Article taken from Fruit Grower Magazine
Botanicoir is investing €1.2m in the first completely automated coir-drying facility, to ensure that the issues caused by a two-year monsoon in Sri Lanka can never happen again. The Sri Lankan monsoon season is normally from September to November, but during 2015/16, unprecedented rainfall affected the whole coir industry. Coir pith is normally dried by sunlight, and continuous rain meant that it could not dry - causing knock-on effects for UK growers. Ordinarily, growbags are delivered as dehydrated compressed slabs. But the only way Botanicoir could fulfil the orders was to ship them partially hydrated and, as demand was up by 30%, this was no mean feat. ""For the 2015/16 season, as we were unable to dry the coir, the volume we needed to ship was bigger, says Kalum Balasuriya, managing director at Botanicoir. ""Instead of one container of growbags, we had to send 3.5 containers of partially-hydrated bags from Sri Lanka, meaning a cost increase of 350%. We didn't pass this cost onto customers but we're aware that it's unsustainable to risk such a situation happening again, so this is why we're investing in a new drying facility.""
After 12 months of research and development, working with a German company already building woodchip drying equipment, in a 'first' for coir production, a state-of-the-art drying facility was designed which will dry the coir as it runs along a conveyer. The heat from a biomass boiler will be controlled by a number of sensors and six different types of heat will be applied at various stages depending on the moisture levels. Just driving off the moisture after the buffering process in a normal dryer would destroy the unique structure of the high quality coir that Botanicoir supplies. The drying process has to mimic the natural drying process, so this was the challenge for the German engineers.
In August the new 30m long drying facility will be installed, powered by a boiler fuelled with wood chips produced from biomass crops on neighbouring land. The future implications are vast, because 80% of the daily required volume will be dried and ready for production as soon as it comes off the conveyer. ""The other 20% will come from existing natural drying yards. This means that in a good year, we'll have the ability to produce 80% more product than before, and, with the rise in demand we're seeing, we need this development," says Kalum. Mark Davis of Agrovista, that hosted Botanicoir on their stand, reported that the substrate crop monitoring service that Agrovista offers continues to be popular and was ""one area in which we noticed much more interest this year, with many leads to follow up"". The in-crop stations can monitor soil moisture, soil temperature and bulk/pore water EC in substrate or soil-grown crops for more efficient scheduling of irrigation and fertigation. Additionally, they can also monitor air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation and other parameters, including output from water meters. Alarms can be sent to a grower at any threshold. In addition, wireless valve controllers can be added to perform timed or automatic irrigation.