A fresh perspective

Karl Stensson is at the helm of Sheridan Nurseries, where his grandfather began as nursery manager in 1913.

The leaders of Sheridan Nurseries possess an astute view of the nursery and retail operation. Some of them see sales opportunities among the acres of plants, stacks of containers and collection of machines. But two key personnel see the nursery as a series of processes and systems.

Company president Karl Stensson is proud of the fact that Sheridan Nurseries hired two industrial engineers who are charged with cutting costs, reducing waste and improving speed. Instead of working in an automotive plant or for an aerospace company, these two engineers are in a nursery. They watch how the plants go from the propagation house to the shipping dock and every process in between. And it’s this left brain/right brain concept that has kept the Georgetown, Ontario-based nursery thriving.

Fresh set of eyes
Pieter Joubert came to the nursery a decade ago when he answered an ad for a distribution manager. Bill Stensson, then company president, realized Joubert was more qualified for an operations manager and promptly placed him in that position.

“We had an operations manager for the stores, but not for our growing operation,” Karl Stensson said. “We needed someone to observe and refine the production processes from an unbiased point of view.”

After years of doing things the same way for no real good reason except “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” Joubert helped the nursery improve several production processes. Two years ago, the company hired a second industrial engineer to continue the process improvements.

Sheridan captures all of its runoff, which flows through a silt pond, through reed beds and into a huge bio-pond.

“We have taken the approach that we are a manufacturer and we review all steps in the growing or ‘manufacturing’ process,” Stensson said.

The potting process is 25 percent more efficient thanks to the observations of the engineers.

The loading process has been streamlined to speed things up and eliminate mistakes.

The process of applying poly to 34 kilometers of hoop houses was refined to apply it at twice the speed from the previous method. Poly is laid out ahead of time, and the engineers charged one crew with tacking down the poly, while a second crew comes in behind them and finishes it off.

The pruning process has been improved by looking at it as a system. Previously, a crew member pruned the top and the bottom of a bareroot plant before it was potted. Now one prunes the top, then passes it to another person who prunes the bottom.

“Sometimes it’s that simple to make a big difference,” Stensson said.

Coco discs help prevent weeds and help hold in moisture.

The company treats the nursery operation as an assembly line, but its line takes longer in the growing process than, say, an automobile. And each component is carefully examined.

“Labor is the single biggest component in any nursery operation,” Stensson said. “Our goal is to modify those systems to speed things up and improve our quality. Since adding industrial engineers to our staff, we’ve improved our quality each year while cutting our costs.”

Saving resources
Besides saving labor and expenses, Sheridan Nurseries has also invested in a system to conserve millions of gallons of water per year. The nursery started the water recapturing system to provide a backup water source during times of drought or water restrictions. Two years ago, Sheridan built an industrial-sized biofilter pond. Runoff water travels through a series of holding ponds and spillways for recapture into the 31 million-gallon bio-pond. The end product is water that is 85-90 percent purified, Stensson said.

The bio-pond will recycle a minimum of 278,000 and up to 720,000 gallons of irrigation use each day through critical summer months. In 2011, the nursery’s main irrigation pumps went down and for seven days Sheridan was without direct water from the nearby Credit River, the company’s typical irrigation source.

“Parts for the pumps had to be flown in from Switzerland. Without our bio-pond, we would have been in serious trouble,” Stensson said. “But we didn’t skip a beat.”

The nursery grows 650 varieties of containerized hardy shrubs and evergreens and more than 550 varieties of 1- and 2-gallon perennials.

With the recapturing system, Sheridan has decreased its draw from the river by 40 million gallons per year.

“We’re being used as a model by our local conservation authority,” he said. Sheridan has adopted other water conservation techniques. The nursery uses drip irrigation for larger shrubs and pot-in-pot trees, and underground drip tape to directly water the roots of liner crops. These methods have reduced water use by 80 percent.

Plastic is another important resource that is conserved at the nursery. Sheridan started a recycling program in its stores. The nursery offers a return fee on 15-gallon or larger pot-in-pot containers, so the heavy-duty pots can be reused.

“If we can’t reuse them, we crush and bale the pots and send them to a plastic recycler,” Stensson said. “We also recycle the poly on our houses.”

The nursery has been experimenting with pots made of coir (coconut husks) to reduce the use of plastic pots.

“This has been met with limited success because of the length of growing time needed, as well as the extra cost,” Stensson said. “We can’t use them to grow from beginning to end because the coir pots don’t last two years.

“But we’re offering a ‘flip and ship’ program where we’ll repot the plant from plastic to coir at the time of shipping,” he said.
 

For more: Sheridan Nurseries, www.sheridannurseries.com.