Agro Best

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Hi, to all solaroof.org members:

My name is Tuisco Petzoldt. I live and work in Holland and my life longtime friend and business partner Steve Silos lives and works in Suriname fulltime on our agroBest greenhouse project. We are building a controlled environment greenhouse.

In our endeavors to improve horticulture practices in the Humid Tropics we found that information is scarce when it comes to production in controlled environment conditions.

The ambient climate conditions such as: Hot Temperatures (average 32˚ C), Rain (average 3000 mm/annum) and High Relative Humidity (average 80%) are the major factors we need to control for our greenhouse.

We have already built a 14 x 15 meter greenhouse as a pilot project for the 1 hectare commercial vegetable production operation of phase one of our endeavors.

We installed an evaporative cooling system along with Roll Star automated roll up/roll down side walls. These motors are superb and can be purchased from our dear friend Mr. Je J&C - Mr. J.J. Je / president (jccorp@kornet.net) BUSAN, KOREA TEL: +82-51-803-6586 FAX: +82-51-803-6586. WOO SUNG HITEC CO., LTD.) www.wandw.net . The floor is covered with green woven groundcover upon which a white plastic sheet is laid to eliminate soil moisture evaporation into the greenhouse.

With the solaroof tech we have found a superb solution for our radiation heat problem. We immediately contacted our dear solaroofguy, Richard Nelson, who is guiding us further with some of the required technical installation and operational details.

We still face the challenge of reducing the RH of the ambient air form 80% to minimal 55% in such a fashion that the dehumidified air enters into a insulated dry air chamber that maintains a constant Static Pressure of 1.0 for our evaporative cooling system to optimally cool the greenhouse. We want to keep energy consumption as low as creatively possible, working as much as possible in harmony with Mother Nature. We belief that moving the warm moist ambient air through a series of underground ducts may result in the appropriate condensation of the moist in the air. Of course we do not have any knowledge or experience in how to dehumidify warm moist ambient air in a passive energy way and are also seeking help on this.

Steve Silos and I are extremely grateful to Maureen Silos maureensilos@sr.net, Director of Caribbean Institute, who is doing a lot of wonderful transformative work with farmers towards biological horticulture and supply chain management. She introduced us to Steve Troy (steve@sustainablevillage.com) who has become a dear friend. Mr. Troy immediately upon contact took note of our challenges and soon afterwards forwarded your soloroof.org site stating “I thought you'd be interested in this site.” And sure enough, it was the “EUREKA” site for our hot roof problem.

So here we are, feeling right at home among people with the common interest of finding solutions for the realization of “a very different world than the one we see around us” as Richard mentions in his own vision so eloquently on his welcome solaroof.org page.

For Steve and I, this vision goes very deep, being born and raised in Suriname – a developing country going through all kinds of growing pains, and where the quality of life is a constant challenge on all levels of human experience.

In 2003, Steve and I decided to enter full heartedly into what we named as the agroBest project. It is a project to first develop a low budget highly efficient multipurpose controlled environment production space for the humid tropics to ultimately share our product with everyone who “envisions a very different world than the one we see around us in Suriname and the planet we are blessed with to experience life on”. The second stage is to commercially produce vegetables and to also setup a school to teach those who seek to better the quality of their lives, independently as private entrepreneurs, how to setup and manage such an operation.

Our dream is to develop a feasible Low Budget production space for the humid tropics that can be used for a wide range of ag-production enterprises such as: vegetable, plant nursery, poultry, dairy, and hog production. The climate of the humid tropics has an adverse effect on today’s required human, plant and animal productivity. Having access to a space that in conducive to increasing productivity will improve the quality of life of farmers in the humid tropics.

We have studied your solaroof.org website, back and forth, up and down, inside and out and concluded that the solaroof community has precisely the kind of cognition we are in accord with in our endeavor to help realize our dream in this last quarter of our lives before we exit.

“Some men see the world as it is and say, ‘Why?’ -- I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’” Robert Kennedy

Best Regards:

Steve Silos Belladonnastraat 15 Paramaribo Suriname P.O.Box 2125 steve.silos@agrobest.biz Tel.: ++597 464358

Tuisco.R.L Petzoldt Lutmastaat 83 1073 GR Amsterdam The Netherlands tuis.petz@agrobest.biz Tel.: ++31 06 21222627


Hi Tuisco and Steve, we need you at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/if-wms - Solaroofguy


Hi Tuisco, Steve and Rick - I've already invited T and S. Lucas Gonzalez


Nice work. Why use evaporative cooling in a high humidity environment? Why not just dehumidify? Or shade? Or both? Abayomi