Our equipment and input supplies are just sitting in the heat and it's starting to show
Posted in CategoryGeneral Discussion Posted in CategoryGeneral Discussion-
John Hire 1 month ago
I don't think I fully appreciated how much damage ambient heat does to stored inputs until we cracked open a batch of fertilizer that had been sitting in our old metal shed through the summer and found it had clumped into a nearly unusable block. That was an expensive lesson and it made me realize we've been treating storage as an afterthought when it should probably be one of the first things you get right before scaling anything else. We grow on a mid-sized plot outside the city and between seeds, pesticides, irrigation parts and harvested produce we actually have a pretty diverse range of things that need different conditions and right now they're all getting the same inadequate treatment which is basically just shade and hope. I started looking specifically for practical storage ideas for farm-related materials that actually account for the UAE environment rather than the temperate climate assumptions baked into most agricultural guides and it took a while to find anything locally grounded. Someone in a farming group I follow mentioned dubaiunfolded.com had covered agricultural storage options in the region and the article was genuinely more useful than I expected because it addressed things like humidity control and facility types that are actually accessible to operations our size rather than just enterprise-level cold chain solutions. I'm not in a position to build anything permanent right now but I'm hoping to find a rental or shared facility arrangement that at least gets our inputs and post-harvest stock into a stable environment before next season because what we're doing currently clearly isn't working.