JC Chong

Photo courtesy of SePRO

Greenhouse Management: Why did you decide to leave your role at Clemson to work for SePRO?

JC Chong: I think one of the biggest reasons is the position gives me an opportunity to work with growers directly. Right now, because of my responsibilities at the university with teaching, the most I get to do with growers is go to a trade show and give a talk. Or maybe they’ll send me an email and I can provide them with some recommendations and guidance. That’s all nice and good, but I guess I’m sort of greedy — I want to do more. What I really want is to have the time and the opportunity to really work on developing some kind of effective pest management hand-in-hand with growers and do a little more handholding during the growing process. In an academic position, that kind of opportunity, that kind of time commitment, is not exactly available. This role at SePRO is technical support and problem solving with growers and being out there with growers.

GM: When you think about what you’re most excited to work on, what comes to mind?

JCC: One thing is one of the biggest issues growers face: labor and labor shortages. That’s a topic that growers always say is a problem they have. What I was hoping to do is to help develop a program or some kind of approach that is effective, that is something they don’t have to keep coming back to over and over again. Something that can be effective and time saving. If [growers] can do a good job with pest management, then hopefully they won’t have to spend as much time, labor and resources on that and they can use that time on some other task.

The other thing will be to show growers that pest management can really be integrated. When you’re talking about chemical control or biological control, I think the two approaches can be combined. So that’s something that I hope to get to do — some kind of demonstration to show that it’s possible.

GM: Where do you feel like the greenhouse industry is at on the floriculture side?

JCC: My personal feeling is that the industry is maturing, and I feel like, in some ways, we are reaching some sort of a bottleneck as far as growth potential is concerned. So what I mean by that is, we have grown a floriculture crop, now what else can we do? What else can we grow? And that’s to either make it more profitable, or is it growing a new product? Or can it help us grow our client base? There’s a new generation of customers, Gen Z, and they should be our focus in the next few years. Really get to understand them in terms of what makes them tick, what they are willing to buy and what they are interested in. We should be really catering to the future consumer in some way.