New Ultrafiltration system for Pure Harvest Smart Farms

At the end of 2021, Pure Harvest Smart Farms commissioned its new greenhouses in Saudi Arabia. Growing in Saudi Arabia means that water management is of high importance. For the new greenhouses, Dutch company Mienis Water supplied the water treatment systems. This involves a Reverse Osmosis with a production of 50 m3/hour and an Ultrafiltration as recycling/disinfectant of 36 m3/hour. Both systems are fully automatic, which means that they maintain themselves without human intervention.

Ultrafiltration
Ultrafiltration is a membrane technique in which the infections are filtered out of the water, instead of being killed. All of this happens at low pressure, which means that the energy consumption is very low. Jochum Genuit from Mienis Water explains: “The filter is so fine that 100% of the nematodes and fungi, 99.999999% of the bacteria, and 99.999% of the viruses are removed from the water. In addition, the turbidity after our system is usually around 0.03 NTU, which ensures a cleaner irrigation system and better control over the infections behind the system. Finally, this technique also makes closed cultivation possible, which is something that more and more growers are looking into.”

Year-round tomatoes
According to Thomas Prins from Pure Harvest Smart Farms, this matches their goals: “Pure Harvest’s goal is to produce year-round tomatoes and other fruits & vegetables in ‘State of the Art’ greenhouses serving local markets. As the production is year-round, the greenhouse will never be empty. This challenge requires the strictest hygiene protocols, ideal crop conditions, and the best water treatment possible. The system of Mienis Water meets all of that. That's why we selected them.”

Ultrafiltration
Jochum continues: ‘For more than 5 years, we have been demonstrating that our unique Ultrafiltration can be used on all types of water flows - stably, safely, and automatically. The system does treat the drain water from tomatoes, but we also use it with floriculture companies and with cuttings- and young plants growers.’