Text: Henna Niskakoski, Chief Scientific Officer, EOD Oy
Kitsböle Home Farm is open and willing to try new farming techniques. The farm has operated without pesticides since the beginning, relying solely on biological control. When Erno heard about EOD’s oxygenation technology, he was immediately interested. Kitsböle Home Farm is EOD’s first commercial garden customer, already since 2022.
“The efficacy of plant protection products is constantly decreasing and they are being removed from the market. Perhaps the most important idea behind our decision to introduce oxygen nanobubble technology was that we can strengthen our production with purely biological measures. We want to be able to do this without biocides when we are, so to speak, in the middle of the green transition,” says Erno about the Kitsböle farm’s decision to explore the new oxygenation technology solution.
Finnish consumers are increasingly aware and want to eat products grown without pesticides. Finnish berries, fruits, and vegetables are generally among the cleanest in the world, but new sustainable methods are needed to improve yields and the profitability of plant production. It is not a simple task to rely solely on biological farming methods but it requires foresight.
Erno has a feeling that plant diseases in particular can rear their heads when growing conditions are unbalanced, and oxygen supplementation can help to restore the balance. “Before oxyfertigation, gray mold and powdery mildew could ruin up to 30 % of the strawberry harvest. Now powdery mildew is almost gone, and gray mold only occurs in the fall, when the weather gets cooler and the humidity is constantly high. That’s when it’s already time to wrap up the season anyway,” Erno comments and continues, “Every fall, we always think in retrospect about what went wrong this year. With the addition of oxygen, there are significantly fewer things to worry about and the yield per hectare has increased year after year, even though oxyfertigation cannot prevent insect damage. There are always some small worries, but now every summer is a good summer.”
Oxyfertigation has been found to have also other practical effects that make work easier, and the impact of stress factors on the harvest is less. Elina says that oxygen enriched irrigation water gives, among other things, a little more flexibility when estimating the amount of overwatering: The idea of overwatering is to remove excess fertilizers from the growing medium. However, if you water too much, the growth conditions of the root system can easily become oxygen-deficient, so the oxygen nanobubbles in the irrigation water ensures that the plant has good conditions to grow healthy, and the risks of overwatering are not so significant.
Oxygen nanobubble technology was introduced at Kitsböle Home Farm in 2022 as a part of an EIP cooperation project led by Satakunta University of Applied Sciences. At the beginning of the project, in the 2022 harvest season, only a few strawberry rows received oxygen nanobubbles with the irrigation water, while in the third year of the study in 2024, only a few control rows were left without oxygen nanobubbles. Since the summer of 2025, all rows have received oxyfertigation throughout each irrigation of the season.
Strawberries are grown in tunnels in two layers in grow bags, where about 30 % of moss and wood fiber has been mixed with peat for several years now. “Cultivation in two layers increases the production efficiency of the production area, although the seedlings in the lower trough still produce an average of 25 % less yield than the seedlings in the upper trough, because, among other things, they receive less light and grow closer to the ground with higher humidity. The direction is right, but it is still possible to improve the production result by optimizing the conditions, especially in the lower troughs,” Elina says.
Since 2022, the strawberry harvest has increased every year. In 2025, when all strawberries received oxygen nanobubbles within the irrigation water, the harvest was 40 % higher when comparing to year 2022. The significant increase in production achieved through oxyfertigation strengthens the profitability of continuous-yield tunnel strawberry production produced using biological methods and encourages us to meet the requirements of both customers and the Green Transition for clean food production. Erno believes that the strong growth will continue and is already thinking about the coming season. “In 2025, we produced 53 thousand kilograms of strawberries per hectare, next year our goal is to achieve a yield of 60 thousand kilograms per hectare,” he estimates.
Both Erno and Elina are happy to share their experience with oxygen nanobubbles, and you can ask them for practical tips if you are considering using EOD oxygen nanobubble solution at your own farm. “You can always learn something new from discussions with other farmers,” says Elina, commenting on her interest in sharing her cultivation knowledge. Leave us a message using the contact form and we will forward you the contact details of Kitsböle Home Farm to have a direct discussion with them.
Learn more about the Kitsböle home farm here
Photos: Kitsböle Home Farm archives
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