New Jersey Hydroponic Farm Experiments With Equipment To Improve
New Jersey Hydroponic Farm | Dan Sullivan |
IMAGE: Cris Botticelli and Deacon, the family farm dog, harvest greens.Photos provided by Sweetleaf Farm.
Grow it, and they will eat.
That was Guy Botticelli’s motto when he and two partners launched a hydroponic greenhouse business in Denville, New Jersey, in 2014, growing greens for a wholesale distributor servicing restaurants.
A lot has changed in the intervening years. The farm moved to Green Township, New Jersey, changing its name from Happy Harvest Hydroponic Farms to Sweetleaf Farm.
One of the partners has moved on. Botticelli married his other partner.
Business shifted from growing greens wholesale to direct-to-consumer sales via two local farmers markets.
And equipment alterations have been made constantly to try and establish a sustainable, profitable hydroponic operation.
Botticelli, with a background in masonry and landscape installation, decided to shift to agriculture after a sluggish economy precipitated a downturn in housing starts and hardscaping projects.
His contracting and plant background, a business he started right out of high school and ran for more than 25 years, helped tremendously in his new endeavor, Botticelli said.
“Just having any kind of construction background helps with the building of the high tunnels or greenhouses from the bottom up, essentially, from grading to using all the parts that are involved in the houses themselves and tools that go along with it,” he said.
That included electricity, plumbing and heating.
The original partners chose a company called AmHydro based in Arcata, California, for the equipment to grow plants without soil. They opted to do some of their own construction versus purchasing an entire plug-and-play system, which Botticelli said was not in the budget.
“I went with the one single-piece channel, because I thought it would stand up to the rigors of what was going to happen,” he said. “I’m not the gentlest when I handle things, so having a two-piece (channel), I thought there might be more issues.”
A hydroponic channel is a narrow, inclined trough used to deliver nutrient-rich water to bare plant roots. While single-piece channels tend to be more durable and cheaper, they can be more difficult to clean.
“I fabricated the tables and the reservoirs and plumbing and everything that went along with it,” Botticelli said. “And you save a lot of money that way.”
That route required a learning curve, he said, one that has never let up.
“If you filled out that whole area with the tables to grow on, without any packing or storage or anything like that, you’ll probably get it a couple thousand square feet of usable space because of room you need to walk around, the aisle to get up and down.”
Adaptation
“We grow lettuce and leafy greens,” Boticelli said. “The only thing that changed for us was we were contracted with somebody to grow specific greens for them, and then they would just resell them. But when we broke off and started to deal with the farmers markets, we pretty much just transitioned into what we would eat ourselves and what we thought other people would, having pretty much limited experiences at the markets.”
Hydroponic produce proved a novelty for many customers, Botticelli said, even though the technology has been around for thousands of years.
“The people really enjoyed the cleanliness and also the fact that we can grow 12 months out of the year and produce in the winter, which definitely comes at a cost for sure,” he said. “Energies that go into it obviously have increased tremendously in the past recent time.”
Both farmers markets Sweetleaf Farm currently serves — Denville and Montclair — operate year-round.
Equipment companies estimate a high tunnel the size of Sweetleaf Farm’s, 30-by-96-foot, can accommodate up to 10,000 plants in a hydroponic system, Botticelli said, but he has generally pushed that envelope, harvesting around 25% of the plants every five to six weeks when selling wholesale.
“At the request of the first person that we were working with, they went out as restaurant greens,” he said. “So, they were much smaller in size to be able to be used in the kitchens and on your plate at a restaurant.”
Those sizes don’t fly at market, Botticelli said.
“You’re not going to want to pay whatever for a four-inch little piece of lettuce,” he said. “You’re going to want almost a full-grown, if not full-grown, green.”
He now lets the plants fill out more but has generally maintained planting density, something he does not necessarily recommend.
The more densely planted, Botticelli said, the more potential issues will likely occur with diseases and insects.
“People think that you’re inside and you’re immune to all of these things, whereas it’s pretty much the complete opposite,” he said. “Once something gets in, it’s found its food source.”
The Move
In 2017, Botticelli and his partner Cris Tuhy (Cris Boticelli since 2023) purchased an 8.4-acre property and home while continuing to farm in Denville. Once they cleared various hurdles, they set up a high tunnel, purchased secondhand, on their new property.
They worked out of both locations for about a year and also began growing produce outdoors before shutting down the first location. Their goal is to have 3 acres of produce in the ground to augment their hydroponic offerings.
Another goal is to assemble a scaled-back version of their original high tunnel from its parts on the new farm and increase hydroponic greens production by around 30%.
“The old saying is, ‘If you build it, they’ll come, or if you plant it, they’ll eat it,’” he said. “So, we’re looking for that 30%. And I think if we do fill it, obviously you’re going to look back and say, ‘Hey, we should have done more’ kind of thing. But, we’re older and this is it. We’re going to max out with what we can do and finish it off that way.”
Boticelli continues to tweak the system, such as experimenting with under-table heating.
“I’m figuring ‘Why is no one doing this?,’ because heat rises, number one, and, number two, your roots and water, which acts as a soil, is there,” he said. “It should be able to keep it in better condition at a steady temperature as opposed to it being as far away as possible at the roof.”
He’s also planning to experiment with placing supplemental heating and fans along the sides of the greenhouse versus at each end.
“We’re extremely basic as a house goes,” he said. “We just have exhaust fans and heating in the winter to keep it at a minimum that the greens can handle. It’s not high-tech at all, and a lot of that stuff is manually controlled, so I’ve got to be here a lot to take care of it.”
As with most farmers, recent skyrocketing energy costs present challenges.
“We started with propane, and it’s been great,” Boticelli said, adding that the fuel remains an affordable choice. “However, natural gas was installed on the street a couple of years ago. And just last week, we had one heater hooked up, finishing up the other one to get that up for natural gas. And everything was great until the beginning of this year. We would have probably cut our fuel bill in half.”
At this juncture, a zero-sum game is the best they are hoping for.
Water Balance
Another learning curve that came with the move was managing a new water source, which needs to be built up with beneficial microorganisms and nutrients just like soil, Boticelli said.
“We’re now pulling from the well instead of city water,” he said.
It had taken about four years to dial the latter optimally into a hydroponic system.
“But then moving up here, it was a whole different animal working out of the well because things are obviously different.”
East Coast hard water brings with it issues, such as calcium, magnesium and salt build-up, he said.
“I definitely do not have it completely figured out yet,” Boticelli said.
The learning curve is constant, he said, especially when running a smaller operation where margins are tight.
Water, HVAC and energy present constant climate- and cost-control challenges.
“When we jumped in, we just started treading water and doing it and doing it, and it’s now, you got to go back and fix, repair or make changes to whatever was done a few years prior, whether they worked or didn’t work,” he said.
