Cleaning up the Harvest | Designing A Good Wash/Pack Station

hey nerds farmer Jesse here so it's one thing to grow vegetables in an entirely other thing to get them ready for market so in today's video we're going to go over the keys to a good wash pack station sometimes called a pack house sometimes called a wash head sometimes called wash Vegas nearly 8 billion people in the world somebody calls it wash Vegas no matter the name there are some key elements each wash station should possess and some that may not be as necessary and at the end of this video I will take two crops from field to Market so you can see what that process roughly looks like per usual I'll share some of our mistakes uh our deficiencies as they pertain to washing and packing so let's do it foreign there are very few crops on our farm that come out of the field just ready for Market most produce need some amount of washing wiping packing cooling uh maybe just one of the above but maybe all of them the goal however is not to spend more time on this task than you absolutely have to getting it from the field to your customers with as few steps in between as possible should always be the goal not just for profitability but the more you handle a crop the more risk you run of damaging said crop or increasing foodborne pathogen exposure so designing a good wash pack station is key to running an efficient and safe produce operation now I am a fan of contextual caveats because I like to make sure it's understood that there are many ways to do basically anything in farming and I look forward to reading in the comments section how you set up your watchback station or wood or how it would differ for us this is the setup that has worked on our One acre-ish Market Garden but I'll also discuss some things that I would like to change your approach may be very different or you may scale it down for your home so you can just get all the soil off of your crops before you bring them into kitchen so you're not doing it in the kitchen sink not always the best okay so there are three main components to our washpack area first is the root washing station second is the greens washing and packing area and third is the cooler so let's do each individually those of you who've been watching this channel for a while know about this tool already this is our foot operated root washer it's still a little prototypish but essentially we have our hands freed up to wash and clean things like carrots and beets green onions Etc while we operate the water with foot pressure I cannot emphasize enough how much faster this has made the entire process of cleaning root vegetables a little wetter to be sure but faster than our previous system of laying the carrots out on a table and washing them individually because you can be grabbing the next Bunch or pulling out a weed or a dead leaf at the same time as you are spraying where two seasons into using it and it's been wildly helpful a couple changes I would recommend or that we have made or will make first I think it would be nice to also have a hose permanently placed in this area for bin washing because it's not super convenient to drag the hose over there or wash bins under the foot pedal washer second it's nice to have it extended out six or ten inches so you're not bending unlike our first prototype third having it under a roof for rainy days is a good idea but also for shade as the veggies get stacked there for a while like while we're harvesting speaking of that I want to expand the staging area out more like where we stack them because it definitely gets crowded to the left of the sprayer before we start moving stuff down the line next we added a water collection bucket which is uh insufficient because it fills up so fast so we're going to install a barrel with the hose that drains right into a old pile for later use so we don't lose that soil we spray off and of course the water and because it kind of makes a Mucky mess just sitting there below our feet I mentioned washing bins and that's a huge time suck so ideally you have a place like the wash table to line the bends up and spray them then another area to dry them you cannot stack wet bins inside of one another or they will stick together forming the world's strongest bonds second only to two five gallon buckets that's got to be the strongest so you need space enough to either hang or stack the bends separately also in terms of Bin choices definitely do not follow my lead here and just standardize your bins if you can it all afford it buy airtight stackable bins preferably with the lids attached that are food grade and easy to wash I will put a link in the show notes to the work that the University of Vermont extension AG engineering has done exploring different Harvest container options that is really helpful the reason we have all the these different bins is because we wanted to save some money and then we couldn't find the identical bins when we needed to buy new ones so now we have like five different types of bins not ideal we got our yellow Harvest bins from a very random Amish store but I'll also put a few links in the show notes where to find similar bins also bulb crates that flower bulbs come in those make fine bins if you are or if you know of any flower farmers who maybe don't need them anyway like I said I'll take a couple crops from start to finish at the end of this video so moving on into the building it's good to have a covered area for greens washing so that one it's easy to wash and two so that it's out of the rain but more so the sun and the wind and snow and whatever else wants to destroy your Harvest we lucked out finding a property with this building on it but when we first started out farming on a different property I built a small lean to where we