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Building a Low Cost Packshed
34 Plays10 days ago
In this episode, we’re joined by Annalisa Hultberg, a Food Safety Extension Educator with the University of Minnesota Extension, and Ariel Pressman, Principal Consultant with Whole Farm Strategies. Together, they share practical tips for building a low-cost packshed. From structures and flooring to essential equipment, they break down how growers can create an efficient wash/pack space without sacrificing functionality or food safety.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Agri-Food Safety Produce Bites podcast, where we discuss all things produce safety and dive into the rules and regulations surrounding the Food Safety Modernization Act Produce Safety Rule.
00:00:13
Speaker
My name is Ariel Pressman. I'm based out of the Twin Cities. I was a certified organic diversified vegetable grower in Western Wisconsin for a decade. And after that, I ran a certification program for farms across the country. And now I work as a consultant with Whole Farm
Designing Low-cost Pack Sheds
00:00:29
Speaker
Strategies. And a lot of my work um is with Annalisa and the University of Minnesota Extension team. We've gotten to visit dozens of farms over the past couple years, done a lot of work kind of ideating and building out different designs for low cost pack sheds for often smaller farms or farms on rented land or farms that are just for whatever reason lower resource.
00:00:48
Speaker
My name is Annalisa Hultberg and I'm a statewide Extension Educator in Food Safety at the University of Minnesota. I'm based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area but I get to work statewide with all kinds of fruit and vegetable farms and have been working with RAL for the past few years to help a lot of those farms.
00:01:09
Speaker
So today we are talking about low cost pack sheds for vegetable farms. So starting from the beginning, Ariel, why does a vegetable farm need a pack shed?
00:01:19
Speaker
You know, from the start, we kind of need a pack shed area because we need a controlled space where we can wash our vegetables. And the reason we need a controlled space is that leads to food safety. So if we're just packing vegetables on a table under a tree,
00:01:33
Speaker
You know, who knows what birds are flying over it or there's a squirrel up there, there's leaves falling over it. So we want a controlled space. But we also need a pack shed so we have a place to efficiently wash and pack our vegetables because that's going to be a big piece of whether our farms can be profitable.
00:01:50
Speaker
A lot of people focus on kind of the efficiency of harvesting or weeding or planting, but anybody who's farmed before knows we spend a lot of time washing and packing vegetables. So if we don't have a setup that can lend itself to doing that efficiently, we're to have a really hard time making money, especially as we scale our farm.
00:02:07
Speaker
How about shade and temperature, Ariel? Yeah, those are really, really important factors. um Everybody knows that, especially when you're harvesting over the summer,
00:02:17
Speaker
when you are harvesting in the middle of the day, it is really hot out. And if you don't have a controlled space to go to where it's shaded, your produce is gonna spoil really quickly. And that's because it's just gonna keep heating up as you're trying to pack your vegetables, as you're waiting to pack your vegetables.
00:02:34
Speaker
I'd also say it's really important to have that shaded kind of enclosed space because of inclement weather. It is somewhere between very unpleasant to impossible to wash and pack your produce effectively if it's raining outside and you don't have cover or if it's super windy or it's just not good conditions.
00:02:52
Speaker
Like you said at the beginning, Ariel, we've worked with a lot of farms that are kind of emerging farmers.
Constructing Affordable Pack Sheds
00:02:58
Speaker
So in general, do these have to be expensive or can we build them well for less money?
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I think what we found is that we can basically build any pack shed to fit any budget. We've built some pack sheds that I think are pretty good effective spaces that have ended up costing less than $500. I would say the kind of like ideal middle ground between money you're spending and the most efficient space is probably about 1500 bucks. As far as that gets you pretty good structure that gets you a lot of what you want on the inside.
00:03:32
Speaker
of the pack shed. But in the end of the day, you know, we've worked with farmers that came to the table with basically no money and were able to basically just find free stuff on Facebook marketplace and build a structure for themselves.
00:03:43
Speaker
So you really can do an effective pack shed at at at any price point, depending on kind of what your resources are. So what are some of the structures that you think that we found that have been working well for some of the farms? Assuming again, we're not talking about an enclosed pack shed, we're talking about more temporary low cost structures here?
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I'd say on the absolute cheapest side, you can really build kind of like lean to or open sided structures out of materials that you can pretty commonly find for low to no money. So we've been to a couple farms where they basically just use some four by fours and some tin and essentially just build a structure to put everything under. Again, maybe that works for you if you're comfortable with carpentry, you're comfortable finding different materials. Maybe that sounds sounds really intimidating to you.
