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Our primary purpose to construct a cold storage was to extend the season of fruit grown on the farm and to serve our customers requirements for post season fruit availability.
Our first refrigerated cold storage was built in 1977. Since then we have expanded eight times with the last building completed in 2009. Our present facilities accommodate not only fruit that we grow but also store fruit from several other growers in the Western New York region.
Our cold storage has a capacity of 150,000 bushels of apples or approximately six million pounds of apples. Included in the storage is an 84,000 bushels of fully automated Controlled Atmosphere (CA) storage. We separate nitrogen from the air with a machine called a nitrogen generator and then flush the CA rooms to bring the oxygen down to about 2%. We also remove access carbon dioxide from the rooms using scrubbers that absorb the CO2. A computer monitors all rooms automatically every hour to ensure the fruit is kept in optimal condition.
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