Why frost fans are a solid choice to fight frost.
The battle against frost is an ongoing one. Even with frost protection in place, it needs to be up to the job, maintained and monitored regularly. Without good frost protection, expect countless late nights and resource intensive solutions to tend to crops and trees, ensuring frost doesn’t get a hold on growing buds.
Frost isn’t just a cold weather event. It can significantly damage fruit, crops and seedlings right when they’re coming into bud, and destroy years of hard work in an instant. Cumulative frost events can have an even greater negative impact. This leads to food wastage, crops needing to be re-planted (which may take several years to mature), inability to harvest sufficient supply to meet demand, or being unable to produce award-winning vintages. The obvious outcomes are large financial losses and reduced yield.
Damage from frost isn’t just the result of not having protection in place.
Weather predictions aren’t an exact science, and many solutions require guesswork to anticipate when frost events will happen. If you guess right, you’ll have labour on site, helicopters in the air, candles lit, irrigation running. Guessing wrong may mean paying for helicopters and resources when you don’t need them, not having them booked to give you the coverage you need, or not having enough protection in place in time.
Damage can also happen when you have solutions which aren’t up to a good enough standard to get coverage to all areas you need, you run out of fuel or have water restrictions.
So how do you combat frost with consistent coverage? One way to protect crops against frost is by using a frost fan, such as the FrostBoss® 4-blade or 5-blade machines.
Frost fans work by mixing warmer air from above with the colder air at ground level, and blowing the warmer air across the crops. This helps to prevent frost forming on plants, and can also help to speed up the thawing process if frost has already formed.
There are several benefits to using a FrostBoss® frost fan for crop protection:
- Cost-effective:
While there is an upfront cost and fuel is needed to run the fans, frost fans can pay for themselves in in a single frost event. The coverage area is excellent, especially when compared to other methods such as irrigation or heating, and they reduce the cost of guesswork, human error and labour-intensive solutions, and negate the need to get helicopters in the air each time there is a frost.
- Easy to use:
Once installed, frost fans are easy to operate. FrostBoss® have cleverly designed built-in monitoring hardware (with a compatible web app you can subscribe to for up-to-date info and data including temperature, run-hours and machine performance as well as text alarms before and during a frost event). The controller also provides both manual and automatic start/stop options. The towers are rodent & theft resistant, and you can set the fans to turn on before a frost, and turn off much later than traditional methods for greater protection.
- Saves time:
Having the frost fans armed and ready to go when the temperature drops, and having alarms and notifications set to tell you what the fans are doing in real-time, means less time on the ground preparing for the frost, and time back for the things that matter.
- Fuel efficient:
FrostBoss® fans convert more fuel into useful wind, and less into turbulence and noise, which keeps emissions down, and costs low, and greatly reduces the impact on the environment compared to solutions like irrigation, which requires a continuous high flow of water and can produce run off, saturated soils and leaching of agrochemicals.
- Smartly designed to reduce noise:
Ensuring quiet enjoyment of their property is an important consideration for your neighbours. Helicopters regularly flying overhead are noisy, as are some fans which sound like them. FrostBoss® blades have been designed by ex-America’s Cup yachting specialists to produce a hum rather than ‘chop chop’ sound as they circulate. The design and additional blades allow for a greater coverage area, which can also mean a reduced number of fans are needed on site, producing less cumulative noise when all the fans are running. FrostBoss® fans are also significantly quieter than competing 2 and 3-blade machines. - Versatile:
Frost fans can be used to protect a multitude of crops, including fruit trees, berries, grapes, nuts and more.
- Allows for more planting:
Using frost fans and ensuring they are correctly located in relation to the katabatic drift coming through your site, helps make more of your land viable. This allows more space for planting and the ability to grow your business.
- Increases yield:
Having better protection in place, with less manual intervention, ensures minimal crop damage each time there is a frost event, which maintains the potential for shelf-space or award-winning supply, and leads to greater opportunity to increase yield and profits, and decrease overall food waste.
Frost fans by FrostBoss® are the smart choice for growers looking to protect their crops and ensure a successful yield. With significant frost events in recent years, more growers are looking for better protection globally, and to meet the growing need, distributors of FrostBoss® are now in many countries worldwide including New Zealand, Australia, France, Chile, Spain & Italy, and a new blade factory is opening later in 2023 to speed up the ability to get fans to growers when they need them.
For a no-obligation chat to see if FrostBoss® is the right solution to protect your investment, get in touch today.
.svg)
.svg)
