There are many options when it comes to constructing a walk-in cooler, cold room, or warm room for on-farm storage. The main goals for construction of any temperature and humidity controlled space are: The resources below provide an overview of common cooler wall construction options.
Category Archives: Refrigeration and Storage
Mighty Clean and Comfortable (Video Series)
Lisa MacDougall has led Mighty Food Farm through start-up, relocation from rented land to owned land, and now through the construction of a brand-new 60 ft x 90 ft wash and pack shed. She’s done this all while producing a diverse mix of organic vegetables, tree fruit and berries on fourteen acres, now, in Shaftsbury. …
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The BarnHouse: Optimized for Modern Day Vegetable Farming at Footprint Farm
Download the PDF Fact Sheet of this Post Harvest Case Study Here! Taylor and Jake Mendel own and operate Footprint Farm in Starksboro, VT. Starting their own farm in 2013, they now produce pretty much everything except storage potatoes and storage squash with 66 different kinds of vegetables grown in both fields and high-tunnels. About …
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Footprint Farm: Post Harvest Case Study – Video Series
Looking to upgrade your wash-pack space? Check out this interview with Taylor Hutchison from Footprint Farm talking about their motivations for building a new barn (house!) and including all the features they implemented to make it food safe and efficient. Stay tuned for a written case study, and a downloadable pdf coming soon. The playlist …
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Bins, Buckets, Baskets & Totes
So you’re starting to farm, or scaling up your production. You hear talk about produce safety and cleanability. You are checking out what other farms are doing and are looking for harvest crates and storage bins. You probably noticed lots of people use many different things. Some use 5-gallon pails, milk crates, muck buckets, some …
Mighty Clean and Comfortable – A New Wash and Pack Shed at Mighty Food Farm
Download this Postharvest Case Study as a PDF Here! Lisa MacDougall has led Mighty Food Farm through start-up, relocation from rented land to owned land, and now through the construction of a brand-new 60 ft x 90 ft wash and pack shed. She’s done this all while producing a diverse mix of organic vegetables, tree …
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Construction Details for a Counter-top Forced Air Cooler
To learn more about forced air cooling visit go.uvm.edu/forcedaircooling To download the PDF version of this plan click here! Farms that need to cool smaller volumes of produce can also benefit from forced air cooling. Whether cooling stacked pallets, pallet bins or individual cartons, the same principals apply. A smaller pallet cooler was noted on …
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Construction Details for a Pallet Forced Air Cooler
To learn more about forced air cooling visit go.uvm.edu/forcedaircooling To download the PDF version of this guide click here! Framing: 2”x12” lumber to make a 43” wide x 74” tall x 11-1/4” deep plenum for suction air distribution. Plenum Panel: 3/8” CDX Plywood with an 11-1/4” circle cut out for the blower suction inlet. Position …
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Forced Air Cooling On The Farm
A downloadable/printable pdf of this article is available here. Introduction The preservation of quality in fresh market and storage crops on small and medium-sized farms in the Northeast depends on the rapid reduction of pulp temperature and maintenance of relatively low temperatures to slow metabolic respiration. There is strong foundational work showing that rapidly reducing …
Small Scale Forced Air Cooling Demo (Video)
Here is a video shot during some field experimentation last week working in a cooler.