Nebraska retiree uses earths's heat to grow oranges in snow

we're in alliance nebraska this is probably the worst place that you could ever build this in the winter we'll get real high winds lots of dry cold i think it averages daytime around 30 degrees fahrenheit it'll get down to every year we'll have days that are 25 degrees below zero or lower wow it looks like you even have oranges yeah those are eureka lemons these are the lynch oranges they're the juice orange this one it's a new type of um mandarin that doesn't normally grow in nebraska the wood citrus doesn't normally grow in nebraska no no nowhere near the closest ones would be probably 800 miles in texas or somewhere and not a problem no no in fact they thrive here we can probably grow the best citrus anywhere in the world at this latitude for size and quality these are 12-month greenhouses and we're wasting our sunshine in nebraska during the winter we're not growing and and we're just wasting all of this underground heat this is one of the tubes coming up out of the ground six inch tubes that go down eight foot deep and out and clear out into the yard see where that asparagus is back there it goes out about 90 foot back there and then comes around and goes in there's seven of them come up on the south side here we're just using the underground heat underground it stays a certain temperature it's stable at 52 degrees here so if you have a stable temperature you can use that both in winter and summer and this blower here this sets over seven tubes six inch tubes that go down eight foot deep and then when the blower goes on it just recirculates that air continually when and picks up that ground heat so you're just the energy you're using is just to circulate the ground yeah it just circulates the uh the air underground it only runs when it's 50 degrees or lower it draws seven and a third amps is all and that heats the entire place during the winter but just about everything we put in grows real well these are figs here and they'll put up this first crop then in the middle of the summer they'll put out another crop that's way heavier here's some grapes and those are golden mascot we've got i think nine different varieties of grapes they're all southern grapes northern grapes they'll grow in here but they won't fruit these are thompson seedless we're having to learn how to grow grapes because it doesn't work the same here that it does outdoors so all you did in order to have this plenty was to take advantage of the sun and to go a little bit deeper into the ground and to combine the two things together everything in the design fits together you can't do away with any part of it and come up with this efficiency the sloped back wall this one's overgrown now that it doesn't make any difference but in the new ones when the sun goes low in winter that wall will reflect down on the growing beds you don't get growing rays from the north so there's no reason to have glazing on the north so we get all of our sun from the south and above this is all lexan it's polycarbonate it's 3 8 inch thick and this is twin wall it has a little insulation value not very much but in the back wall this is the only one that has this open foam the all the rest of them have galvanized metal these are the little flame grapes and then two we've got blackberries there yeah there's a pomegranate there let's see are there any fresh blossoms here's here's one and then here's some more we can grow local plants and we can grow tropical plants but sometimes local plants don't like it as well this tree is about 24 years old it'll probably grow for another 100 years or so when we built the greenhouse was the year i retired from the post office so this unit's about 24 years old so you've initially had geothermal just for the house yeah when we built the house 45 years ago we took tubes out through the lawn that are eight foot deep and they just circulate that 52 degree temperature this is the geothermal tubes for the house you can tell there's a little indentation it goes right down through here and then it goes into that patio area three different points [Applause] we found out it worked so well for the house that we could use it for the greenhouse without the heat pump this one is three and a half years old it's called a tango mandarin i'll pick that one and see when we started it we knew it would work but we didn't know how well and we knew that we had to grow something that you couldn't grow here so that's why we ended up with a citrus and i think we have 13 different varieties now all of them thrive most all of the fruit is way bigger than why is that one fellow that had done work in new zealand the only thing he could figure was that it was a latitude each one of these trees take up an eight-foot circle at the farmer's market price that we get the tree will average about 125 pounds of fruit a year and at farmers market that eight foot circle will return 430 dollars and we grow above and below the trees this greenhouse this one averages about 80 cents a day year-round for energy and the new design is way more efficient than this so we always think we've gone about as far as we can with the efficiency but i can see the time when we could grow all of the table citrus on the high plains to take care of this whole area the average grower in florida gets 46 cents a pound for oranges we get 350. why well they're wholesaling them to a broker and the broker is selling them to a distributor that they have to truck them from 1500 miles the profit that we get off of one tree they're gonna have to have nine trees people say that young person can't get into farming anymore because it's too expensive for the price of a three-year-old four-wheel drive big tractor like they have to have now we could build nine of these for that price i don't know how this is gonna be today how hot it's gonna be in there because we just got it started and then then they went to australia for two weeks and she wasn't used to watering yep she's watering now we just finished building it about two weeks ago they're so much cheaper than a conventional greenhouse we tell people if they have access to a backhoe and can do their own labor which is easy because it just all slips together it took two of us six hours to put the frame up we tell people they can put one up completely automated for less