Center for Produce Excellence

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Over the Winter, we’ve been building a homemade walkin or cooler about 8 X 10ft in size in the barn back at the house. It’s loosely based on a design from UK-Extension and it will be cooled using a plain ole air conditioner and a Coolbot controller. It’ll be a nice change from operating out of the air conditioned basement and a single refrigerator, like we have for the past two years (I won’t even go how nice it’ll be to pull up to the barn door on level ground rather than the death defying trip along the side-hill to the basement!).

Most importantly, this will improve our ability to quickly remove field heat from everything we pick which slows down plant cell respiration which helps our produce last longer after it’s purchased. Rapidly cooling things and keeping them cool (with those big white coolers at market) is one of the reasons our greens hold up.