidity sensors are not terribly expensive. But you can't, you can't compromise and get one of these really cheap little mechanical wax dial ones where there's no battery, there's nothing. It's just something that you throw in atrium or the garage you need to get something at. The bare minimum is digital and preferably has a probe with a very, very long lead that can be placed over the canopy or even within the canopy to measure those changes. Right, where it's measuring and where it's reporting. The best sensors are wireless, right? And I'm going to throw into the chat, we're looking at a $300 communitite sensor and logger. $300 gets you the accuracy that you need and it gets you the durability so that you're not repurchasing this over. And we don't want to purchase these more than one time in five years. Right? That's expensive. There we go. Okay. Let's look at these components at play, and we'll come up with $1 amount. This is my typical greenhouse system. We'll start with this component here, which is the heat source in this example, it's a boiler. In other examples, it might be an entire contained unit that doesn't have these other distribution components. Let's see, unit heaters. Modine heaters are basically standalone furnaces and fans that are fixed above the canopies. The only thing that they have going in and out of them would be like a be like a fuel supply line if it uses like propane or natural gas or the electrical wiring. If it's an electric unit heater. Right? But that entire fixture, that modine unit heater, still has all of these components, Which is the component which heats up the air or the medium, right? In this case it's water. The distribution system, which in this case is pipes in a modine unit heater. It's basically the radiator, the heat exchanger, then the actual heating element itself, and the form of heating distribution. Here we have it as little brackets with radiator fins that the heated solution passes through so that you can distribute, it, can exchange that heat from liquid to the air. The closer that we can get to the plants, the better in these heating systems, because hydroponic growing is already so resource intensive, take as many opportunities during build out and during planning to price in your production efficiency. Doing things like having on bench heating or right underneath the bench heating is really efficient because the heat is where the plants are as opposed to baseboard and top heat. Right? We're heating the air that's already moving up with convection currents. Unless you have a really, really big greenhouse with a lot of volume and air mass, doing something like this is going to be maybe simpler on the installation, but more expensive to operate. Okay, the boiler itself. For a greenhouse, the size varies wildly. Building on the assumptions that we talked about in the chat. We're sizing a facility for a beginning grower, which is going to be an eighth of an acre for something that size. We're looking at approximately $10,000 I'd say easily on this system that less than conservative, but for now we'll pop it at the chat. Heating equipment. Fuel sources for heating greenhouses is a hotly debated topic. The best system that you can use for heating is so variable that it's really not a good idea to try and figure this out on your own. If you can try to talk to the company that's producing your greenhouse, to talk to the maintenance company, If you have an enclosed structure and find out what their recommendations are for BTUs per hour. I wonder if I can write that down on the chat right? Things to look for. Chat BTU per hour output. Now, how do you know what your output requirement is? We're going to go out of this and I'm going to show you how to find that. So one of the pieces of software that I use fairly often for doing greenhouse and hydroponics consulting is Virtual Grower 3.0 right? This is a modeling software that helps you predict what your heating requirements and therefore what your equipment requirements are going to be for a given greenhouse. The way that this works, see if I can get to the gallery here. The way that this works is you download the software, right? Let's take a look here. They've got a video tutorial. They have step by step process for doing this. I'm trying to see if I can find a video here. The step by step process and what you do is you go step by step. I really wish they had a picture. Nope, just text. Okay. All right. So there's a step by step process. It prompts you for details about your greenhouse, what it's made of, the size and your geography, where you're at. Right. Whether the greenhouse is new or old, so that they can adjust their recommendations. And at the end of all of this, it spits out a fantastic spreadsheet that gives you all the requirements. And you can hand that over to your contractor. Or if you're doing this purchasing yourself, you can keep it with you so that you can make sure the heating equipment that you're purchasing matches up with the capacity that you need. Because even even if you think that you are purchasing something that will meet the requirement, you also need to consider that if you are running this equipment year round, that you're very likely going to be running it at maximum capacity during the coldest parts of the year. You need to plan for those coldest