00:04:31
Speaker
So I'd say that's the cheapest to free option. The next option is using something like a farmer's market tent. The upside is those structures are really cheap. They're often under a hundred dollars. The downside is the farmer's market tents are not something you can leave up even overnight. And they really are not, they're pretty flimsy. You know, anybody who's been to a farmer's market knows if you get too high of a wind, anything like that, they tend to twist, they tend to fall apart.
00:04:57
Speaker
So after the farmer's market tent, I would say you can get into some of these fabric carports. Those tend to run between what you're looking for as cheap as $150 to maybe $500.
00:05:09
Speaker
What's nice is you get a lot of kind of square footage for the money you're spending. The downside I would say is that the both of us have found they're actually a lot harder to put together than you would think. You look at the picture on the box and you go like, this this will take 20 minutes. We found some of these take hours to put together. The instructions are frustrating. So i think it's a good option. It's not something I'd recommend if you're somebody who Doesn't feel comfortable with carpentry or construction. But if you have a day and you've got the time, that can be a really good option. And then outside of that, I would say, honestly, the best kind of middle ground we found is a really heavy duty pop up tent.
00:05:49
Speaker
um So I'm sure there are other options out there. we ended up buying one from a company called All Tents. So literally A-L-L tents dot com. they sell basically a market tent that's really souped up.
00:06:01
Speaker
So it's got four sides to it, including a door and the sides have windows. The inside of the tent, you can look at it and see it's built with much heavier duty materials. Like it's meant to withstand some wind. It's not gonna twist and fall apart. That tent structure costs about $550 for a 10 by 10 tent.
00:06:20
Speaker
And I believe it's about seven or 50 if you wanna get one that's a 10 by 20 tent. So I think that's the best middle ground. That's something that unless there's a big storm, you could leave up overnight. You definitely would want to take it down over the winter.
00:06:32
Speaker
But I think it's going to be relatively stable. It'll take, I don't know, 30 minutes to put up. It's easy to move if you need to. So I think that's kind of the best the best middle ground out of all the structures we've looked at.
00:06:45
Speaker
One thing we did find was that those really do need to be pretty well anchored to the ground as well. So those anchors are separate, right? Yeah, definitely keep in mind that, I mean, any carport tent type structure you're putting up is basically a giant kite. It's going to fly away.
00:07:02
Speaker
And generally the stakes they provide are like woefully insufficient for even like 10 to 15 mile per hour winds. So definitely plan to invest some extra money.
00:07:13
Speaker
I think when we bought that tent from All Tents, it came with like the classic kind of like tent stakes like you might use for like a camping tent. That's not going to do anything. So there's definitely some drawbacks to these structures.
00:07:24
Speaker
They're much more affordable, but you really do have to kind of be a little more careful with how you're using them. Let's move on to the parts that go inside. So first the flooring. So we're not just packing straight on, you know, mud and grass.
00:07:39
Speaker
What are the different floor options? Yeah, so I think you can think about the floor in a similar way to the structure. There's kind of the absolute cheapest, which is going to have some big drawbacks, to things that are going to take a little more money and time.
00:07:52
Speaker
So the absolute cheapest way is just put down some high quality landscaping fabric. That'll have the benefit of, at the bare minimum, kind of separating the mud and the dirt from where you're stepping.
00:08:03
Speaker
um That being said, you know, the water is still all draining right below you. so you're going to find the ground is going to get kind of squishy. You're going to find some dirt and mud is going to permeate through the landscaping fabric. So I'd say if you're really short on money, that's a great option because it's 20 bucks and it's way better than nothing.
00:08:21
Speaker
The next option up would be to use something like a plastic pallet. So I would first put down the landscaping fabric, then put the plastic pallet. Generally, plastic pallets are really expensive if you buy them new, but they're actually pretty reasonable if you buy them used. You can usually find them on Facebook Marketplace for $10, $20, something like that. Be very careful to buy the heavy-duty plastic pallets.
00:08:46
Speaker
So keep in mind that a plastic pallet might be rated for 1,500 pounds, but it's rated for that weight to be distributed across the whole pallet. If you're me and you're just 200 pounds standing in one spot, your foot is going to go right through that pallet.
00:08:59
Speaker
So get something that's heavier duty. Sometimes if you look on the inside of the pallet, you can see metal and that's an indication it's heavier duty. So those, like I said, you can generally do that for 10 or 20 bucks. So that means that a 10 by 10 space, you could probably outfit that with a plastic pallet floor for for less than a hundred dollars.
