At Leader Greenhouse, we are committed to provide you with well-designed, high-quality greenhouse and tools to meet your needs for the construction of the farm!
Every day, we see the fields, hear the challenges, and listen to the ideas of those who make a living by farming. This is the inspiration and motivation for all of our product development. Every day we can receive the design request of the farmer friend, comes from each country, each kind of climate, our designer can act according to the situation, designs conforms to the local condition the greenhouse, uses the simplest material, builds the most reliable greenhouse.
Our goal is to continue to develop the types of greenhouses and the supply of greenhouse accessories to make farm greenhouses and greenhouses of the 21st century more efficient and profitable. Your success in agriculture will be our success as we grow together to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Where do I start? I guess it really goes back to 1997 when my father came under conviction that he wanted to have a home-based business (he and my mom are both teachers by training). After looking at many options, he felt God leading to organic farming. There was only one problem: he had no knowledge or practical experience in farming. All he had was Eliot Coleman’s The New Organic Grower as his guide and a belief that God was directing.
Well, needless to say, the next few years were very difficult ones as he learned through the “school of hard knocks.” But Eliot’s book was kept by dad’s side and dad came to view him as his “mentor” — even though the two had never met.
So, when we got the news that Eliot was going to be in Nashville (just an hour away) for a conference, my dad was pretty thrilled — that is until we learned that the conference was to be on Saturday. You see, as Bible-believing Christians, we see Saturday (the 7th day of the week) as the Sabbath. We are asked not to do any work on that day (Ex. 20:8-11) and since farming is kind of like work, we choose not to do anything farm-related (including going to conferences) — which meant not meeting Eliot.
But my sister Kirsten, unbeknown to my dad, decided she was going to try and arrange a meeting between the two of them. So she wrote Eliot a letter explaining why my dad wouldn’t be at his conference, and wondering if there was another time they could meet. Eliot graciously responded and said he would love to meet my dad and talk. How about for breakfast Sunday morning — and could she come too? She had great joy in making an invitation to this breakfast date. My dad was thrilled!
They had a wonderful time over breakfast and Eliot invited my dad and uncle (who had become my dad’s farm partner) to come visit his farm in Maine. That was nice, but times were hard and it didn’t seem like a doable dream — that is until someone who had come to our farm for a week-long workshop gave my dad a check and said it was for he and my uncle and my cousin and me to go visit Eliot’s farm and learn all we could. Kirsten was a little bummed that this was designated a guys trip — because she had more interest in farming than I did, but she was able to surrender it and trust that God had a plan in it all.
So, in September of 2008 (I had just turned 15), we flew up to Maine and spent a couple days visiting and working on Eliot’s farm. While we were there, Eliot looked at my cousin and me and said, “You young guys need to come up with a solution for harvesting baby greens.” He then shared some pencil sketches of ideas he had and left it at that.
Well, that got my wheels turning. You see, growing up on the farm, I was always looking for more efficient (read: “easier”) ways to do things. Why do things by hand if you can come up with a mechanical solution, right? When I got home, I bought an electric bread knife and an electric hedge trimmer and started tinkering. I soon had fabricated something with the hedge trimmer that worked decently. A few drawbacks were that you had to run extension cords a long way, and I kept getting shocked by it! It was also clear that we needed some sort of device to gently push the greens into the blade (so they didn’t just bend over). I had a lot of ideas in my head for how to solve these problems, but didn’t have the skills or equipment needed to take these concepts and create real prototypes. It was clear I needed some help to make this a reality. I talked with my parents about my need and they wished out loud that they knew a “retired engineer” who could help me.
The very next day, a lady acquaintance called my mom to see if she and some of her friends could come and visit the farm. At the end of their visit, as we were saying goodby, it hit my mother that this lady’s husband was a retired engineer! Did she think he would be interested in looking at my harvester ideas? The following day he called and asked what he could do to help. What a Divine appointment!
I couldn’t have asked for a better engineer! Mr. Christianson is brilliant, talented, and willing to think “outside the box.” He bent over backwards to help this “kid” come up with a working prototype. Sometime in 2010 we had a greens harvester that was cutting well, but then I lost momentum on the project. I got distracted with my Mighty Power Small Engine Shop, and just wasn’t sure how to proceed with the production challenge. So, things kind of sat on the shelf for a while.
Then, in the winter of 2012, my dad was reading the latest Growing for Market magazine and saw about the “Slow Tools Summit” that Eliot had helped organize. Someone there had demonstrated a mechanized greens harvester and there was interest in getting it into production. My father encouraged me to “act quick” or else I was going to lose out. I emailed Eliot and sent him a picture of what we had been working on. He said he “whooped and hollered” when he saw the photo; he could tell from the picture that it had great potential. He then immediately forwarded it on to Adam Lemieux at Johnny’s Selected Seeds and they said they would like to see it demonstrated.
Please contact us if you have any questions. We are here to serve you!