Post-Harvest Handling Decision Tool > General Considerations >
Packing Facility Considerations

A packing facility for fresh produce ideally provides a comfortable, safe, and efficient environment for people and produce alike. Facilities can range from a bare minimum to something that resembles a licensed processing facility.

Minimum Requirements

It doesn’t take much to get started with a packing facility, but some basic considerations should be taken into account:

A Roof

Some sort of roof, and preferably side walls in addition, should be used to provide protection from sun, wind, and rain. Small farmers often start with a simple farmers market awning. At the author’s Rock Spring Farm, a twenty-foot wide hoophouse with high rollup sides was used for this purpose; in the summer months, shade cloth provided protection from the sun’s heat. Although less-than-ideal, this setup enabled packing in relative comfort for four seasons every year.

A Walk-In Cooler

Every farm visited for this study had a walk-in cooler. Although many ways exist to chill produce, keeping it cool presents another challenge altogether. A walk-in cooler provides the ability to pre-harvest crops, and deliver them chilled to the customer.

Water

At a minimum, the packing facility needs access to a supply of clean, safe water, and a way to move it away from the workers’ boots. A deep gravel bed can provide an inexpensive way to drain water away, as can drainage hoses from the drain plugs of tanks.

Bathrooms and Handwashing Facilities

While none of the farms visited for this study had a bathroom attached to the packing house, everybody had a bathroom available for use by employees and workers. Hand sanitation in the bathroom and in the packing shed is a must; the absence of a handwashing sink creates an additional burden on management to guarantee the cleanliness of hands that come in contact with the produce.

A simple handwashing area can be created with a small, instant electric water heater, a basin, and a soap dispenser for under $500; while warm water isn’t necessary to soap’s effectiveness, it does increase the likelihood that workers will scrub their hands for the recommended twenty seconds.

Other Food Safety Considerations

Allowance should be made for sanitizing equipment and facilities, and pests should be excluded. Open-air packing facilities can’t exclude pests, but can make the packing area less inviting to rodents, flies, and birds by keeping the area clean of debris, installing bird netting over open rafters, and moving pallets regularly.

Food Safety

While food safety issues are beyond the scope of this document, they are important. With every new health scare, the likelihood that all farmers producing food for humans will be required to meet certain standards for facilities and procedures. Any vegetable farmer intending to stay in business should understand the steps they may need to take in a regulated environment, and make investments that will achieve those steps.

Water

Water may well prove to be the most troublesome element in improving packing operations. Most post-harvest handling equipment uses water to clean and cool the produce, so you need a plentiful, easily-accessible supply of clean, safe water. Brush washers and barrel washers rely on a consistent supply of water; although manufacturers can provide more concrete information, a large brush washer can use up to 1.5 gallons of water per minute.

For crisping tanks, and tank-type barrel washers, the rate at which the tank fills can be a severely limiting factor. With inadequate water supplies, slow tank-filling requires a degree of organization and regimentation that can be difficult to achieve. At a rate of ten gallons per minute, a 300-gallon tank will take half an hour to fill, so cycling a full tank of dirty water to a full tank of clean water can easily involve forty-five minutes of downtime. (Not to mention that at low flow-rates, filling a tank with a hose can make it impossible to have a washing machine operating in the house concurrently!)

Washing vegetables uses a lot of water, and it has to go somewhere. The three-season packing houses visited in this study all vegetable wash water out to a pasture or grassy waterway. For a four-season packing facility, deep burial to avoid freezing would be an important consideration.

Adequate drainage from the packing area has an importance equal to or greater than an adequate supply of water coming in. The change from washing in a tank to using a barrel washer, for example, changes the ability of the ambient water to remove dirt and mud from the washing area; draining a tank creates a large flow of water all at once, sluicing the mud away with it; at 1.5 gallons of water per minute, a barrel washer allows mud to build up directly underneath it; in addition, without a catch pan, water from a barrel or brush washer can’t be directed to particular location, increasing the importance of adequate drainage and slope.

Materials Handling

In many ways, farming is a materials handling game. The more stuff you move the more quickly (while maintaining product quality) the more profitable your farm is likely to be.

Concrete may well be the foremost way to improve the materials handling aspect of the packing shed. Pallet jacks operate most efficiently on concrete, and it can greatly increase the ease of operation for two-wheeled dollies.

Access points should be designed according to product flow, and made flexible enough to accommodate new knowledge and new developments. Even for farms operating on a very small scale, all access points should be designed for the potential use of a pallet jack, with room to steer in and out.

Access for harvest and delivery transport should also be considered. For harvest vehicles, drive-through capability can greatly increase the efficiency with which product can make the transition from field to packing shed.

Coolers for Produce Storage

You can’t build a big enough cooler, so packing shed design should accommodate future potential needs for cooler expansion. Coolers should be big enough for palletized product, with enough room to maneuver and organize product as well as to store it.

Additional Storage

Waxed produce boxes, although designed for contact with moisture, are not designed for continual, long-term contact with water. They must be stored in a dry area. Rodents also have an excessive fondness for these expensive items.

Plastic clamshells can deform slightly in extremely cold weather, causing them to close with difficulty or not at all. Accommodation should be made for temperature-controlled storage for these items.

Electricity

Most post-harvest handling equipment utilizes some sort of electrical motor. Electrical outlets should provide adequate access without stringing electrical cords over long distances or through water. Outlets should be protected with a Ground-Fault Interrupter (GFI, or GFCI) switch, and be outfitted with a wet location in use cover to keep water from contacting outlets that have equipment plugged in.

Most equipment runs on a 110-volt supply, although refrigeration and ice machines may require a 220-volt supply.

Seasonal Considerations

In the Upper Midwest, the three-season packing facility seems to be the most prevalent design. All of the facilities visited for this project were open to the elements, and none had made arrangements for permanent heat in their packing facilities. Two had the potential to be sealed up and a unit heater utilized to provide temporary heat.

Growers looking into season extension – either with hoophouses or storage crops – should consider for how many dates each week and for how long into the winter they plan to wash and pack their produce when designing a packing shed.

Water management in an Upper Midwest winter can provide a real challenge, since extreme temperatures can freeze even moving water. At Rock Spring Farm, the author installed perforated drainage tile pipe five feet below the ground to move water from the packing shed to the drainage area, providing an opportunity for water to gradually soak into the groundwater on its way to a possibly frozen outlet.

System Capacity

As a farmer himself, the author is aware that farmers tend to run themselves and their facilities at overcapacity much of the time. Most market farmers can’t afford to invest in excess capacity that creates additional overhead, but at the same time, we can’t ask our employees to do what we, as entrepreneurs, are willing to do to achieve financial and lifestyle success. Designing a facility that is large enough, but not too large, and comfortable enough, but not too comfortable, is a task very dependent on the experience of the individual grower.

This information is part of a Post-harvest Handling Decision Tool developed by Chris Blanchard of Rock Spring Farm in Decorah, Iowa. The tool is a project of the Fruit and Vegetable Working Group affiliated with the Value Chain Partnerships program. This project was funded by the Iowa State University Extension Value Added Agriculture program and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Blanchard conducted case studies of three vegetable operations to gather information for this decision tool. Products referred to in this tool are not an endorsement by Iowa State University.