00:09:17
Speaker
After that, I actually think the best option, if you have the money and the access to the resources would be just to use gravel or rock. So if you can put down the landscaping fabric first,
00:09:28
Speaker
Generally, a landscaping company can deliver whatever you need on site and just dump it. The really nice thing about using gravel or rock is not only does it give you a surface to walk on that's not dirt or mud, but you can put a bunch of it on top of the ground. And what that means is your water is going have something to filter through. So it can kind of percolate through. It's going to lead to less mud. You're going have a solid surface to stand on top of.
00:09:54
Speaker
We did that at one of the sites we were at, and it was... you know, it was relatively straightforward. It was relatively affordable, probably a couple hundred bucks. So that's the option i' would go with if you have the money. If not,
Water and Electrical Requirements
00:10:05
Speaker
you can go with a lot of other options too.
00:10:07
Speaker
Okay. So the main things that we're thinking about when the, in choosing our flooring options are good drainage, the ability to clean, Of course, we're not going to be able to you know wash any gravel, but at least we could sweep it and we can pick up the culls pretty easily. And then people safety, so we're not tripping, we're not stepping into broken you know wooden pallets, those kind of things. But drainage is probably the most important And then also kind of thinking about where the pack shed is sited so that you could send your water downhill and away from your packing area if possible.
00:10:44
Speaker
So maybe building it right at the top of a little bit of a slope or a hill so the water is going to naturally drain away from the pack shed. Because to your point, Annalisa, even in a small pack shed, if we're filling a washtub that's 100 gallons, I mean,
00:10:58
Speaker
You pull out the plug and that's 100 gallons of water that needs somewhere to go. It doesn't feel like that much in a farming context, but it's way more than the ground can absorb. so to your point, if you can take advantage of the topography and let that be your drainage, that's going to work way better than most of what we could improvise or build for the pack ship. Right. And then for food safety, having that water not go onto the field. So you wouldn't want to reuse that water for irrigation or anything. Just have it go off into a grassy area and and percolate down naturally.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So water and electricity are you know requirements here for our packing area. So can you talk a little bit about water and electric needs for the pack sheds? Yeah, so the electricity is, I would say, optional.
00:11:46
Speaker
I'd say the most important essential piece is lights. Me and Annalisa have played around a little bit with a couple of different kind of solar light options, although we haven't really gotten reports back on how well that's worked. But keep in mind, if you can't see what's going on in your pack shed, you can't be food safe, you can't be efficient.
00:12:03
Speaker
Also, if you don't have electricity, that's going to limit some of the different things you can put inside of the pack shed. So if you do eventually want some of the scaled up equipment like a brush washer a barrel washer, you're obviously not going to be able to do that if you don't have electricity.
00:12:17
Speaker
um I would say water is the essential component. Without water, you just have a pack space. You don't have a wash pack space. So just keep in mind how you want to adapt your wash pack space to the amount of water that you have.
00:12:30
Speaker
The first farm I worked on they had a really, really, really low capacity well. So it meant we'd only get a couple gallons per minute and we can only use the water in the pack shed if we were not using water in the house or for irrigation.
00:12:44
Speaker
So keep in mind, like if you're using some larger capacity equipment, like let's say 250 gallon or 300 gallon wash
00:12:52
Speaker
If you only have three gallons of water per minute, it's going to take 100 minutes to fill that up. And then the other thing to keep in mind is it's going to a long time to drain out that water. So I would make sure you have sufficient water for whatever your needs are.
Essential Equipment for Pack Sheds
00:13:04
Speaker
Don't overcommit your equipment if you have limited amounts of water. So just be careful about kind of how big your wash tubs are, how much water do you think you're going able to get with your spray nozzles and and different things like that.
00:13:16
Speaker
Okay, so about the equipment that they would have in the packing area, um you mentioned the tubs. So can you talk a little bit about those options? Yeah, so I would say that there's basically two essential components to any pack shed for the most part, and then there's a lot of stuff that's optional.
00:13:34
Speaker
So the first essential component is the wash tub, like you said. That feels essential because basically any leafy greens that we're doing, we want to actually submerge in the water because that's helping to hydro-cool the produce and clean it at the same time.
00:13:47
Speaker
The other is a spray table because generally we're going to need that for any type of root crops or bunched root crops. um Both of those can be pretty cheap. I'd say for the wash tubs, it really depends on the scale of your farm.
