PLSCI 5175 - [Production and Management of Greenhouse Crops]

Spring. Not offered: 2024-2025. Next offered: 2025-2026. 4 credits. Letter grades only (no audit).

Offered in even-numbered years only. Mandatory two-day, one-overnight field trip. Co-meets with PLSCI 4175.

W. Miller.

Covers basics of establishing a greenhouse operation, growing crops in optimized environments, and serving niche or mass market. Discusses technology basics including structures and equipment, systems for heating and cooling, lighting, irrigating and fertilizing, material handling, environmental stewardship, integrated pest management, and production management. Also covers world centers of greenhouse crop production; culture of cut, pot, bedding, vegetable, and fruit crops in greenhouses, emphasizing predictive harvesting through environmental, physical, and chemical management of growth and development. Each student grows one or more crops.

Outcome 1: Explain the importance of the major environmental factors that affect plant growth, especially in semi-controlled environments (greenhouses).

Outcome 2: Describe how and why a protected cultivation structure can influence the plant-growing environment.

Outcome 3: Describe environmental manipulations needed to control floral induction, initiation, and development in a variety of plants, and how to apply them to produce commercially acceptable crops.

Outcome 4: Successfully produce a variety of flowering crops within a commercially acceptable time period.

Outcome 5: Develop production costs for a crop or crop sequence.

Outcome 6: Use outside resources to develop and evaluate methods of growing an unknown crop.

Outcome 7: Be conversant in the major greenhouse production and management systems and how they interact to profitably and responsibly produce floral crops.