Saunders Brothers Inc is committed to being green and we are environmentally friendly.
We believe in sustainability. Working with professors from the University of Florida’s Department of Environmental Horticulture, we were the first container nursery in the United States to help develop new technology for irrigating container crops. The system is based on the Evapotranspiration (ET) rate of the plants and bases water application on daily environmental factors including temperature, solar radiation and rainfall. It also considers the size of the plants. It has helped us cut our water usage by over 100 million gallons annually; that’s water conservation! In addition, the irrigation technology helped us reduce our fertilizer usage and our pesticide applications.
We have started utilizing rice hulls as a mulch on some crops to eliminate the use of herbicides.
We recapture our runoff water and practice Integrated Pest Management which reduces our pesticide use. Greenhouse plastic is also baled and recycled eliminating it from local landfills.
Our spray program now also includes trialing some bio control products. We hope to have more on this soon.
Also, we have started a company called NewGen. It was started with goals of breeding boxwood and evaluating varieties to find ones that are less prone to leafminers and Boxwood blight. Two patented plants that we released in 2020, NewGen Independence and NewGen Freedom met those goals. Identifying these plants and hopefully others down the road means less pesticide usage and a landscape you can rely on.