Start strong

Transition time

Jasinski is a member of the inaugural class of the HRI Leadership Academy and has worked at the USDA laboratory located inside Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center in The Land pavilion as an Agricultural Sciences Biotechnology intern. He has two horticultural master’s degrees from the University of Florida and focused his studies on plant molecular biology and pathology, becoming an expert in propagating plants via tissue culture, initially with the aim of bolstering sea oat populations along Florida’s coastline. When he began looking for a way to get into the industry, Jasinski’s UF professor Michael Kane suggested contacting Gayle Suttle at Microplant Nurseries. He had heard she was looking for someone to help her with her operation. So Jasinski sent her his resume. After a few months of radio silence (“I thought she threw it away!”), Suttle asked Jasinski to come visit. During the job interview, Jasinski asked if there was any potential for growth at the company. Suttle said yes but never let on that she was looking for a direct successor. She needed to see if he could be trustworthy and reliable first.

“I’ve been here eight years and the rest is history,” Jasinski says. “She took me on, and I am eternally grateful for her being able to guide me through what our company does. I was very fortunate in taking on something that was already running very, very well.”

Suttle is retiring at the end of March but is still with the company in an advisory role. She had the foresight to move Jasinski through the different departments at Microplant before letting him take the reins. He started as a media prep supervisor, moved into shipping, and later plant production.

His time at UF created a foundation for tissue culture knowledge. He understood the science behind it. But how do you know what a maple is supposed to look like four weeks into culture? What should it look like as a final product?

The average tenure at Microplant is around six years, but there are some employees with over 25-30 years of experience. Jasinski leaned on those employees and asked questions.

The transition went rather smoothly, as smoothly as possible in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The need for social distancing in the lab to adhere to COVID protocols meant breaking the teams into a day shift and night shift running from 5 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., five days a week. That meant twice as many team leaders were needed.

“That was a challenge, but the silver lining of rethinking how we operate during COVID was figuring out that we’ve got a lot of leadership in this building,” Jasinski says. “Let’s capitalize on that and use it to the best of our ability.”

Inside the lab

Microplant Nurseries’ lab is segmented into what they call “pods”. Each pod consists of several lab technicians, and each one is supervised by a pod leader. Pod leaders oversee day-to-day operations carried out by Microplant’s lab technicians.

The nursery employs between 56 to 74 people year-round. Tissue culture work isn’t as seasonal as a conventional nursery. It depends on product mix and your customers – what they want to grow and when they want to grow it. There used to be a drop-off in summer, but Jasinski says it’s been full speed ahead for the past few years. 

Microplant invests heavily in new employees. There is a 6-8 week training program, which Jasinski says is like going back to school. Between sterility techniques and lab protocol, it’s different than any job most workers have had.

“I feel like there’s this black magic voodoo that kind of shrouds the lab, but anytime I go to tour a nursery operation, whether it be through IPPS or just a personal tour, I am always astounded at the parallels between the two,” Jasinski says. “We actually deal with a lot of things that other nurseries and greenhouses deal with.”

Even though Microplant’s products are tiny two-to-four inch plantlets, they face the same types of issues as a typical growing operation. The fail-safes they put in place to mitigate problems on the front end are similar, from checking media mix and making sure the pH is correct before you plant to protecting against pathogens and insects.

Jasinski is quick to note that Microplant wouldn’t be where it is without its lab technicians.

“It is an art form to be able to do what they do day-in and day-out in terms of where to cut, how to cut and making sure that every one of those stuck plants on its final pass looks like a beautiful tissue-cultured maple,” he says.

It typically takes 12-16 months to produce a newly initiated-plant line in culture. The nursery sells only lab product, Stage 2 unrooted microcuttings, and Stage 3 in vitro rooted plantlets. Microplant ships out 20-30 plantlets per sterile tub. Accuracy is crucial.

“If we plan on a crop but only produce 60-70% of what was expected, that will wreak havoc on our ship schedule,” he says.

Stick to the schedule

For a tissue culture lab to be successful, it needs to be able to offer repeatable quality. To do that, Jasinski says you need top-notch scheduling and planning. At Microplant Nurseries, that comes from Bianca Hernandez. She started as a seasonal employee nearly seven years ago and has worked her way up to scheduling and production manager.

“(Bianca) does a phenomenal job at putting pen to paper, but also adding an element of realism,” Jasinski says. “You can very easily let pen and paper run away with you or extrapolate numbers to the point where you could get yourself in trouble, if you're not taking into account some of the realities that you could face.”

These realities include potential plant underperformance or overperformance, making a decision based on a small sample, or racing ahead without looking at the historical data of how Microplant has done it in the past and applying that to the plan.

Hernandez says her most important task is thinking about the future.

