Since acquiring the Darwin Colombia farm in 2014, Darwin Perennials has made several changes. But this is not just investing in the short-term — we are investing in the infrastructure and facilities to support growth for our customers well into the future. Darwin Perennials has been grateful for the outpouring of support shown by our customers over the years as we accomplish our plans. This support has allowed us to invest in new facilities to ensure we can supply a robust, clean stock program consistently for healthy cuttings and AutoStix inputs.
In addition, we are investing in our people, too. We have created a new position at Darwin Colombia for an expert with decades of experience in the industry to help us continually improve: Corné Brooijmans is our new operations manager for Darwin Colombia. We can’t wait to see where his expertise takes production. Welcome, Corné!
Now let’s look closer at a few of our infrastructure changes:
New Cold Room – Packing, Shelving and AutoStix
Darwin Colombia’s new cold room provides the unique ability to properly handle and maintain exact temperature-controlled maintenance of cuttings post-harvest, during packing and prior to shipment to our customers’ doors. This means we have the best possible conditions for cuttings post-harvest and high quality cuttings delivered.
For cold chain accurate packing (above), cuttings are transported to the cold room to start cooling within 15 minutes or less of harvest. Each bag is individually scanned upon receipt in the cold room and allocated to a designated space where it will be carefully monitored until shipment.
The team in Colombia packs each customer box (above) by scanning the bags destined for each account and doing a second check with the pack-list box to ensure accuracy. We also prepare the AutoStix for our customers in our cold room to ensure the highest possible quality.
New Construction
Darwin Colombia has room to grow! We just constructed a new elite stock block that is housing the elite material we use to fill our production greenhouses with clean/pathogen-free product. We also have an additional hectare of newly constructed, state-of-the-art production greenhouses with ideal conditions for growing perennials.
Darwin Perennials is commited to the ongoing success of our grower customers. With these ongoing investments, Darwin Colombia is poised to provide market-leading genetics delivered in full and on time.
Stay tuned for more news, or contact us anytime for questions about how Darwin Perennials is investing in you.