Atlas Farm in Deerfield joins Valley trend to extend growing seasons
1
2
DEERFIELD - Corn that may have been knee-high in Northfield by the Fourth of July was at work Thursday, the first day of winter, on a River Road farm, as Gideon Porth looked over rows and rows of salad greens.
Atlas Farm, which Porth started in 2004 and now totals about 55 acres, is among an increasing number of agricultural operations around the Pioneer Valley that have stretched their growing seasons to extend their operations. Boosted by greenhouses - some of which are heated with relatively efficient devices like Atlas' corn-fed boilers - and by the swelling appetite for year-round locally grown food, farms like Atlas are feeding a slowly increasing number of winter markets and Community Service Agriculture operations that continue throughout the year.
"One of the weird things about (produce) farming in New England - you have all this infrastructure and you're not using it four or five months out of the year," said Porth, who grew up in Florida and has packed farming experience in Michigan, Tennessee and eastern Massachusetts into his 36 years. "You have greenhouses, you've got trucks, you've got the buildings, you've got to keep the heat on."
Aside from the wisdom of spreading those fixed costs across more of the year, Porth said, "It also ties in with how tough it is getting people to work on a seasonal basis. So if you can provide something that's year-round # their incentive is they have a year-round job."
As the bearded farmer speaks, a couple of those workers are adding onto the barn, which serves as Atlas Farm's distribution area and houses an upstairs office where three other workers are stationed at computers. They're among the seven full-time year-round employees - that number will swell to 27 between June and October - along with a couple more employees taking care of the crops growing in the four greenhouses.
Maintaining a stable core staff, meanwhile, has the added benefit of meaning "They're going to stay with you a lot longer, when spring comes around, you've got people who know what's going on, and you don't have to start over again," said Ruth Hazzard, UMass Extension Service specialist as she visits the Deerfield organic farm. "So you're providing better jobs to a local labor force in agriculture and getting more middle-management set up on farms."
With that added help, she believes, "It takes a little pressure off the summer. If you have to earn your entire year's income to cover all your infrastructure, all your production costs and you have to do that in three or four months, it's a huge pressure."
For Atlas, which has about 100 memberships for its winter CSA, the boom in year-round eating of local produce comes at a helpful time for the farm that began on 3 acres of rented land on the opposite side of the river, in Montague. (Red Fire Farm is producing nearby.) "I tell people it's a good time to be a farmer: People are interested in it, they want to support local stuff and I feel fortunate. It's stressful, hard work, but there's a good environment for it right now."
'Full-tilt' farming
In addition to weekly Amherst and Northampton winter markets, Atlas is also part of the new, monthly Greenfield winter market at Second Congregational Church - the next one is scheduled for Jan. 7 - where customers line up for lettuce, sweet potatoes, onions and a host of crops that still keep growing in a season that's been nearly snowless so far.
Add to that, the farm's wholesale business, primarily in the Boston area, where Atlas also retails twice weekly at Copley Square Farmers Market. That business, to Whole Foods outlets there as well as groceries, co-ops and distributors, has played a larger share of Atlas' business in other years, as in summer. Poor growing conditions this year for some fall crops means that wholesale business has largely ended - meaning more of a local focus, Porth said.
Taking its place is the CSA, which was first offered this past summer and now takes place from winter through the end of March, or a combined "full season."
"The CSA is our priority now, and we're trying to grow that part of the farm," said Porth, maybe by offering that shareholder option outside the Pioneer Valley.
Year-round CSAs and markets - the winter markets go right up to the point in spring when outdoor markets begin - also raise a new burnout issue for some growers, who are effectively giving up what had been a dormant season.
"People are really seeing what it means for my life, my business and farm and family life, to be working full-tilt year-round," he said. "Some people are able to say, 'I'm going to do a little bit less in the summer so I can sustain this year-round.' Some people find it really works for them to push in the summer and then take a break. It's going to be very interesting to watch how people deal with those questions."
A more technical stress, for Porth, comes from trying to heat the largest greenhouse, 35 by 144 feet, using a 165,000 btu Amaizing Heat boiler that burns wood pellets and corn - 10 to 12 tons a year - from Northfield's Five Point Farm.
The corn-burning boiler, as well as a smaller one that heats a smaller, neighboring greenhouse, have been a struggle to keep operating right, Porth said, because they're intended for domestic basements rather than tricky, humid greenhouses.
"We've had to spend time troubleshooting," he said. "We've had every kind of trouble you can imagine: electrical stuff, the feed rate."
Still, the expensive furnaces - the larger one cost $10,000, including plumbing - has helped cut fuel costs about in half and has a payback of five to six years, thanks to state grants.
Porth, who first tried his hand at farming briefly while an environmental studies student at the University of Michigan, then farmed for a season in Chattanooga, Tenn., and moved to the Boston area to work on The Food Project farm in Lincoln and its urban youth program, moved to the area for a graduate Plant and Soil Science degree at the University of Massachusetts.
After a couple of years of renting land across the river on Montague's Meadow Road - "A nightmare," he recalls. "As the crow flies, it's right across the river, but you have to (drive more than 10 miles and) go over the bridge" - Atlas bought its core 27-acre farm, with about a dozen tillable acres that had been rented for field corn. In addition to that farmland, which he credits the state Agricultural Preservation Restriction program for making affordable, Porth rents another 43 acres along River Road.
Some of that land is covered with unheated hoop houses, which the crew disassembles for winter because they're not built for snow loads. In addition to the four large greenhouses behind the barn, these are the key to year-round farming, according to Hazzard.
There's a variety of sizes, dubbed "high tunnels," "low tunnels" and "caterpillar tunnels," which help farmers get crops started in fall in the ground to over-winter, or simply get seedlings started in February and March so they're ready for harvest in some cases by late March - about the time greens in the larger greenhouses give out.
Porth, who's "still tweaking the economics of doing this winter stuff," says he's applying for federal funding to build more of the hoop houses and may "beef up" some of the three-season ones for winter growing as well.
"If I knew what I know now when I built those, I would have invested in different structures," he said. "They cover a lot of growing area. The big one is about half an acre, double what I have in all our heated space."
The real space crunch, though, isn't for winter growing as much as for winter storage, said Porth, who stores crops now in rented buildings in Shelburne, Whately and Chicopee.
"We're totally maxed out on space," he said, adding that some of the barn addition will probably be used for storage, as well as for washing greens.
The need is so great that CISA, together with the Franklin County Community Development Corp. are looking at a shared storage facility that could handle multiple temperature, humidity and air flow requirements without requiring users to drive long distances and risk freezing some crops en route.
"I think we've also seen an increase in crops that can be stored," said Hazzard, pointing to temperamental needs. "Butternut squash and sweet potatoes suffer chilling injury if they're kept below 50 degrees; carrots and beets suffer a serious loss of quality if it's above 40."
Also nourishing the year-round farming trend are efforts like the CDC's Food to Institution project, freezing vegetables and fruits at its Greenfield food processing center for off-season sale.
Porth, who said, "I would love to freeze some of that stuff," like strawberries, to whet the appetites of his winter CSA customers. "That's the kind of stuff people get really excited by in wintertime. And greens are great # They get a little bored with carrots and potatoes."
Appalachian Naturals, a Bernardston food products company that got its start in the Greenfield kitchen, also helped Atlas by canning tomato puree for CSA customers whose appetites crave more than winter squash, cooking greens, cabbage, garlic and root crops.
With such mixed vegetables, including specialty crops like a tasty Brazilian "abóbora japonesa," Porth, Hazzard and others see winter farming as surely growing.
