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WEEKLY UPDATES – EP10 – MAY16 – 21 WEEKLY UPDATES – EP10 – MAY16 – 21
Dear Curtis,
Thank you for awesome vlogs and very helpful information. I am a small scale part time farmer from Port Elizabeth South Africa. I farm around 6000 square meters of floating raft and nft hydroponic iceberg lettuce, Living Lettuce with the roots on for a retailer in the Eastern Cape.
I have always been interested in agriculture and attended an agricultural school growing up but it wasn’t until a business trip to Canada where I visited a deep floating hydroponic raft operation producing 20, 000,000 heads of loose leave lettuce a year….that was the catalyst for me getting started.
There was not a lot of information available on deep raft hydroponics at the time and the Canadian consultants (understandingly) was not keen to help. It was also very expensive for me to afford their fees and systems seeing I am paying in South African Rands. After endless hours of google and YouTube and with a second hand greenhouse we started. Four years later and some early school fees paid we are producing 800 heads of living lettuce a week. The total system holds around 9000 plants from nursery to NFT, where we finish off the lettuce heads. The reason we go from deep floating raft to NFT is that the rafts can’t carry the weight of the lettuce after 30 days. So they spend 7 days on ntf gutters.
That being said I have 2.8ha of land left and we are now going to start baby lettuce /salad mix production after we watched your channel over the last year. There is a huge demand for baby lettuce in our area and we are going to attempt to fill the gap. I was always apprehensive to start as the trials we did the labor was going to kill us. Now my greens harvester is on its way to SA and my Jang, Earthway seeders and Tilher is on its way from Johnny’s. I have leveled around 8000 meters of land and we are bringing in 209 cubes of topsoil and compost to start the open field production.
We( my sons and i) hope to see you in South Africa one day.
PS. I bought JM’s book before I discovered your channel.
Regards
Wickus