months possible and make sure that you're not exceeding the duty cycle of the heating equipment because it can technically run nonstop for the life of its warranty without you having to worry. But the equipment was much more likely to last longer and the maintenance costs are going to be lower if you use it at an appropriate duty cycle. An example of that would be, let's get back to the presentation here taking a. Greenhouse, which requires 500,000 B to use per hour, right? And running it at 250,000 that's a way that I would ensure that my equipment is lasting long, that I'm not going to have surprise breakdowns. It's not worth it to me to save a little bit of money by squeezing every last ounce of performance out of my heating system, because even a single 8 hours of breakage can destroy the entire crop. It's much more important that you have a system that is not going to break. Or if it does break, it's a component that needs to be replaced and not the entire unit. Right, I see. The cooling system works in the same way. The most basic type of cooling system that you'll encounter for greenhouses or automated venting systems. So that the polycarbonate and portions of the frame open up. That way, hot air can rise. The overall temperature of the greenhouse can go down. It also has implications for humidity. You can see other forms of passive cooling. We've got shade net right here, which is really important. You'll notice that this particular type of shade net is installed on the outside of the greenhouse because the shade net material is black. If you take a black fabric and you put it inside of an enclosed thermal space, it will just absorb heat and heat in here. You still will get a shading effect, but the heat in the mass of the air is going to be hotter. The radiative heat, right? The energy that strikes the leaf and heats the leaf up won't be there. But all of the energy that strikes this material and heats up this black material that transfers to the air. Right, If you have it in here. Here's the exception for interior mounted cooling systems. For these shade systems, right? If they have two sides, right? So take a look at my video. The top side is the silver reflective type, right? And the bottom is white. Black, doesn't matter. Then that thermal energy is being reflected back out and we're getting the shading effect. Okay. So two basic systems for my tiny little hydroponic greenhouse of this size. We're looking at about 3,000 $4,000 for a shade system. That's it, That's all we're talking about. Right? And that's dead of the summer. And also our vents. Right. You can see in this picture there's also a third portion of the cooling system. These look like events, but these are actually part of a swamp cooling system. This is an evaporative cooling system. The cheaper of what we would call the active cooling systems, but still exceedingly expensive. About as expensive as an automated shade retracting system. I'd say maybe even slightly more expensive because of the installation. So we'll say that for our system that we're pricing out a cooling system. We're looking at about a $6,000 system, right? Horizontal air flow, although it is slightly related to temperature management, has more to do with humidity, right? I had said earlier, one of the things that detracts from plant productivity is plant tissues ability to sweat and exchange gases and cool itself off when there isn't active air movement going over plant tissue, especially if that plant tissue is humid and wet. It doesn't dry down enough to allow for the sweating to take place. Think of it this way. Imagine you've taken like a really hot shower and you walk outside and it's really muggy. That sweat is not going to evaporate and you are going to stay warmer, right? Because remember the act of water going from liquid to gaseous state. It has to absorb a little bit heat. That has to absorb a little thermal energy from your skin. Plants are no different as that. Water on the surface of the plant and in its pores heats up. It has to absorb heat from the plant to turn into gas and then move into the air. Okay, So these are really important. These fans run 2047, right? They almost when the computer system is kicking on and it's telling the greenhouse to cool itself down, these things will turn on. They're not just running all the time. They're cycling on and off all the time, which means that you need to purchase hardware that is engineered to do this. Ceiling fans are designed to run kind of like nonstop, but if you turn them on and off and on and off and on and off, they'll break down prematurely, right? These fans are designed to not only run all the time but to also handle the minor mechanical stress are being turned on and off all the time, right? So make sure you're purchasing quality ones. It's strange, but this is actually a commercial grade quality fan. It looks like an old standing fan was ripped off of its stand for like the 1990s and the 1980s. But this actually is what they look like, right? Hopefully, as we're, one of the things that you're getting out of the value of this conversation is actually seeing legitimate, prescreened examples of what the commercial hardware looks like. I forgot to give you a price example. This greenhouse, I can see the end here. I'm guessing this is about 30, 40 feet. The amount of