About 100 miles north of Montana, in the town of Medicine Hat, you’ll find Big Marble Farms, home of a 1.5 million square foot greenhouse, yes, 1.5 million. Even though Medicine Hat is in the heart of the Canadian Sunbelt, with 2000 hours of sun a year, it isn’t quite enough to hold off the Alberta Winter, so Big Marble took their operation indoors.
A green house that has 300,000 cucumber plants, along with 60,000 tomato vines needs quite a bit of high tech equipment to keep their crops happy and healthy. Cucumbers in particular like a very humid environment to flourish. Mitchell Lewis was contacted by one of our valued partners Watertec, out of British Columbia, to help design a system to meet the customer’s needs. Key parameters included system foot print, required water flow and pressure, initial cost, and energy efficiency. To create and maintain the essential level of humidity, the system would use fog nozzles to create a fine mist spray to fill the growing area. The customer’s previous system was falling apart, quite noisy and inefficient.
The packaged pump system from Mitchell Lewis was designed to be a “plug and play” skid that contained the maximum amount of equipment on one single base that only needed to be mounted, wired and plumbed to be operational. The packaged system contained a water storage tank, filtration down to 1 micron, fabricated SS headers, custom UL controls and of course pumps to supply the 50gpm @ 1000psi required. The custom header also included 5 actuated ball valves to open and close depending on which zone of the greenhouse needed misting. Powerful, highly-efficient pumps enable the system to support all 5 zones simultaneously using a single pump at reduced speed. The system provides built-in redundancy and increases energy cost savings.
With the ever-increasing demand for energy and water efficiencies, Mitchell Lewis & Staver and its network of valued partners stands ready to meet these challenges with the latest in technology, engineering expertise and good old fashion experience.