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."
"We are already using HydraFiber Ultra in our blends for indoor production, and decided to trial EZ Blend for outdoor production. Our Fall 2019 mum trial put EZ Blend side by side with a 30% Ultra 160WB blend. The plants performed very well in EZ Blend – we couldn’t see a difference."
"The HydraFiber and AgriNomix teams were excellent to work with as we made the transition. We worked with them to get both our soil blends and the mixing equipment just right."
“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.”
"Previously when we would move some of our dormant grass liners to heat, we would see tremendous top growth, but rooting would lag behind and there’s not much you can do to enhance plant quality without good roots. When we moved these liners to a HydraFiber blend, we had a very successful crop – plants grew uniformly and we had good root quality throughout the crop across various varieties.”
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