What does commercial identity mean for a crop?

The class the market actually buys — truss tomato rather than tomato, butterhead rather than lettuce. Plant load, harvest rhythm and handling belong to the class, which is why each class has its own page and its own specification.

Can one greenhouse grow more than one crop?

Within a family that shares a climate envelope, a compartment split is the usual answer. Crops with different envelopes need their own compartments, and the layout decides whether one house can hold them without the climates fighting.

Crops — DutchGreenhouses

What a crop asks of a greenhouse

A greenhouse is designed around a crop, not the other way round. The crop sets the temperature the structure has to hold, the light it has to admit, the water the irrigation has to deliver and the hours the climate system has to run. A buyer who starts from the building and chooses the crop afterwards inherits whatever envelope the building happens to give, and pays for the mismatch every season it operates.

Commercial identity is finer than the crop. A grower does not sell tomato; the grower sells truss tomato, or cherry, or beef, and each is a different plant load, a different harvest rhythm and a different climate. The same holds inside cucumber, inside pepper and inside lettuce. These pages are organised the way the trade is organised: one page for each variety, under the crop it belongs to.

The building follows from those differences. Light transmission, gutter height, screening strategy, heating capacity and irrigation design all move when the crop changes, and so does the order in which they have to be decided. A house specified for leafy greens is not a house specified for a long-cycle fruiting crop carrying a heavy plant load, and converting one into the other after it is standing is expensive where it is possible at all.

DutchGreenhouses® designs the structure, climate, screening and irrigation together around the crop, its market and the local climate, so the envelope matches the plant rather than the plant being asked to accept the envelope. Get in touch to size a greenhouse for your crop.

Fruiting vegetable