Do You Like Fresh Strawberries?
Anybody out there like strawberries? Does anybody enjoy strawberry shortcake in the Spring? Maybe you are partial to strawberry cake or strawberry crisp? I assume everyone has had fresh strawberries from Young’s strawberry fields and has made something delicious with them.
Bottom line, Young’s farm fresh strawberries are much tastier than the berries bought from a grocery store. I don’t get enough of them myself. Now consider this.
Would you be pleased to know that you could have fresh strawberries delivered to your house - picked one day and delivered the next. Would you enjoy this on a regular basis? And any time of year? Are you wondering how this could possibly be done? And probably the next thought is- can this be done feasibly? Are you wondering whether this idea makes any economic sense? Let's take a quick look at a startup enterprise called Oishii. Oishii is investing 50 Million to grow strawberries.
Oishii is a Japanese name and uses Japanese bees. They are probably using Japanese technology to make things small and efficient in the great Japanese tradition. Well, we can take them on with American bees and with Texas ingenuity, creativity and intellectual firepower. And it won't cost us anywhere near that much. So at Oishii, startup investors are spending 50 million dollars to produce fresh strawberries. Therefore, we know there is strong demand now and projected strong future growth in demand driving the investment.
It leaves us to wonder what we could do working together with just a tiny portion of these funds. And we can work out solutions step by step with little risk. I hope this idea sounds attractive. I might need to remind you that strawberries bought at the grocery story are not nearly as fresh and tasty as fresh picked. Store bought berries are designed tougher for travel and longer shelf life. You have probably found a rotten berry in the bottom before in store bought berries. Not in fresh berries picked yesterday.
And imagine having access to these delicious and fresh strawberries all year. I better explain.
It is possible to grow strawberries with grow lights and a hydroponic feeding system. And using a great team of local people, maybe even you in the future, we will be delivering berries picked one day and delivered the next morning. Maybe to your front door.
All participants will have an opportunity to share in our equity.
Our connection will be through a cooperative... don’t let that word scare you, we will all be stockholders through a plan we ourselves design and then implement with the advice and legal issues from our professional of choice.
The original charter members are totally buying a dream, an idea that we are testing. Each of us has a open mind and an adventurous spirit, each of us has the vision of how big a venture this can be and have faith that the right people with the right talents will step forward and make this work. The first group to join us here will be the charter members and we will hold stock in this enterprise and the value of our stocks will increase greatly as we build a business empire.
I would suggest active Charter members are vested with $5000 and passive investors are vested at $10,000. Passive investors would see the promise for a robust future for Wichita Falls and for their own family interest.
And we will find a way to vest equity in all who join in and start adding value. We need a variety of skills and expertise and people who want to participate but just don’t have $5000 bucks sitting around, can still participate.
You might not really feel you have a defined skill; bottom line is we need any and all folks ready to pitch in and help find solutions. We will work out with our hive brain, in which you will be a participant, to figure out how to vest folks in our enterprise.
Stakeholders with children who act mature can be integrated into our efforts. They would be ready to pitch in, ready to help in every way. The skills and experience could develop them into critical leadership and management roles in the future. As we develop these concepts and have looked around at possible buildings and developed a broad idea of what will work, we will commission someone to draw up schematics on display boards and present these to possible investors.
These will be the passive investors who are ready to invest $10,000 and who can see the concept outlined in the display boards. This will offer them a visual clue as to what we have in mind, and know enough of what is going on to provide a visual outline.
It is not that we need all this money to spend, but will help us secure commercial lending. We will use commercial lending when our operation matures enough for a line of commercial credit to make sense.
Our stakeholders will know exactly who this person is because they know him or her personally. That is the power of collective knowledge and intelligence. We have a lot of hurdles to overcome none more basic than fundamental questions.
We have to figure out if enough people in our Community enjoy strawberries enough to want them want delivery to their home on a regular basis. This seems like a no-brainer. The Swan’s Truck comes by and delivers here. If the local Swan’s Delivery Owner makes an acceptable return on his investment, I don’t see how our enterprise couldn’t succeed. We have so many advantages over the Swan truck. Natural foods vs processed food is a big trend and will only get bigger in the future. Our market for fresh strawberries will grow and grow. Everyone who likes an easy way to diet will love fresh strawberries as a healthy and fresh taste treat often. Imagine 50 calories per cup. Fresh strawberries are a delicious diet food that can be indulged in.
Anyone on a Keto diet of Paleo diet would love the taste of fresh strawberries and want them often. They would beat a path to their door.
So we will evaluate the significance of this fundamental question with our hive brain. I look forward to seeing your opinion.
We will verify each marketplace zone with a sophisticated market survey sampling potential markets across Texas major metro areas. We will survey in the macro but also in the micro markets.
We will break these major markets into zones where we can develop new areas and viable new delivery routes. We will build on new experiences to best grow this local industry.
We can learn valuable lessons from Swan's years of experience. We will just have to adjust to a totally different product and much greater demand. We have great advantages in Wichita Falls that make us quite unique. Wichita Falls with 104,000 folks, is a great size to text and evaluate a market and has great variety of spaces and buildings available for evaluation.
The huge market of DFW with 6.3 million prospective customers lies just 150 miles away. Our community is the optimal size with a Local University and a variety of Professionals we will need, with many of you personally acquainted with the professionals we will need.
Now imagine trying to start this enterprise in DFW. The bustle, and ability to evaluate structures and communicate and meeting together becomes a colossal problem. We are in the groove in Wichita Falls.
