Florida Blue Farms Inc.
Commissioner's Agricultural Environmental Leadership Award
In 2009, Brittany H. Lee started working with her parents to convert 50 acres of their silviculture land in Waldo, Florida, into a Southern Highbush Blueberry farm. This family-run farm has expanded into 90 acres of current production. Brittany’s parents have been in the agricultural/rural land real estate business for over four decades and helped convert the timberland into blueberry production. Brittany is the vice president and general manager of Florida Blue Farms and an alumna of the Wedgeworth Leadership Institute for Agricultural and Natural Resources. Overall, the Lees are committed to conservation, sustainability and protecting natural resources.
Florida Blue Farms implements the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ Specialty Fruit and Nut Crop Operations Best Management Practices (BMPs). These are a combination of practices that have been determined to be the most effective and practical means for maintaining or improving water quality. Brittany consulted FDACS, the St. John’s River Water Management District, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and consulting engineers to employ advanced practices to achieve the BMPs’ goals. The conservation plan includes weather stations for accurate on-site weather conditions; drip irrigation and ground cover, which reduces irrigation needs and inputs; soil moisture monitoring; plant tissue and root growth monitoring and testing to aid in nutrient and herbicide application decisions.
The operation’s drainage system collects water into a 2-acre tailwater recovery pond. This allows for the collection of recoverable frost/freeze irrigation runoff flow and is applied to conserve water supplies for further use and to improve offsite water quality. The pond allows for the reduction of the volume of frost/freeze water from the wells and recycles up to 70 percent of the withdrawals applied to the receiving watershed, with a 50 percent overall long-term farm aquifer reduction goal at build-out. The entire farm layout considers a conservation plan that seeks to provide filtration and avoid erosion. Water recovery and reuse efforts during freeze events have shown a reduction in the instance of sinkholes in other areas of Florida.
The grassy filter strips used throughout the farm sponge up already minimized nutrients and sediments as surface drainage channels its way across weirs and through sediment basins to the tailwater recovery pond, which also performs as a sediment basin. The innovative “EnviroGrid Geocell System” used is a heavy-duty plastic honeycomb that is installed over ground cloth and filled with granite gravel. This is used to minimize adverse water action and to allow natural flows of creeks and waterways to continue. On the nutrition side, highly effective fertigation systems apply spoon-fed nutrients directly to the root zone. Driven by intense monitoring of plant tissue samples, and when coupled with integrated pest management approach to field monitoring, crop protection materials and costs are minimized.
Florida Blue Farms is a member of MBG, a grower-owned blueberry marketing cooperative, which packs and markets its blueberries under the grower-owned “Naturipe” brand.