fans that you would need for this area. The associated wiring is probably another $1,000 Seems like a lot, but again, these are really high quality fans. Put the associated item. Let's get to everybody's favorite topic. I saved this for last because it needs much more time to discuss because there's just bad, low quality information out there regarding lights. There's just so much money floating around in this industry that if you don't know what you're looking at and you don't know what it is that you're supposed to be buying. Somebody is getting their Christmas bonus off of what you don't know. Because everything that you don't know is going to be used against you during the budgeting and the procurement process for hydroponic facilities. Light intensity for edible crops. Very similar interaction when we think about heat, which is that plants have an optimum. And as we increase the light intensity, how much lighting we're adding towards that optimum, we're getting more yield. And for a lot of edible crops, that's really important because we're selling on a fresh mass basis, or we're selling on a minimum plant size basis. Right? These numbers right here correspond to this unit. This is a really complicated unit, but it's the most important thing that we can talk about today. It stands for, this looks like a U, but this is Latin or Greek for mu. It's micro, micro, micro moles. Moles is a unit amount per meter, square per second. Okay? A mole is a fixed number. It's six times ten to the 23. So that means six with 23 zeros behind it. A micro mole is 1 million, right? Of this number. What this entire number means, micromoles per meter squared per second. We can abbreviate that to micro moles. That's just a standardized unit of intensity, 100 micromoles per meter squared per second. 100 micromoles means we're getting 100 units of light for this plant. 600 means we're getting 600. It's a linear scale, which means this is six times the amount, right? We aren't going to see six times the amount of growth. What that means is there is a cap on the return on investment. For the lights, this is the dangerous territory. Essentially business operators and planners, not enough lights. It's buying too much. If I get a doubling in yield as I go 100-400 micromoles, but I only get a 10% to 15% increase going 400-600 That means that my ROI caps somewhere between right here. Because for every dollar that I'm spending on increased light intensity, I want to be getting the most increase in yield. And if I'm spending over that, I'm not getting anything for my money, right? I'm bringing a gun to a knife fight at this point, All right? The intensity issue for our lighting equipment is really important. The spectral quality of the light is also really important. If you see a horticulture lighting product that has one of these graphs as part of the manufacturing information, that's usually a good sign. That means the people who are marketing it have at least a little bit of data to back up their price point. What this graph tells us is that all the light that plants receive, they're absorbing this particular color and this particular color. I'm saying colors because when we see light, we see this white band, right? But really, we know from the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, and from playing with light prisms, that white light is actually made up of all these different colors. But we can't see the components of those. Our eyes, our eyes can't do that very well. By having this spectral quality rating attached to the light, we can tell, okay, well, this light has a lot of red, but it doesn't have a lot of blue. And we know that plants like a mixture of both. What I'm looking for is a spectral quality graph that matches this overall quality, right? Ignore this. Peaks for energy output in my blue and my red wavelength, right? Even though I'm seeing this, I'm getting a lot of this, right? If we take a look at what natural day length looks like, it looks like we've got yep, plenty of energy in those bandwidths. Incandescent bulbs, we're losing out on blue, white, blue light, right? Conversely with Hologen, we're losing conversely with the cool white LED's. We're missing out on the red. Okay, a cool white LED would be something that you use in like an office space, right? Whereas a warm white LED, even though it has a little bit more, this is still not enough. So stray away from these. In fact, we'll talk at length length being 5 minutes, about what an appropriate graph is going to look like, the cost, and then also just what the fixture looks like. Light intensity is really important, but the distribution of the fixture is also really important. Light fixtures have a distribution pattern that can be generalized by this figure that I made right here. It's a bull's eye pattern where below the fixture, below directly to the fixture, we have a lot of high light intensity. Then as we move out towards the edges and we break 90 degree angle with the fixture, it gets very low. Well designed light fixtures are almost always going to have the same fixture pattern, which is a rectangle because it allows this effect to be diminished so that you're not getting such intense hot spots. And that the intensity is more evenly shared throughout the bull's eye. Right? Things that don't work really well just in