We will build our base in Wichita Falls and then using our experience move on to the DFW area and then beyond. Austin, Houston, why not? Another critical hurdle is designing and evaluating the components and systems required to create a hydroponic growing system with grow lighting that is viable 365 days a year.
First let’s look at an overview of this growing system. A vertical wall supports troughs which carry a hydroponic solution. Vertical troughs are positioned one above the other and each runs the length of the wall.
Grow lights will hang down the vertical length of the troughs to uniformly cover our plants with light. Some kind of conveying system will transport picked berries to the end of the row where the containers will be stacked and moved to shipping.
A cart will carry three pickers and be able to elevate the pickers to reach berries with minimal extra motion. The cart will be powered with a picker maneuvering the cart as needed. These are the basic concepts.
I am hoping that we can interest Midwestern State University into championing the design and experimentation options that we need. If you have influence here, or know someone who does, please share this outline.
We need influencers to promote this idea and the closer connection to the university the better. And there are so many knowledge experts that will need tapping here. Make sure you share this with anyone who can help with this process And, of course, all this testing and evaluation and sharing of information will require a great deal of cooperation and require a lot of human horsepower- a solution to be figured out as we move forward. Maybe you or someone you know has the affinity for this. There are a great many systems to test and testing will require creative design and execution. I have faith there are individuals out there who can pick up this challenge and succeed. Here is my simplified and by no means definitive list of systems and components that need testing. We will have to design and test
- a hydroponic system - pumps, guttering, media and drain back system.
- a long cart to support pickers as they move down rows. It needs to support 3 picking technicians with elbow room to operate for each. The cart needs to be steady and secure from any sense of instability at full extension. The cart extends up and down to place pickers at the most advantage and efficient level of picking berries and tending berries.
- the electrical system controlling each cart needs design and testing.
- the cart as it extends up and down vertically
- the cart for variable speeds backward and forward. The entire assembly with have to be designed and tested.
- the telescoping lift system
A critical factor is ensuring the berries are easy and efficient to pick. Berries and the packaging to hold the berries must be at optimal close proximity; there is no more critical challenge than eliminating any wasted berry harvesting motion because any unnecessary motion will be repeated hundreds of thousands of times.
This is a central issue which will be solved by iteration by process engineers and efficiency experts. At the present time, I describe a conveyor belt system running along each side of a hydroponic growing wall and containers would move along and be filled by each picker. Again, the key challenge here is keeping the conveyor at optimum distance from the picking process.
A first draft suggests a conveyor system with roller supports that snap in and out elevate the conveyor to optimum height. A separate crew would operate on one row while the o9perating cart or carts move to another row.
The belt would be rolled up and supports adjusted and then a light line would be quickly restrung and the belt rolled out again. A special tensioning system would adjust the belt. This is basic restringing the track on any tracked vehicle.
Another obstacle is ramping up production as demand for our product increases. We can deal with this by starting with a certain number of hydroponic troughs and adding to this number as we ramp up production. We might also have to vary production across the seasons. We will figure this out as we proceed and deal with events as they happen.
We will need to evaluate the best variety of strawberries to grow which will need the cooperation of the county extension agents for advice of finding the strawberry expert we need. We have great resources for this, including Steve Young our local fresh pick entrepreneur, and probably some Master Gardeners we can recruit for help.
We only need to do enough testing as we ramp up to minimize risk, but as we mature as a working operation our testing can become much more sophisticated. An example would be testing and compiling data over time on the height of strawberry plants in the trough system.
A shorter plant would reduce height required between tiers and could ultimately allow us to add another tier of berries and increase our production capacity within the same space constraints.
And, of course this will include the University, we hope, which will handle the actual plants growing to evaluate for plants being secure in the trough and what is needed support the vines. We need to evaluate the minimum working distance between rows - room for cart, room for a conveyor belt system on each wall and space for elbow room to work from the cart.
We will configure and test to determine the height of the ceiling which is needed. It will be an iterative process taking into account the maximal height of grow walls, the space needed to enable lifting of our lighting system to a comfortable height above the heads of our tallest pickers.
We will to evaluate the best placement of switches to move light bays up and down. We need to evaluate and test a rail on the ground between rows for maintaining a straight line
We will need to design and configure a portable system at the end of each row for stacking finished boxes. We will not want our sorter bending over to sort our finished product on the skid. The skid will be moved about by forklift. We will be picking directly into our designed container. We can hold a design competition for an optimal design. The container will be a clam shell. And let's mention right now that our plastic packaging will be recycled by providing a 10 cent return fee to encourage recycling.
Home delivery will make returns really simple. Containers returned at farmers markets, etc. will be easy to recycle. The labeling must be stout enough to withstand vigorous rinsing without disfigurement. Picking out a property has a variety of issues to consider
- We will need a loading dock and space for loading trucks
- The ground floor will need to support a forklift.
- We will need plenty of space for sorting, and storing berries
- The building will need to be insulated or easily insulated to hold a steady growing temperature all year- in the hottest and coldest months of the year.
- We will need a viable height of ceiling.
Enough height could support an addition of a new floor which would not have to take a forklift but a powered pallet truck illustrated above. to accommodate mechanisms needed to lift lights clear of the growing walls.
These choices will require an iterative process. We would use a lightweight open elevator system to drop pallets down to be picked up with the forklift. So there is the outline for the project. If you have an interest send me an email.
Stu Langley biged76112@gmail.com.
And share this around as often as you wish. I have little reach my self.
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