Wind tunnel growing method may lead to early harvest

By Carrie A. Mizell

Imagine a 75-acre field flourishing with watermelon plants that just two weeks after being planted, have already caught root, gotten color and are just before running off their beds. As they grow inside wind tunnels, the watermelon plants are thriving in a greenhouse like environment that keeps the temperature 10 to 20 degrees warmer than the outside climate.

Watermelon growers Rantz Smith and Alto Straughn look over plants growing in wind tunnels.

Though they may look a little unusual, the plastic tunnels are perfect for early spring mornings when temperatures dip into the low 40s like Gilchrist County experienced on Monday.
Local watermelon grower Rantz Smith and his partner Alto Straughn are banking on the wind tunnels pushing their harvest up by 10 to 14 days, which could possibly have them picking as early as May 5.
“It’s an experiment at best,” Smith said. “They look good right now, but we’ve got a long way to go.”
It’s an expensive venture that will require Smith to get an extra two and a half cents a pound for his melons just to pay for the plastic tunnels.
On Monday, Smith said he had about 300 of the 400 total acres of watermelons he will plant in Gilchrist County this spring already in the ground. Out of the 400 acres, only 75 are under plastic tunnels.
Planting watermelons under wind tunnels is a relatively new concept in Gilchrist County, though Larry Grant and Howard Bailey tried planting watermelons under wind tunnels in Gilchrist County several years ago.
As the first farmer in North Florida to grow and market seedless watermelons on a large scale some 20 year ago, Straughn said that earlier efforts to use wind tunnels in Gilchrist County were largely unsuccessful because back when Grant and Bailey tried the method, no one knew that wind tunnels had to have ventilation holes so the plants could breathe.
“They’ve come a long ways,” Straughn said. “Wind tunnels are now used all over the world to grow watermelons.”
Using wind tunnels is very time sensitive, Straughn explained. As soon as the plants begin to flower, which should be late March, then the plastic tunnels will have to be ripped off. Like other plants grown in a controlled environment, the watermelon plants will then have to stabilize and adapt to growing in the elements.
“The tunnels will have to come off at the end of March and the cold is not necessarily over at the end of March,” Smith said. “How often do you hunt Easter eggs wearing a jacket?”