The remediation of growing substrates using steam is a commercially-beneficially, environmentally-safe method of combatting invasive species and harmful pathogens, leading to substantial benefits for horticultural and agricultural businesses. Steam heat treatment offers a highly effective means of sanitising growing substrates, composts, manures and topsoils from fungi, harmful organisms, bacteria and weed seeds.

FlowSteama Vessa and Rova Series’ add big value across a wide range of materials, including soil, topsoil, compost, food waste, green waste, agricultural manures and growing media blends in various forms. Stronga supply FlowSteama equipment and mobile steam boilers for various scales of operation. Read on to learn more, or contact our sales team to discuss the scale and scope of your project and let us build your optimal heat treatment system.

FlowSteama empowers clients to improve profits by creating a saleable, reusable material while reducing costs associated with waste disposal and importing virgin products. Discover below the horticultural benefits associated with steam sterilising growing substrates. Advantages for agricultural, recycling and land remediation groups can be discovered further down this page.

Produce extra crop with clean, revitalised growing substrate ✔; Reduce losses from diseased crop ✔; Reduce import costs or virgin substrate with your own circular growing economy ✔; Save cost on buying chemicals ✔; Reuse & recycle existing growing substrate ✔; Reduce costs associated with disposing of used substrate ✔; Improve nutrient uptake; increasing plant yield & quality ✔; Create ideal conditions for thriving crop ✔; In-house control of growing substrate hygiene ✔; Avoid use of banned, ecosystem-damaging chemicals ✔; Meet increasingly higher health & welfare standards from supermarkets & customers ✔

Super-heated steam from low-pressure Stronga steam boilers eliminates pathogens by heat-treating substrates to temperatures up to 90˚C for a user-defined residency time (time-at-temperature). The equipment has been proven through lab reports to kill all harmful contaminants and invasive species, including: pathogenic bacteria ✔; larvae ✔; nematodes ✔; spores ✔; fungi (moulds & yeasts) ✔; weeds seeds ✔; pythium ✔; fusarium ✔; rhizoctonia ✔; other diseases & pests ✔

Transforming contaminated, spent growing media into clean, revitalised growing substrate enables safe reuse in commercial nurseries and greenhouses, cycle-after-cycle, while delivering significant long-term cost savings. Using steam-cleaned growing substrates after each crop cycle closes the loop on horticultural waste, providing long-term commercial benefits for growers.

In comparison to alternative approaches, such as chemical sterilisation, in-vessel composting and sheet steaming, FlowSteama offers the most efficient, reliable and environmentally-friendly solution for sanitising spent substrates, contaminated soils, composts and manures, in order to comply with quality-control regulations.

Glyphosate, methyl bromide, basamide and other products, which have been used in the past, are now forbidden or considered hazardous to health. Super-heated, clean-steam solutions from Stronga provide an excellent alternative which is environmentally-friendly, residue-free and with no risk of resistance formation. With chemical bans now common across the globe, now is the time to invest in clean steam sterilisation to add significant value to your operation, saving cost while significantly improving profits.

The video below shows the Compact FlowSteama Rova model in action.

Stronga substrate sterilisation systems provide effective heat treatment for a wide range of composts, manures, growing substrates, fibres and other organic materials.

While FlowSteama is most popular with horticultural substrate sterilisation, transforming spent growing media into premium-quality substrate, the sanitisation technology is also well suited to recycling, soil and land remediation, agriculture and industrial applications. Our technical team works closely with customers to develop efficient, reliable sterilisation solutions for different materials and processing requirements.

Steam sanitising or ‘heat treating’ growing substrates has consistently proven itself as a protection measure against weed seeds, pathogens, bacteria and fungi in spent growing media. The result is clean, safe, hygienic media for growing healthy, high-yielding crops with shorter growing cycles, while the overall effect is the production of sustainable growing medium, reducing horticultural waste, extending the useful life of growing media and supporting a more circular horticultural operation.

Each grower has their own characteristics, including scale, optimal substrate blend, location and plant/flower type in production. Stronga offer various scales of steam solution to suit various operations. Collaborate with our team to optimise your substrate steaming system for optimal outcomes.

