So you will grow on string and do lean and lower? Or use the high lift vehicle to prune and harvest?

For vine crops (tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants), we use a high wire system. The stems are clipped to the wire as the crop grows upwards. The entire wire (and crop) is then lowered as fruits are harvested to make room for more growth. We keep the same crop for an entire year.

I've been in some of the greenhouses in Mexico, (Sinaloa to be exact) growing peppers and Asian eggplants. They were fairly simple plastic houses but had strict entry protocols including booties and yellow sticky trap mazes to enter.

Pest and disease management is a big deal in greenhouses as they spread quickly given that it is an indoor environment. In Mexico, more high-tech plastic greenhouses are being built. They are cheaper than the Dutch glass equivalent but still have a high degree of actuation. In Mexico, there is so much light, that you don’t need the high light transmissivity of glass.

There is a more complex industrial greenhouse I saw in Utah growing tomatoes on string. Very tall, unfortunately I didn't get to go in. It's next to a power plant and they pipe the expelled CO2 into the greenhouse for increased crop production. I believe it was started by Dutch growers.

I’ve been to this facility. It was built by a company called Houwelings which are a Canadian company with Dutch heritage. Unfortunately it was not operated well and it has recently gone through a restructuring [1].

I agree on greenhouse quality 100% but but am personally a big fan of soil and compost and dislike hydroponics. Nearly religiously so haha.

There’s a case for soil vs hydroponics but the reality is that you can’t supply year-round at the quality and price that consumers expect without hydroponics.

Also I didn't realize you were founder of this company. I thought you were just a guy on the internet.

I am both :)

People think because something looks like a tomato it is all the same. But there is a huge difference in flavor and nutrition as you correctly point out and the idea of optimizing for nutritional quality is so overlooked.

You can grow high taste varieties and low taste varieties in greenhouses. Which variety you choose is a simple ROI calculation like in any business. A big problem in the US today is that greenhouses have been built in Canada and Mexico and the produce is trucked a long distance. This results in significant quality degradation vs growing locally. We aim to fix this in the US and in other countries.

[1]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sunset-continues-to...