HydraFiber Heroes: Jose Navarijo, South Central Growers, Inc.
Jose Navarijo, R&D manager at South Central Growers, Inc., discusses how HydraFiber's consistency has improved the quality of plants and their business efficiencies.
Jose Navarijo, R&D manager at South Central Growers, Inc., discusses how HydraFiber's consistency has improved the quality of plants and their business efficiencies.
"After 30-plus years in the greenhouse industry, I’ve made the biggest changes in my substrate mixers with HydraFiber. After lots of trialing and tweaking, we’re at 55% peat, 25% coir, 25% HydraFiber and it’s working very well. We’re really getting a great, great root system that is going through that substrate, all the way down to the bottom of the pot. In all the years that I’ve mixed soil, I’ve never seen the root systems just permeate the soil ball like they are now. Get a good root system and the plant will come."
“When we switched to HydraFiber, we shaved 5 hours of labor off every zone each week due to plants needing less water. That’s a 5 to 10% labor savings for us. And on some crops, we have been seeing faster rooting, with white roots all the way to the bottom in 9 days on crops that typically take longer.”
"The growers adapted pretty fast to the new HydraFiber media and we didn’t have major issues. Everything we have done is the same as we did with the perlite mix."
"HydraFiber is by far the most innovative commercially produced soil amending product to hit the industry in a long time."
"Switching over to HydraFiber has been very nice and given us more time to focus on our mixes. We used to use two people in our soil room in the busy season, with a lot of perlite loading. The smaller HydraFiber bales let us use one person all day long, and he never falls behind loading HydraFiber and peat moss on the line. And HydraFiber keeps the place clean and dust-free. To him, it’s a dream back there!"
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