terms of the fixtures with distribution but just practicality. Lights which are dim these lights right here, this is a two watt LED string light. My recommendation for energy inputs per square foot is 3.8 watts per square foot, which is not sufficient here. 38 38 watts per square foot. And if I got two by two coverage off of this three watt light, that's less than one watt per square foot. So this is too dim, right? This is not intense enough. This is a heating lamp that I used to raise young chickens, and even though it's very bright, it uses a lot of wattage. It's not dim. Most of the energy is converted to heat. And not only is it not helpful photosynthetically, it's very dangerous because it could scorch plants and it can, you can start a fire. And then lastly, LED lighting products, which are very difficult to use because of the layout of their LED's. This product, this is a 50 watt bulb. This is a strong, really powerful light, but it uses so few diodes and uses really powerful diodes that we end up back in this situation here, where we're getting lots and lots of growth in one little hot spot right here, and then very diminished growth out to the side. We want to stray away from these when we look at what's available commercially, even if they don't look as terrible as this, right? We still really don't want to rely on the older types of lighting fixtures. The HPS or the fluorescent ones. This is, this is like a metal halide, it works like an incandescent bulb. These fluorescent lights, we used to use them for a long time for young plant propagation because you can mount them so closely. Here's the thing. High efficiency rectangular LED fixtures are the industry standard if we boil these things down to which is going to be cost wise at its initial purchase and which is going to be most effective for operation. It used to be that this was a three way race LED's have pulled ahead so far that I don't even recommend these anymore. The only time I recommend that people use these is if they already have them and they're free. This is what our commercial grade fixture looks like. This is a residential, this is a consumer grade. It's got all these little features that you're paying more for but you're never going to use. This is what the fixture looks like. These are the LED dialed mounting brackets. You can't see them because they're on the other side. Because I wanted to show you this piece right here. Led light fixtures don't have ballasts. These control units that are called, oh, oh man, I forget, I'm going to forget the name. But they do the same function of a ballast. They control the amount of electricity that's going into this fixture. A lot of them also have dimming functions and they have ways to communicate. And daisy chain together. They link together, one of these, right? You'll get about two by two, 4 square feet of coverage. For 4 square feet of coverage, you need about 150 watts. Which means that the lowest viable alternative that you can purchase for this is going to be about $200 for 4 square feet. So it's $50 per square feet. Right? That's expensive. That's really expensive. But again, this is the product that we're going to be running year round. It doesn't matter if it is winter or summer. We may not be using it all day in the summer, but we're going to be extending our growing hours by running at dawn and dusk. They need to last a really long time. The intensity needs to fade slowly enough that we're getting our money out of it before inevitably breaks down. We'll say $50 per square foot because it's such a space dependent cost information to look for as indicators of high quality equipment. Estimates for the coverage. Get this from the manufacturer. Don't get this from the retailer estimations for the coverage, for the square footage mounting heights and then the intensity at those given mounting heights. Right? This manufacturer has also done four square foot of coverage looks like. And they've done the intensity and it's that same bull's eye, same target kind of distribution, right? Lots of intensity, dead center, and less intensity as you go out. But again, this is a professional product, so what we've seen is that there is less variation from the center to the very edge, right? As we increase the mounting height, though that variation changes. You always want to double check because if you know what your mounting height is, you need to make your measurements with the fixture at that mounting height. You cannot get more intensity out of a mounting height by just putting it higher up. That's not how it works, right? It's putting out a fixed amount of energy that the plants can absorb if you put it up so that it shines, so to speak, over a larger area. It's just distributing that intensity over more space, right? You can't get around that one function. Okay. And then lastly, the actual container systems I want to go through with our last minute or so here. All of the commercial systems that you are going to be able to purchase and have professionally installed are going to fall into one of three systems. And that's this deep flow technique system, the NFT Nutrient Film Technique system or a Dutch bucket system. I'll go back briefly to talk about these systems. We don't have enough time to talk about all of them today, but each of these systems in complexity