Farming On The Edge - Growing Under Cover

By George DeVault

Lancaster Farming

Sept. 13, 2003

Takes the worry out of bad weather, extends your season and markets.

On March 5 last year, our field records show, we were in T-shirts, planting onions in the open ground. Sugar snap peas went in on St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), right on schedule.

This year was a different story. When St. Patty’s Day 2003 rolled around, I had the 7-foot blade on the back of the John Deere 1050. The tractor was in 4-wheel drive. I was plowing a foot of frozen snow and ice off of our best vegetable beds in a desperate attempt to get the soil to thaw, dry out and warm up.

While I was plowing snow like a madman, my son and wife were calmly working in T-shirts. They were harvesting salad mix, setting out transplants and direct seeding other crops in warm, fluffy soil. The secret was that they were inside of our three high tunnels.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the high tunnel bandwagon lately. Ads for hem are everywhere. And for good reason. A high tunnel is nothing fancy or terribly expensive, just a metal frame covered with greenhouse plastic. Unlike “low tunnels” of plastic or spun-bound ,aterial on wire hoops, high tunnels are tall enough to walk upright inside. We can even drive machinery inside of our two largest tunnels. We’ve never had much

need to, though. About all we need inside is a garden tiller and a wheelbarrow.

This March, the ground covered by the thin plastic skin of our high tunnels seemed like it had been magically moved to Georgia.

We would have been nearly wiped out by the lousy weather this season without our high tunnels. True, they couldn’t replace the sun during a May and June that were cloudier and rainier than Seattle. But the high tunnels did protect our early tomatoes, peppers, basil and flowers from pounding rains, high winds, cold snaps, and deer that get hungrier and bolder every year as more house farms spring up on the edges of farm country.

Let the neighbor TRY to sell his flagpole lots for six-figure price tags. As far as we’re concerned, the “highest and best use” for farmland in an area of rising land values and real estate taxes is to build more high tunnels (and start more producer-only farmers’ markets).

We have three high tunnels. Each is 96 feet long. Widths are 14, 21 and 30 feet. Together, they total only 6,240 square feet under cover. That’s barely one-seventh of an acre. Subtract the amount of space necessary for walkways, and usable growing space shrinks to maybe 5,000 square feet.

But when cropped intensively (year-round, if you want) and planted only to high-value crops, that sliver of ground earns about $1 per square foot. Not just once or twice per season, but three or more times a year. Compare that to traditional field crops and you’re looking at the cash equivalent of hundreds of acres of some grains and other commodities.

High tunnels make sense economically. Our first high tunnel, a quonset-style hoophouse, cost about $1,000 in 1995. It more than paid for itself -- twice -- the very first season.

When the monsoons came early this summer, four inches of running water drowned our snap beans and annual flowers in the field. Inside our high tunnels the crops were nice and dry. They were so dry, in fact, that while it was raining outside, we were watering inside. (We use garden hoses, drip irrigation, mini-sprinklers and overhead sprinklers, as

needed.)

Don’t let the name “high tunnel” throw you. That’s just the latest name for something that has been with us for more than half a century. Earlier generations called them coldframes, fieldhouses, hoophouses or just plastic greenhouses.

High tunnels are not a new or experimental technology. Building and managing one is not rocket science, either.

The late Emery Myers Emmert, a professor of horticulture at the University of Kentucky, built his first plastic-covered greenhouse in 1949. It was the granddaddy of today’s high tunnels. Emmert pioneered unheated winter production in high tunnels using an inner layer of plastic held about one foot above the soil by wire hoops. His ideas caught on quickly in Asia and Europe, but that’s another story.

By the mid-1960s in North America, plastic covered greenhouses had been researched in more than 16 states and at least one Canadian province.

“Greenhouses covered with plastic film can be used to grow any crops that are currently grown in glass greenhouses,” University of Illinois Extension reported in 1965 in a booklet titled “Plastic Greenhouses” (Circular 905). “Because of low cost, plastic greenhouses have distinct advantages for seasonal use such as the growing of spring bedding plants or summer flower crops. The structure can remain unheated and unused

during the severe winter months.”

That seems a terrible waste of space to us. So, when we’re not at least overwintering crops in our high tunnels, which is rare, we use them to store machinery, supplies, dry firewood or even graze chickens. The chickens eat up all of the bugs hiding out there.

We bought our two larger high tunnels from Ed Person of Ledgewood Farm in Moultonboro, NH., after seeing his structures in use on other farms around the state. Person began bending pipe in 1967 when his old wooden greenhouses needed replacement.

“Our search for a high quality frame at a reasonable price was not successful. The decision was made to purchase a few pieces of equipment, apply some Yankee ingenuity and construct our own frames,” Person explains in his greenhouse brochure. “The idea worked out well and we built a few frames for other farmers. Since then the business

has been slowly growing.”

That’s putting it mildly. Today, Person’s high tunnel frames are found on farms throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The University of New Hampshire used his frames for research throughout the 1980s. When Penn State established its Center for Plasticulture (www.plasticulture.cas.psu.edu) in 1998, it bought two dozen of Person’s

frames.

“Use of this technology will allow growers to produce certain crops year around. (High tunnels) will allow the consumers of the Commonwealth to purchase locally grown produce for a longer period of time than has been previously possible,” report Penn State horticulturists William Lamont and Michael Orzolek.

They’re not kidding. High tunnels start the cash flowing in -- not out -- for us in late February or early March. They carry us through to Thanksgiving or even Christmas, depending on weather and how hard we want to push ourselves.

We could use them to farm from October through May, like Eliot Coleman does in coastal Maine. But we usually don’t. After all, we have to rest some time. On second thought, maybe Eliot has the right idea. Surely would be nice to take the summer off for a change.

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With his wife and 26-year-old son, George DeVault raises certified organic vegetables near Emmaus, PA. He is a Food and Society Policy Fellow with the Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in a program funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The DeVaults’ articles on diversification, high-value

crops, cut flowers and direct marketing are available on the Rodale Institute’s new Website, www.newfarm.org.

For More Information

Two of the best books about high tunnels on the market today are:

“The Hoophouse Handbook, growing produce and flowers in hoophouses and

high tunnels” by Lynn Byczynski (2003). Send $15 (payable to Growing

for Market) to:

Fairplains Publications

P.O. Box 3747

Lawrence, KS 66046

Phone (toll free): 1-800-307-8949

www.growingformarket.com

“The Winter-Harvest Manual, farming the back side of the calendar” by

Eliot Coleman (2001). Send $15 (payable to Four Season Farm) to:

Four Season Farm

609 Weir Cove Rd.

Harborside, ME 04642

Website: www.fourseasonfarm.com

A Few High Tunnel Manufacturers:

*Atlas Greenhouse Systems

P.O. Box 558

Alapaha, GA 31622

Phone (toll free): 1-800-346-4600

www.atlasgreenhouse.com

Farm Tek's Growers Supply

1440 Field of Dreams Way

Dyersville, IA 52040

Phone (toll free): 1-800-327-6835

www.farmtek.com

Ledgewood Farm Greenhouse Frames

RFD 1 -- Box 375

Moultonboro, NH 03254

Phone: (603)-476-8829

Ludy's Greenhouse Manufacturing

P.O. Box 141

New Madison, OH 45346

Phone: (937-996-8031

www.ludy.com

X.S. Smith

P.O. Drawer X

Red Bank, NJ 07701

Phone: 732-222-4600

www.xssmith.com