“We never want to cut ourselves short,” she says. “We cannot stop at the current year’s orders. Whenever I'm planning an order, I'm not just thinking about hitting this year’s order, but also thinking about hitting next year’s order. The better prepared you are well ahead of crunch time, the easier it is to handle unexpected curveballs later on. Without this flexibility, you can end up in quite the predicament.”

Cold storage is a massive help when it comes to planning ahead. Certain crops can be stored for months, which smooths out production peaks. Microplant gets a head start by storing crops so they can move on to plants that cannot be stored and must be shipped out fresh. Plants have limits, of course, and each variety differs in tolerance. All these factors are taken into account when planning production, Hernandez says. 

Microplant has a robust database that houses information on each plant it produces. When an order comes in, Hernandez uses the database to make sure her team can hit the number in the window the customer requires. After crunching the numbers, she knows how often and when a plant needs to be touched in order to make the timeline work.

Investing in research

Microplant ensures repeatable quality by having the research department work alongside production. The R&D team are considered “masters” of all the plants, and so when it’s time for a final pass on customer orders, they check the plants for consistency and strength. 

Denae Watanabe-Smith is manager of research and development. A 13-year company veteran, she likes that Microplant Nurseries is a small enough company that there is opportunity to learn and grow.

She graduated from George Fox University in Oregon in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession. It was a tough time to start looking for a job.  

“I was just interested in getting my hands dirty,” she says. “I started here in media preparation and then just never left.” 

The R&D department is a small, but vital part of the nursery. It initiates plants from customers, provided directly from their greenhouse or field.

“It is our job to surface sterilize the plant material and figure out how it grows, what it grows in, and how to best manage the crop until it is multiplying reliably and consistently,” she says. “Then we get to teach it to our larger production department. And they build it to fulfill customer orders.”

Surface sterilization is a very important part of the process. It begins with washing the plant material with bleach, soap and water. The challenge is getting the timing and the concentrations just right. You want the bacteria or mold on the outside of the plant to die, but you don’t want the plant material itself to die.

Watanabe-Smith says the trickiest challenge she faces in R&D is receiving a new plant that isn’t in the system. Microplant usually receives a limited supply of starting material from a client. As part of the process of figuring out the most efficient way to propagate a plant, you’re going to kill quite a few of them. From there, you need to figure out what the plant needs to grow reliably and consistently in a timely manner. If the customer requires a rooted plantlet, a second medium is needed to encourage a strong root system.

Finally, once you’ve figured out the optimal way to grow and handle that particular plant, you have to determine how to teach it to a group of 60 people. Once it’s in the system, it’s a simple matter of following the instructions.  

When Jasinski is at trade shows like Farwest or Cultivate, he often has people ask him if they can grow more out-of-the-ordinary crops. If Microplant has grown it in the past, the nursery’s extensive historical knowledge base gives it a head start. If it’s something new, then the R&D team gets to work.  

“Sometimes you have to take a shotgun approach and throw that plant on 20 different types of media, which can be daunting, but the way our operation works, we have the ability to do that,” he says. “It’s a labor-intensive process, so if we can narrow it down based off our history, we can very quickly dial in to what the plant likes and needs for optimal growth.” 

In a typical challenge for R&D, a customer wanted three varieties of rhubarb, a plant that had never been in the building before.

“It wasn’t something we were familiar with, and then within a year we were able to turn around and give them thousands of each cultivar,” Watanabe-Smith says.

In college, she studied molecular and cellular biology and chemistry. While not the typical horticulture background, it helps in her role at Microplant. One of the main tasks of R&D is figuring out what nutrients the plants need, so her chemistry background is applicable.

“I have the best job because it is really hands-on,” she says. “You get to see the results of your work quickly, and it’s rewarding to share knowledge with other people.”

Culture club

The culture of this tissue culture lab revolves around worker appreciation.

“Management plays a very small role here and it’s the people who are here every day doing the work that are to be celebrated because they are the reason our company is so successful and that we can do what we do,” Watanabe-Smith says.

Hernandez is the only fluent bilingual manager at Microplant, and she believes that representation is critical. “Like in most of the ag world, the majority of our labor force is Spanish-speaking, so I think it’s very important to have Spanish-speaking people in my type of position, in management,” she says. “We always want to be on the same page and something as simple as language should not be a limiting factor. It helps us ensure that we all understand our jobs and are doing them to the best of our abilities.”

Jasinski credits the company’s employees and long-term clients for its success.

“We grow with them,” he says. “If they’re successful, we are successful. If there’s any magic recipe for how we’ve done what we’ve done over the years, it’s the partnerships that have been created over the decades as well as our own workforce here. They are the lifeblood of our company, without them the whole operation would cease to exist.”

For more: www.microplantnurseries.com