Hydroponic growing allows Airlie Hills Family Farm to keep berries ripe into fall

By Matt Neznanski
Gazette-Times reporter

By September, most summer strawberries are just a memory.

But at Airlie Hills Family Farm north of Corvallis, the berries are ripe and sweet all the way until October.

Using a hydroponic system, Aaron Kennel keeps plants producing from early spring until late in the fall.

Casey Campbell | Gazette-Times Ginger Miller feeds a strawberry to her 3-year-old daughter, Phoebe, as they taste some of the varieties of strawberries available for picking at Airlie Hills Farms on Thursday. The hydroponic system used at Airlie Hills has the strawberry plants stacked upward, providing aisles that feature solid ground with a tarp-like cover keeping shoes from getting muddy and allowing for easy mobility.

“All of the main strawberry production in Oregon is in June,” Kennel said. “If you go out to those fields, there are no berries on them, but we’re able to have berries that are just as sweet right now.”

Hydroponic farming doesn’t use soil like regular crop methods do. Instead, plants are rooted in a growing medium and are fed nutrients through water.

At the Airlie Hills farm, seven varieties of strawberries grow in a mixture of perlite and

vermiculite. Stacked Styrofoam containers hold the plants, allowing drip tubes to apply nutrients and water directly to 16 plants at a time.

“It’s kind of like spoonfeeding plants,” Kennel said.

And the crop can be squeezed into a small space. Kennel has 15,000 plants on just a quarter acre located on a corner of the family grass seed farm. That many plants would take up two acres if they were growing in a field.

The stacking system saves a lot of water over traditional growing methods. Kennel said he averages using 700 to 800 gallons of water per day to feed his plants. A two-acre field of berries might be sprayed with 20,000 gallons a day, he said, with a lot of water lost to evaporation and into the ground.

This is the first year Kennel has opened the strawberry plot to pickers. Last year, the project was a test plot to work out some of the details.

A benefit of hydroponic systems is that because the plants are fed nutrients directly, the farmer has control over making berries flavorful.

It’s a delicate balance, though. If just one part of the balance is slightly off, it comes through in the flavor.

“When crops are grown in the ground and their roots take nutrients from it, soil acts as a buffer and offers some protection,” he said. “I’m just now getting to where I have a handle on it. It is a complicated way of doing things.”

The stacked system gets plants off the ground so pickers don’t have to stoop to gather berries.

Kennel said older couples who can’t easily get out in fields to pick show up, and several people in wheelchairs have been able to pick as well.

A good number of pickers arrived in June, the traditional month for strawberries, but have trailed off since then, Kennel said.

He’s been selling berries to Roth’s grocery stores in Salem and Independence to keep the plants working.

Because the berries aren’t grown in soil, they can’t be called organic. Still, the farm uses methods certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute.

“I’ve grown up on the grass seed farm my whole life,” Kennel said. “You’d think I’d know how to plant a strawberry field. But I know more about how to do it this way than the other way around.”

Reporter Matt Neznanski can be reached at 758-9518 or .