More than a century's experience in peat production

Tref is a leading supplier of high quality raw materials for the potting compost industry at home and abroad. The peat products partly originate from the company's own peat sources in Germany, Sweden and the Baltic States. Tref Peat Production BV ensures the excavation and production of peat products from its own Tref peat production sites.

White peat from Scandinavia and the Baltic States

White peat is the top layer of the "raised peat" package. The decomposition of these plant remains is not yet complete so still very identifiable. The structure of the sphagnum gives a capillary effect (drawing up moisture or water for the plant), with dry sphagnum having a high air volume because the cell wall structure in the relatively poorly decomposed sphagnum is largely retained.
The production of white peat at Tref can be roughly divided into two main groups. The first method is the abstraction of white peat by the horizontal method, where only a few centimetres are abstracted from the top layer by cutting away or turning the too coarse top layers, before drying and collecting in gulleys. The structure of the peat moss is wholly retained, and this product is called milled peat.
The second method is called the vertical abstraction method where sections of turf or blocks are cut out of the white peat. With this method the peat is dug out by machine in the form of "blocks" or "turf". The peat is manually put in rows or rings to allow thorough drying by the sun and wind. The peat is then collected, stored and subsequently delivered. With the second method the blocks or turf are indeed dug with a machine, but putting out is as already mentioned largely done by hand.

Black peat from Germany

The deeper layers of peat are by definition "older" and as a result also more decomposed than the top layer. Plant remains are less clearly identifiable. The black peat is spread wet on fields and will fully freeze through in the winter.
Black peat is a basic raw material used for the production of both pressed peat (energy) and garden peat (horticultural applications). These are, however, two totally different peat products. Black peat has the property of when being exposed to dry conditions it irreversibly compacts. The product then obtained is called pressed peat. Pressed peat used to be burned to heat homes, etc.  Nowadays it is used in large quantities for the production of active carbon, a raw material often used in medicines and air and water filters. At Tref black peat is used to produce garden peat. This process takes place in the winter and spring. Frost changes the structure of the black peat in such a way that the physical properties are altered. After thorough freezing black peat changes into garden peat, a product that can absorb and repel water.
At Tref black peat is abstracted using the vertical method. What this exactly involves is explained with the help of the photographs.It generally comes down to the following:
In the autumn a part of the black peat is "pulled loose" by cranes and spread over the production field.

The peat pulled loose freezes through in the winter. We give nature a helping hand by in the winter with sufficient frost turning the frosting in the peat. We call this process "ripping". It is done using special equipment hooked onto the back of bulldozers.
In the spring the top layer of the production field is dried. This is done with the help of the increasingly stronger sun and the wind. Nature is also given a hand by tilling the fields of frozen black peat/garden peat using tractors.
This dry layer is then pushed to the edge of the production fields into so-called ridges using bulldozers. The described process of drying and moving is repeated a number of times until no more frozen black peat/garden peat is left on the fields.
The ridges are then stored by dumpers along dirt tracks in a large winter mound. A special grinding and sieving installation loads the product on goods vehicles from this stock.