This transcript is AI generated; there may be mistakes.
One of the different things about us is that we grow all of our finished product on spec.
We don't have any committed orders.
And so we wait for our customers to call us.
We fill up this whole greenhouse and we ship it out knowing that our customers will rely on our quality and that they'll always come to us and we will empty the greenhouse at the end of the season.
I'm Dave Van Vugt.
I'm a grower, part of the third generation of Van Vugt Greenhouses here in Pompton Plains, New Jersey.
We try very hard to have a good relationship with our customers.
Everyone in the company knows our customers.
Our customers know all the main people.
They can communicate with any single one of them, including our drivers, which is a great aspect, a great way to build a relationship with them.
For plugs, which we grow for Ball Seed, our customers are other greenhouses in northern New York, western New York, and New Jersey.
And then with our finished product, we supply independent garden centers.
We strive to get everyone on the same page here and have a really strong team culture.
We like how all of our growers are all committed to the same objective, which is top quality plugs.
We just keep open communication.
We all know each other very well, which is good.
Everyone that is new, we try to just include them.
I would almost call it an informal mentoring system where you have the more tenured employees who are able to just kind of bring the younger ones like myself along and just kind of get that culture ingrained in each one of us.
My name is Greg Pohl.
I work for Van Vugt Greenhouses here in Pompton Plains, New Jersey.
I've been here for 36 years working with my father-in-law, Joe, and my brother-in-law, John.
We grow the best plugs possible by giving each seedling what it needs.
We pay very close attention to temperature needs, pH needs, changing fertilizers.
Fix any issues that we see.
If we have a problem, we can order new seed, start over.
We patch everything that we can to ensure the best plugs.
As far as our finished product, we strive for on-time delivery, make sure that everything from the greenhouse to the customer is just as good as it was here.
We do as much as possible on our own grower trucks, which I would say is about 90%.
Where we can't truck, we FedEx or common carrier if we need to.
But for the most part, it's all on our own heated trucks.
To get to 100% order fill, we have a few different solutions.
One aspect of dealing with them is sowing extra.
We do about roughly, depending on the germ, about 20% over-sow in most of our plugs.
So we always will have enough to patch and to replace if needed.
We're also our own biggest customer of plugs for all of our finished product.
We sow a lot of plugs.
And so if we need to, we can put our customer first and we can steal from ourselves, so to speak, in order to supply our customers.
The automation in this business has been amazing, just watching it all evolve.
By investing in automation and in things that help with the plant quality, it just makes it much easier on our end.
We have a water storage tank outside.
It's very difficult to germinate seeds.
Plants are very sensitive to cold water.
So what we're looking into is actually putting our water tank inside a barn.
And this way we'll be able to warm up a larger volume of water and be able to get water to the plants a lot more quickly.
We've recently installed a new conveyor belt system in order to reduce labor.
We've also included a new bench de-stacker and stacker system for our plug range.
That's also reduced labor.
The adult supplier Ball supplied us with technical support.
Most recently, they have provided us with technical advisors that stop by from month to month to walk the crops and to give us advice on different things that we could change to improve.
Well, being part of the third generation at Van Vugt Greenhouses is just a really neat experience.
You know, knowing that my grandfather started the business, my father built the business, and being able to be here, be a part of it, know the opportunities ahead of us in terms of our customer, and hopefully being able to give my own improvements where I can.
It's just a huge driver for myself and hopefully for the whole company.
Thank you for watching!