Cherrylake has a continued focus on innovation and technology to improve our quality at competitive cost. This year is no different and there have been several promising innovations around the farm.

With the help of 3rd party engineers, we have developed some mechanized equipment prototypes to prune our tree roots during the shifting process of our production. While still early in the implementation phase, we are confident this will save time, manpower, and reduce fatigue in our workforce.

Controlling weed growth around the farm is a constant challenge. We have recently converted some unused assets to develop herbicide application equipment that will allow us to use a liquid pre-emergent sprayed over the top of our shrub production areas, replacing a granular application. This will eliminate thousands of hours of labor annually, reduce herbicide input costs by 40-50%, and improve the overall efficacy of the applications.

As an investment into future technologies we contracted Cultivate AI to utilize drone technology to fly the 1,200 acre farm and create a digital geographic information system (GIS) map. The incredible resolution and detail captures all the way down to the individual post for our trellis systems. The accompanying software has helped streamline data collection for particular farm assets and creates a platform for other software interfacing. We believe this will be helpful in the implementation of future technologies that use GPS such as autonomous tractors, autonomous sprayers and drones.

The Farm Leadership Team has recognized an opportunity to increase space utilization and improve overall quality by changing the inventory flow within our production growing cycles. By routing more trees through a 16 inch Air-Pot® size during our growing process, we will be able to process more trees in the same amount of space while increasing our ability to maintain a healthy and desirable root structure. Additionally, this new routing structure gives us the ability to more readily protect our crops in the event of hurricanes or other wind events.

The future looks very bright. We are all very excited to continue to innovate and be on the leading edge of our industry.

This article was written with contributions from Austin Spivey, Production Manager.