would wash everything which was fine too as long as it was out of the rain in the Sun a garage can work a carport it's possible to watch under a large tree or something but the food safety can get a little iffy there with I don't know Birds above you and to be clear food safety is absolutely Paramount if you're selling food you want this area to be easy to clean and sanitized because you do not want to make anyone sick I'll link a couple organically approved products in the show notes that are not well bleach so yes we invested uh pretty hard in stainless steel for this area for the sanitation element of it it's just easy to clean that is not a requisite but it's nice to have a few easily cleanable tables as well as three base sink to wash and pack now of course that's not necessary you could easily use nice food grade large buckets you can always improve that spot later for the sink nothing special here we like having multiple sinks because sometimes lettuce is dirty or it has bugs in it and just needs a second dunk to ensure the bugs don't make it to the bagging table being an organic farm who doesn't even use the approved sprays bugs are a real challenge for us but not so much pests generally things like spiders and ladybugs and lightning bugs are always hiding out in our lettuce and so having a second dunking albeit slowing down the process can help to get some of those out we also have a pool strainer is that what these things are called pool strainers to remove debris from the surface of the water if something is really buggy you can use a very clean bin to weigh the lettuce down or the grain below the water and then use the pool strainer to help clean off the floating bugs and such next we have the salad spinner which is a converted washing machine we you've had since 2018 built wonderfully by our intern at the time Adam and it's still jamming if you are going to build your own I want to emphasize that you should really consider safety and not just food safety just like your own safety I absolutely love this design and it's really well built but that's one element of this machine that needs to probably be improved upon we have to be extremely careful around it when we're drying produce because it's just spinning out in the open ideally you can put something over the top I think they call those Lids I also think they call hats Lids which is clever put something that fits right over the top to prevent anyone from getting hurt now I'm not an engineer but there are all sorts of resources online for washing machine conversions just choose the safest one in the design that's easiest to clean and preferably one that has a break to stop it because these things will spin forever and ever on the two packing tables we have a tour race Certified Scale which I'll link in the show notes we have a few different racks for keeping things like boxes uh pint and half pint containers cherry tomato containers bags Etc one of the wraps can be used to hold produce while it's waiting to be packed or cleaned it has casters so we can like roll it around speaking of bags we use a few different types of bags which you can see here foreign [Music] and all again link all of these things in the show notes it's hard to casually work important little details into a video like this but here's one like this whiteboard that just has all of our general weights for bagging items is extremely helpful to have in case someone who usually doesn't pack the food needs to jump into that station for one day this is the label printer we use which is fairly fast the morning of harvest we print the labels in the inside of our house and keep them in a stack out here at to label as we bag now we pack our produce in bins or coolers depending on if it's greens goes in coolers or something like carrots which go in bins and another little detail we've tried several different things in terms of labeling coolers and bins from stickers to tape different types of pins but the chalk markers definitely are the most functional sadly because I like the my name is stickers but yes the chalk markers are easy to wash off easy to apply apply a recommendation I got from Eric Schultz at steadfast Farm okay so onto the cooler this is a modified restaurant cooler we bought from a local restaurant supply guy for fourteen hundred dollars it was kind of just sitting in his yard it was kind of we got a good deal on it heaviest thing I've had to move in a long time and it basically just locks together with Cam locks and can theoretically be expanded with new panels it's eight feet by eight feet by nine feet tall with a cool bot system and a 2400 BTU air conditioner it's a decent size but definitely gets tight on harvest days like we can't fit everything in there note however a cooler does not have to be an actual restaurant cooler you can build a room for a lot less than fourteen hundred dollars in fact we built an insulated room that I may or may not have pictures to show you what we'll find out at our last farm for storing vegetables and we cooled that with a cool bot as well the coolbot just modifies an AC unit to be a full-on compressor there are other options for this but the cool bot is nice because it is a single unit and if something goes wrong they have a you know a great library of troubleshooting videos and this is not an advertisement either I just like the product just don't buy a random AC unit if you get a cool bot check the coolbot website for compatible units before purchasing because they're expensive of course some people just get a regular compressor which is fine too I like stuff that I can quickly fix myself because I'm not exactly a machine wizard that's who fixes stuff right like appliances Wizards then what was the Lord of the Rings about the AC unit goes