Read the testimony of Farmer Dave!

Dave Dumaresq started using our controlled atmosphere bins in 2018. The feed back he gave us is so great, we wanted to share it with you: heredunder you can read his testimony:

“I first heard about the CA bins in 2014, on a trip to Italy, where I met Benoit Janny at the Interpoma trade show.

A few years later, when I was building a new facility, I was really willing to find the best way to preserve my fruits and vegetables. I am growing quite a range of different crops (lettuce, cabbages, greens, plums, apples, nectarines, blueberries…), and what I was looking for was flexibility to better manage my storage, and limit waste as much as possible. I thought it was the time to give the controlled atmosphere bins a try, and I took about one hundred bins.

Now I am very satisfied with the equipment. I started with apples, and more recently tried it with plums, blueberries, carrots, leeks, cabbage, peaches and nectarines. As I have been following Benoit’s technical recommendations, this storage has worked beautifully since the beginning. The support from JMT is great, with very quick and accurate answers about how to better preserve each product.

With the apples, I was able to store them for 6 additional months, and with plums 1 additional month. Both products have great quality when I take them out of CA. For the other commodities my trials are still ongoing and I will have the results soon.

As the majority of my sales are through retailing, the CA bins are very interesting, because they give me the capacity to extend my sales period with good prices instead of putting them into wholesale. I am able to sell top quality apples 6 months after harvest. The stone fruit can now be sold from July to November, which means I extended their sales period from 3 months to 4. This one-month difference is equal to around 4,000 additional pounds of stone fruit that I can sell retail instead of wholesale, so yes this is clearly profitable.
And you can add that the bins are reusable with plenty of other crops throughout the year. With my crop diversity, I might use the same bin three times in a year, adding to their economic viability.

Having this much additional flexibility also allows me to adjust my planting plans to add efficiencies. For example, for lettuce, instead of planting every 10 days, we might plant larger plantings every 3 weeks, and pick up bigger quantities at once knowing that we can store them in the CA bins if needed. Fewer but larger plantings will add efficiency and profitability in the field as a result of having invested in the the JMT bins.

I would definitely recommend this equipment to others, especially to those who grow a variety of crops. It is an innovative, safe and flexible way to manage harvests more efficiently and profitably.”