00:14:00
Speaker
A lot of farms, if they're really small, will just use a five-gallon bucket. Annalise and I have also so bought from a company called US Plastics. They have a food-safe 17-gallon bucket. I really like that because it it kind of comes with a faucet built in It's scale appropriate to where a lot of kind of maybe like quarter-acre type farms are going to be where you're what you're washing 10 or 20 bunches at a time, not 10 or 20 cases of produce at a time. um And then for some of the larger wash tubs, it's generally going to be in intervals of 50 gallons. you'll see a hundred gallons, 150 gallons, 200 gallons.
00:14:33
Speaker
One thing that I think is really worth considering is I think it's Rubbermaid specifically, at least around here through tractor supply. They have a series of wash tubs that have an extra large drainage hole.
00:14:45
Speaker
So the standard drainage hole in wash tub is three quarters of an inch, and it just takes a long time to get that water out of there. The extra large drainage hole is an inch and a half. It makes a huge difference in how quickly you can empty out that tub, clean it out, get fresh water in there, and then start it over.
00:15:00
Speaker
So I'd really recommend thinking about the drainage. As far as wash tables, we've seen a lot of different designs that work. I mean, honestly, I've probably seen dozens of different designs.
00:15:11
Speaker
I think the most common sense thing, if you have the money, if you go to Websteront and you look up, they kind of have these like retail display tables or greenhouse tables. They're all pre-built. You can buy a four by four table for about $80 plus shipping.
00:15:26
Speaker
It can take a ton of weight. It's a very hygienic surface. There's not a lot of cracks and stuff to get dirt in. I think that's the best investment. Otherwise, a lot of people will buy greenhouse benchtops and maybe put those over, you know, saw horses or just kind of improvise a structure to put them over.
00:15:42
Speaker
That's totally fine. But to be honest, you're going end up being into it about 80 bucks in the materials by the time you're done building it. And then you spend all the time building it. So, um Yeah, I would say the two essential pieces are those wash tubs and the spray tables.
00:15:55
Speaker
And then after that, you're getting into some of that higher capacity equipment, like the brush washers, like the barrel washers, that'll be appropriate for some, you know, medium to larger scale farms. Let's talk a little bit more about the drainage. i think it's so important from those wash basins. So are i mentioned that there is a model that has a larger drainage hole. the The reality is you might have to do some sort of, you know, rejiggering of that because even though it has the bigger hole, the valve itself is still pretty small.
00:16:33
Speaker
And so, you know, depending on what you can find locally in your area, know that you might have to do some work. For example, if you get livestock tank with no drainage hole at all, you will have to use a hole saw. And if you do that, you could go ahead and make a larger hole, like an inch and a half. And then we developed a way just using PVC. So you could put a section of PVC through that hole that's maybe six inches long only.
00:17:06
Speaker
And then you have some sort of a valve on the outside. And then you can attach another chunk of PVC to that. And then you can attach lay flats. hose so that it really is able to be pulled away from wash pack area.
00:17:23
Speaker
So I think one of the most important things is to think, how will I move this water away from my feet? Because it is not pleasant to be, first of all, covered in water and mud. we don't want standing water for food safety issues. um It's going to attract in more rodents and other things.
00:17:42
Speaker
I think that we've found that with a pretty simple system and a little bit of, you know, spending some time in the plumbing aisle, you can come up with a system to move that water away more quickly.
00:17:55
Speaker
The one thing that we saw that isn't great kind of before we started working on this is people just dump. First of all, it's really hard to dump 100 gallons of water like right over, right? That's that's really heavy. so don't plan on just dumping over your tank. That would not be a great option. You've got to gotta come up with a ah different system than that.
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah, i
Hydro-cooling and Equipment Sourcing
00:18:20
Speaker
completely agree. I mean, we're just doing the math. That's hundreds and hundreds pounds. Even if you can't do it, you shouldn't do it. I guess another thing that I'd like to talk about briefly here, Ariel, is just the importance of hydro cooling. I know for food safety, we often talk about washing Less, if possible, which is true because water can really spread around contamination if it's there, and especially in that recirculated system. But we can't forget that taking the field heat out of things is really important. So can you just talk about what needs to be hydro cooled and what would do well in this kind of a scenario to be dumped?
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah, so generally do we want to hydro cool stuff that's going to be the most susceptible to wilting or kind of doing poorly from the heat. And so that broadly ends up looking like things that are leafy greens. And the real reason is when we pull them out of the field, if it's 70 degrees out, you know, that, that temperature or higher could be the surface temperature of the crop.