right out of the building which is important because the first two years on this property we had it pointing into the building and well it the butt of an AC unit is loud and heats things up it's not the most fun to have in your washback station shout out to our neighbor bill for helping install it now we have this rack in the cooler which I like for like seed storage and we can stack bins on it but it gets a little bit too tight in the summer so honestly you don't need any racks like this but maybe a few pallets or something just to keep stuff from being directly on the floor I think it's recommended at six inches it's just more sanitary that way the the little hand coolers are an important part of our wash pack albeit a little worse for the wear for you know six years of use four of these coolers go to market with us every week to keep produce cool we put in a few Frozen water bottles and an old broken seedling tray on top to keep them from touching the produce you only have to learn this lesson once but most fresh veggies cannot rest against Frozen things and survive now ours is not a perfect wash Vegas see that's just the way we've set up ours for now other people may have greens bubbler which we just find to be a little loud a little difficult to sanitize and not entirely necessary for our operation two sinks does a fine job albeit with slightly more labor perhaps if we did more baby greens it would be a different story anyway I'm going to run through a couple crops from field to market now but first it if you would like to support these sort of hyper nerdy videos that I don't usually shoot in the middle of the day this is kind of weird but if you would like to support these sort of hyper nerdy videos that will not likely get the clicks to cover the cost of production please pick up a copy of the living soil handbook from notilgors.com or hat or other merch or become a patreon member at patreon.com no toll Growers or just hit that super thanks button that works too okay so let's do a root crop like carrots carrots are harvested and bunched in the field I like having the bands on my wrist just regular rubber bands and then taking them over the greens but not over the carrots makes it easier to just go over the greens but not Everyone likes bands on the wrist our employee Greg for instance keeps his in a pouch we usually use the yellow bins or black bins for harvesting into they hold about 50 to 60 of our bunches a piece before becoming unwieldy we transport those to the root washing station where we may spray them to keep them moist and cool while we continue other crops then at the root washing station we spray the bunches moving left to right and stack them in another bin to drip dry if Harvest is over in the main building we will let them drip dry over the sinks if not and we need the space on the root washing table we'll place the drying bins on the racks then we shake the whole thing off and load them into normal totes and label them for which Market they're headed to get as much water off as possible we've discussed how much microbes need water in the soil in other videos well pathogenic microbes kind of also need water for doing their thing as well so the less water the better once at Market we pile every carrot that we've brought if physically possible onto the table depending on the time of year we can sell around 125 to 150 carat bunches per Market it used to be around 200 in the summer but our competition has grown slightly which is fine soccer is life sorry such is life keeping that pile looking tall is the key to Market success if you want to sell everything you bring make it look Bountiful right to the last Bunch now let's do mixed lettuce for that we harvest in the field into bins as early in the day as humanly possible especially on hot days if it's cold and there is any amount of frost on them we wait until the Frost has thawed entirely those bins line up on one or sometimes two of the stainless steel tables before they get washed if we are backed up we'll put Lids on them and take them directly into the cooler until they can be washed we then rinse the lettuce twice and set those in crates of some sort to drain for a minute after that we spin them dry and weigh them in the bins at that point if we're ready to pack we'll go ahead and pack them into bags for Market or retail or whatever if not we will set them in the cooler labeled as washed so as not to dry out refrigerators are giant dehydrators you'll never unsee it you don't twist tie the bags until mark it so as to save some space they're a lot easier if they don't have all that air in them to pack into bins these are the last things we put out before Market begins as well because of condensation we will swap them in and out of the coolers if they begin to condensate but mostly they sell fast enough that we don't have to worry about that at least they're not in the middle of the summer in the spring we sell around 30 to 40 bags per Market in the summer we sell as many as 70 bags or more at a quarter pound a piece anyway watch this video here on our Farmers Market approach and now that the sun is out and it has stopped raining I got to get to work so like this video If you like this video if you are not subscribed to this channel make sure to hit the Subscribe button if you are subscribed you're awesome otherwise thanks for watching we'll see you later bye [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 35,684

Keywords: wash pack, no till, no dig, market garden, pieces of a farm, parts of a farm, areas of a farm, farm budget, regen, 2025 VW Bus, cover crop, soil health, milk stage, business, farm business, success, washing, packing, vegetable, harvest, how to

Id: JYQyovXIqGU

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023