than twenty five thousand what they would put for the heat system in a regular greenhouse that nozzle works pretty good doesn't it yeah [Music] how long have you been up a short time about less than three weeks for the plants okay yeah yeah and they took a shock when we first put them in they did yeah big time but they're doing really well now yeah they're really starting to go and these up here i can't believe how much they've grown no so do you want to have this sort of a backyard garden idea as well to have your own produce oh yeah yeah and experimenting boy these things are really taken off haven't they yeah they're really starting to go yeah they're really because that's faster than wouldn't that be faster than just in the ground yeah yeah i've planted some outside to experiment to see which ones have done the best and these are way way ahead of the bunch outside that's the geothermal tubes they go 75 foot out 75 foot across and 75 foot back into the other end so you've got 230 feet of tube eight foot deep at that length of tube we've found that we'll have enough length in the ground to pick up the whole 52 degrees it's stable at 52 degrees here some places it's down to 48 49 some places like the one up at blackhawk it's 62 because they're next to some warm springs so if you have a stable temperature you can use that both in winter and summer yeah we could use it for cooling now that's what it's actually doing i'll show you what it what that peak is now okay it's 125 degrees it's coming out at 87 degrees so it's really circulating see where that white box is at the other end that's where all the 17 tubes come up and they just circulate through but we're trying to figure out whether it works better to push like this one's pushing or pull air like this one is so when we find that out we'll we'll use whichever is the most efficient you've got two thermostats one goes on when it hits 80 degrees it'll go on for the cooling when it drops to 50 degrees it'll be for the warming in the winter so you've got a 30 degree temperature range in there where there's no fans on at all so you're not using any energy during that time in the winter i was a straight d student but the only class that i really liked was physics and a lot of this is nothing but high school physics that's a model of the new type see our blower is at this end then the tubes come out here and they go anywhere outside 230 foot and then they come up down in there and so four of them would come in on this side and then we've got two on this side and those tubes they go out eight foot deep 83 feet they come up right in this bucket here eventually it's going to have a better lid on it see there this goes from here into that entry room and it has a blower and those are high pressure blowers see this one is the one that has the underground tubes that will cool it in the winter this room is completely isolated and closed in the winter when it gets hot in here this blower comes on and if it's all closed it causes a vacuum and it sucks this air underground and it's pre-cooled and then it'll go in here then we suck the air off of the peak off of the peak that tube takes that hot air off of the top here and it puts it in it comes down and it's a foot deep underground here down about a foot deep along here comes up and goes back in up there and then the blower it just blows back it just recirculates that heat and puts it in the ground so in the winter time we store that amount of heat in the path so we think we can delay the fans coming on a couple hours at night this is going to be a pond it'll have 1220 gallons of water in it and we'll put fish in it we'll float lettuce on planks then we'll water out of it out of the pond because official fertilizers so aquaponics aquaponics if we had the hydroplanics set up we could go clear to the the end with a trough in here and have this all hydroponics flowing from this end back into the pond there there's a lot of geothermal research going on but it's most all of its grant research so the end product is millions of dollars so it's not for a market grower like us but your idea is that people could copy this or use this your research and your creations right now we're working with a company in dubai and they're interested in seeing from what we've learned if they could use it for cooling at night does it get cold on the desert there because at night you would be able to maybe put a little cool air through there it might be that the tubes would need to be longer i think there would be a way to use these underground tubes to ventilate the whole thing and not use any outside air everything is automated that would be everything the blowers and everything are on thermostats we can monitor it all if we had the right equipment we could actually turn blowers on and off with the telephone and how about pests we don't have a pest problem at all the only pests we have are white flies and aphids and either one of those we can control with horticulture oil all it is is a refined mineral oil on a system like this organic is the only sensible way to go you can have locally grown organic for the same as you would have outside if you were using toxic chemicals the local is is really a bigger selling point than organic in the sandhills those towns are all drying up all of these little towns that are drying up have vacant lots with water and power at the lot and it only makes sense to put these in one this size lycodee is 140 people you could just about furnish fresh vegetables year-round for a town that size on just this size and then with citrus you'd have even more yeah i don't think he knows how old you are no 85 85 yeah wow so and you're still building yeah nice we were retired for several years and then it come to this so do you expect to retire not as long as this as we've got this going it's getting really interesting now you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 3,205,975

Keywords: geothermal greenhouse, geothermal energy, geothermal, backyard farming, backyard greenhouse, home food production, precision agriculture, organic farming, backyard garden, organic vegetables, hobby farmer, hobby greenhouse, hobby garden, alliance, nebraska, greenhouse in the snow, nebraska farmer, russ finch, citrus in the snow

Id: ZD_3_gsgsnk

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Sun May 27 2018