Versatile, flexible and well-proven, FlowSteama offers the most capable, continuous in-vessel sterilisation solution available in the market today; creating clean and healthy output across a wide range of organic growing substrates. Discover the possibilities for heat treating and sanitising a range of growing media constituents:

Mushroom compost sterilisation ✔; Bark mulch substrate sterilisation ✔; Sphagnum peat moss sterilisation ✔; Coconut coir (coco coir) sterilisation ✔; Soil sterilisation ✔; Topsoil sterilisation ✔; Woody biomass sterilisation ✔; Green waste sterilisation ✔; Animal manure sterilisation ✔; & more ✔

Peat is an effective and widely-used growing substrate, but peatlands are a precious, finite resource that can take thousands of years to form. Steam sterilising used peat can provide both environmental and commercial benefits, allowing growers to extend the life of existing growing media, reduce substrate costs and support a more circular approach to horticulture.

Stronga plays a small but important role in this emerging circular growing economy by providing technology to heat treat peat and other growing substrates for reuse. Why does peat matter?

• Finite resource – peat forms extremely slowly and cannot be readily replaced once extracted.
• Carbon storage – healthy peatlands store significant amounts of atmospheric carbon.
• Wildlife habitats – peatlands support unique ecosystems and specialist wildlife.

Discover below a few "recycling" applications where FlowSteama can be applied to create clean, saleable resource from used and contaminated organic by-products.

• Converting green waste streams directly into valuable, clean, sterilised composts, meeting current standards.
• Empowering recycling companies to convert low grade, screened waste material into valuable, saleable, weed and invasive species free topsoil.
• Remediation of weed and bacteria infested soil fractions, including specific invasive species local to your region, such as Japanese Knotweed or Giant Hogweed.
• Unlocking the potential of lower grade biomass residues, transforming them into clean, saleable resource with clear evidence of sterilization and conformity to local standards.

Impeccable hygiene standards in field-scale operations are becoming increasingly important in food production situations. FlowSteama can add significant value and reduce risk of soil-borne pests and cross contamination when growing potatoes, sugar beet, onions and other root crops.

The risks are particularly high from vegetable cleaning, screening and processing where topsoil needs to be returned to the field after use, but cross contamination of root crop soil also needs to be avoided. Steam sanitisation is the answer to protect your crop from cross contamination while economically optimising overall health and welfare standards on your farm.

Intensive poultry farming and pig rearing operations are struggling with increasing regulations relating to the safe disposal of manures with issues including contaminating watercourses and nitrate leaching. After separation, the fibre element of agricultural manures can be sterilised in an evidenced FlowSteama continuous steaming process which reliably kills weed seeds and harmful contaminants, such as salmonella and e-coli.

Sterilising fibre fractions from manures enables producers to create pathogen-free, nutrient-rich soil improver or fertilizer which can be sold with confidence across borders. A key benefit of steam sterilising agricultural manures is the release of nutrients where cell walls are broken down, enabling more nutrients to be available to the plant, reducing the need for destructive chemical fertilisers.

Continuous heat treatment can be used to sanitise the following agricultural materials, enabling the recovery of phosphates and nutrients with no risk of cross-contamination of crop: Broiler litter sterilisation ✔; Layer litter sterilisation ✔; Turkey manure sterilisation ✔; Separated pig manure fibre sterilisation ✔; Anaerobic Digestion fibre sterilisation ✔; Dairy manure sterilisation ✔; Other animal manures ✔; Green waste crop residue sterilisation ✔; Topsoil residue sterilisation ✔

Contact Stronga today to discuss the suitability of your material with FlowSteama.

For more than 100 years, steam sterilising growing substrates has been successful in horticulture, agriculture and soil and land remediation, among other sectors. Steam sterilisation has consistently proven itself as an effective soil preparation method, providing protection against weeds, bacteria, fungi and other pests, while super-heated steam is widely recognised by scientists as the most effective approach for cleaning infected soils and substrates.

Now is the time to get ahead of the game with FlowSteama, making your enterprise even more profitable and ecosystem-friendly through investing in well-proven, modern heat treatment solutions. Working on sites in North America and Europe, our substrate steaming systems have been proven to produce a completely clean soil improver, well prepared for growing the healthiest plants, cut flowers, strawberries, microgreens and more.

Click the icons below to learn more about the two types of substrate steam sterilisation systems for sale by Stronga.