00:19:19
Speaker
So if we take a crop that starts at 70 and we just stick it in a cooler, it's going to take a long, long time to get down to temperature. just surrounded by that ambient cold air. So we kind of need to do something to be able to bring it down to temperature quicker.
00:19:32
Speaker
So if we take kale that's at 70 degrees, we dunk it into water that's say 40 degrees, that's just gonna immediately take out that field heat and bring it much closer to the temperature where it wants to sit.
00:19:45
Speaker
And that'll make it much easier then for the cooler to bring it from 40 degrees down to 32 degrees. So it really is essential where you tend to see the effect of the hydro cooling the most is in how long the produce lasts.
00:19:57
Speaker
So maybe the produce, whether hydro cooled or not, looks the same 24 hours later. But when you check in on that produce 72 hours later, 96 hours later, it's going to look a lot worse. We actually, me and Annalisa just talked to a buyer last week.
00:20:11
Speaker
who had been getting kale that was field packed, as in it was not being hydro cooled. And they said that it was looking good when it came in and that it was kind of falling off a cliff after three or four days compared to the hydro cooled produce, you know, especially with things like green curly kale, they have no problem lasting 10 days to 14 days. um So yeah, I'd really recommend hydro cooling if you can.
00:20:34
Speaker
Obviously, you need the water to be safe. You need to pay attention to that. That's a contamination risk. But the hydrocoating is going a huge difference in the long-term quality of of the leafy greens. Yeah. Is there anything else, any other tips? Ariel, do you want to just mention just in general how many things we can find secondhand and not have to purchase new?
00:20:54
Speaker
I would just say in general, it's all dependent on your situation and and you're going to know your know your situation best. um When I started my farm, I had no money. And so a lot of stuff was sourced on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. There's always a deal to be had. It's obviously going to take more time.
00:21:11
Speaker
um So, you know, kind of in this world, we either get to spend more money and save time or we have to save some money and then spend a bunch of time. I'd say just be careful about what you buy. um Certain things, like for example, a carport, I think can be a really good place to save money because you can really easily see the structure, assess if it's something you want to buy.
00:21:30
Speaker
<unk> very hard to imagine a food safety risk related to like a used carport. Other things I'd be very skeptical about buying used. So for example, like those wash tubs we were talking about, oftentimes they were previously used on animal operations. I just,
00:21:46
Speaker
I just would never recommend taking something from the animal operation that's come into contact with animals and introducing it to a vegetable operation. So that's something I would invest in buying brand new.
00:21:57
Speaker
But even things like the lights, um certainly if you're looking for things like brushwashers or barrel washers, there's almost always a deal to be had. The other thing I'd say about looking for things on Facebook marketplace, oftentimes it just takes a while to find what you're looking for.
00:22:14
Speaker
So I'd really encourage you like have your plan in mind. and know what you're looking for well ahead of time. Because maybe in your mind, you're saying, hey, I don't think I'm going to need a brush washer for two years. But if you're keeping an eye out, maybe you'll find one at a price you can afford a year before.
Linking Food Safety to Quality and Resources
00:22:28
Speaker
um you know So just always be on the lookout. Always have an idea of what you're looking for. And and sometimes that means you can find a good deal. Well, yeah, um I guess my final thought would just be food safety and products quality and post-harvest efficiency really do go hand in hand. So I think the farms that I've seen kind of successfully implement food safety practices found that they had higher quality product that lasted longer. Their stuff was cleaner and everything just worked a little bit more smoothly. Ariel, do you have any other thoughts?
00:23:04
Speaker
I would just encourage people be be thoughtful about the space. I mean, really, that the the washing and packing of your produce is not only a big part of the efficiency of your operation, it's the last step before your customer sees what you have on your farm.
00:23:18
Speaker
And I know for me, sometimes things could be super hectic on the farm. Maybe the produce quality looked terrible. But what I really prided myself on was the customer never knew. because we did a really good job washing, packing, sorting, grading the produce. And at the end of the day, your customers are just going to see what you bring to them. So I really encourage people to think about that piece of their operation, take that piece of their operation seriously. And I think no matter what you do, whether it's CSA or farmers market or wholesale, it's going to be a big benefit to you to your business as a farm if you're taking the wash pack piece of the operation seriously.
00:23:54
Speaker
Links to anything referenced in this episode can be found in the podcast description. For more produce safety resources, tools, and upcoming trainings, visit the MSU Agri-Food Safety website at gaps.msu.edu.
00:24:08
Speaker
That's G-A-P-S dot M-S-U dot E-D-U. We hope today's episode helped you take another step towards safer produce.