Infrastructure

The Auckland property has three greenhouses of (GH I) 4000 Square Meter, (GH II) 2000 Square and (GH III ) 2600 Square Meter size and an open space of more than 5000 Square for outdoor growing. The two smaller greenhouses are fully heated: GH II with hot air circulation and GH III with hot water circulation. The GH I is used for growing vegetable seedlings for outdoor crops, GH II for native seedling production and GH III for growing summer and hothouse crop seedling.

In general on average we have been producing and supplying about 20-25 million seedlings per annum.

• We have two sources of water supply: a commercial water bore (300 Cubic/day drawing rights) and a fully lined water reservoir of 1000 Cubic Meter capacity.
• We use different irrigation systems: hand showers, ground sprinklers, overhead irrigation, drip irrigation, NFTebb & flow system depending on different crop requirements.
• Different dosing systems such as are Dosatron, Solution A & B with peri dosing pumps, and Electric injectors are used.
• Different Drum seeding machines are used for the vegetable and the native seed sowing along with small seeding machines for specific operation.
• A fair level of mechanisation exist for material handling and making operations less labour intensive.
• In addition, we use various monitoring processes (pH, CF, environmental etc.) to optimise seedling growth.
• Our plan is to install a modern ‘rolling bench system’ at considerable cost to facilitate better quality, higher and timely production of different type of seedlings.
• In addition, we use various monitoring processes (pH, CF, environmental etc.) to optimise seedling growth.
• In general on an average we have been producing and supplying about 20-25 million seedlings per annum.

Although FIAT students have separate facilities to conduct their practicals, the commercial operations happening on site gives them orientation about the potentials and the industry links we have gives them easy access to finding jobs in the industry.