Great Northern Seedlings
Great Northern Seedlings is a 5 acre greenhouse facility specializing in high quality vegetable seedling propagation. Through Great Northern Seedlings, Soave Agricultural Group is focused on delivering top quality hydroponic seedlings to production facilities in the Canada, USA and Mexico; annual volumes produced and shipped exceed 4,000,000 plants. Great Northern Seedlings is also SQF 1000 – Level 3 certified along with sister company Great Northern Hydroponics. They are a member in the CFIA Greenhouse Certification Program, participating in the Japanese Beetle Program.Great Northern Seedlings is inspected annually by Senasica (phytosanitary service) a division of the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture in order to export to Mexico. They follow a strict sanitation and hygiene program which provides the company with confidence in knowing that it is providing a clean, pest-free product to customers. The Soave facility maintains a daily routine of pest control management and pathogen monitoring.
Great Northern Seedlings only uses government approved fertilizers for their vegetable plants and continue to operate in a propagating-environment which is free of contamination. Great Northern Seedlings implements a closed door policy and there is no possible cross-contamination between the transplants and other production facilities. In conjunction with Groen Agro Control in Delft, The Netherlands, the company will randomly sample a batch of seedlings via FedEx: for analysis of any contamination (whether bacterial, viral or fungal), and supply customers with the results.
Soave Agricultural Group Growing Practices
Tomato, peppers and eggplant are sown in 240 French Kiem plug trays and cucumbers directly into the growing block. As soon as seeding has taken place, it is incubated for a specific number of days; depending on commodity. Once taken out of incubation, tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings (240 trays) are nurtured inside smaller nurseries until the transplanting stage; while cucumbers are taken directly into larger zones for final spacing. At proper time and date seedlings are transplanted into appropriately customer selected grow blocks and brought to their final spacing location.All of Soave’s propagated plants are grown on a raised bench system. They find that the air pruning generates enormous root strength. Because of the bench system, overhead watering is offered at Great Northern Seedlings via a boom system. At Great Northern Seedlings the employees are always determined to provide an excellent propagated plant and also strive to provide great quality service to their customers. The team is dedicated and passionate to make every plant and customer count. Soave Agricultural Group takes pride in the clean operating environment that they provide for customers. The trending shows that people that start to propagate with Great Northern Seedlings, continue to propagate at Great Northern Seedlings.
For more information on Anthony Soave and Soave Enterprises, please visit http://www.soave.com.