in management requirements and cost. This rate is a fairly large expense up front because this reservoir that this raft and the plants sit in has to be very, very durable. Water weighs a lot, the sides have to keep from buckling in. I'd say a DFT system like this, we're looking at about $12,000 for one employee, one person size greenhouse operation. Right? The nice thing is that cost really is all up front. There's so little maintenance on this system besides occasionally cleaning it that as material prices increase, you won't have to eat those costs later on for maintenance and upkeep. On the flip side, something like a nutrient film technique, which has lots of moving parts and channels and things like that, can be quite costly to repair as small things break and become unusable. This system can be cheaper, but it'll be quite expensive to maintain over the long term. A good NFT system for greenhouse of our size will say probably about $10,000 T about 10,000 Then lastly, our Dutch bucket system here. Now this is deceiving because you're looking at this in your about. You're probably going to ask yourself, okay, how could this possibly be so expensive? I see a bucket. I see a little drain tube system, some concrete blocks, and some wood. What you're not seeing is the nutrient injection system that you are required to use in conjunction with these. If I could zoom in really, really close, what you would see is that each of these actually, on the other side, has nutrient injection little spikes. And those spikes hook up to dripper lines. The dripper lines, the fertilization system that we talked about earlier in this conversation. So we have to have one of those things if we're going to use this system. Whereas with our DFT and our NFT system, the nutrient solution that's being adjusted, it can potentially be all one big reservoir. That's the case with the DFT. And if we have a good pumping and distribution system, we have one system here for all the nutrient solution that we can adjust by hand so we can actually bypass the cost that we were talking about earlier with the nutrient metering system. Not so with the Dutch bucket system. The Dutch bucket systems do not lend themselves well to manual fertilization, right? The irrigation and fertilization process is very often an open loop system. Meaning that as the nutrient solution passes through here and it goes into this discharge pipe, it's either collected and remediated or it's discharged according to their discharge limits for the facility. Okay. So bear that in mind because when you look at the price for the Dutch bucket system, it's going to be exceedingly lower, right, but it's deceiving, right, because you're also going to eat the cost of the injection system, which is like another five to $6,000 Which puts you right back up here. Okay, so that was our very quick overview of some of the essential purchases. Has anybody been keeping track like a running tab of how expensive this thing is so far? Let's take a look, we're at meters and sensors. What is this? 16 $1,500 $1,600 for sensors. Another $10,000 puts us about 11. $12,000 with heating equipment. $16,000 now with our shade and cooling system, let's see, Another $1,000 puts us at about 17. Lighting is going to be significantly variable, so we have to leave that out of this. But if we add in our final number for our actual plant support system, the DFT, the NFT, or the Dutch bucket system, We're looking at a, this is part of a longer lecture. We're looking at about a minimum budget of $25,000 right? This is the bottom line. And this is the number that we can anticipate if we're building this thing from scratch, right? And that means that we are doing a lot of the installation ourselves, except for some key components like the nutrient management system that we are still doing, the calibration and everything ourselves, and we're assuming an operation size of about one or two people, right? This is a mom and pop outfit and we're already at about 25,000 The nice thing is that these systems tend to scale pretty well. They can scale pretty linearly, meaning that as you're spending more money, you're getting more for your buck. The smallest greenhouse size that you really want to get into bed with here is about about an eighth of an acre, anything less. And then you're not producing enough value. You're not producing enough value to get a good capitalization rate, which is how much money are you making versus how much money have you invested into this business, this facility. Right. But $25,000 gets you into the ballpark. For an absolute beginner, I would not get into a hydroponic, even a small one business without that much money. Maybe double to go. Okay, that is all of our time today. Please feel free to e mail me here. Ask extension, I'll put it in. The chat is also a really great resource extension. I'm the only responder in the state that handles hydroponics questions, so it'll just be you and me talking over text. But take a look at some of, if you want to copy and paste the chat, we can just put that number in your mind. Hold that number in your mind as the basic expectation for what the budgeting is for the equipment, right? We haven't even talked about what the building and the actual structure costs. This is all after that fact, right? Okay. Thank you very much.