Vegetable Growers News

Extension Adapts to New Challenges

This is the first story in a series about the future of Extension. What does Michigan State University Extension (MSUE) mean to Michigan’s fruit and vegetable industries? It depends upon who you ask. To Donald Coe, managing partner of Black Star Farms in Leelanau County, Extension is a factor in his company’s community and business decisions. He frequently discusses subjects like agritourism, value-added agriculture, product innovation, farm markets, 4-H clubs, farmland preservation, county planning and governance with Extension personnel. The agency plays less of a role in Black Star’s crop-growing decisions, but Coe still seeks expert advice from the nearby research station, which evaluates wine grape varieties. Black Star Farms includes a winery. “The strength of Extension is in the depth and breadth of its services to the community,” he said. “You can reach into a grab bag for the services that help you.” If Extension didn’t play such…  » Read more

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Life’s Simple Pleasures Get Harder to Derive

Writing about fruit and vegetables is, for me, made doubly satisfying because I try to practice some of what I preach. I have a large garden and a small collection of fruit trees, and I love “different” kinds of stuff. I have medlars, paw paws, oriental pears, ground cherries, Jerusalem artichokes, winter onions, 12 varieties of tomatoes, horse radish, okra, daikon radishes, blue potatoes – in addition to the normal stuff like green beans, summer squash, pumpkins and sweet corn. I like to learn about and apply good farm practices, from pruning to pest control, but it’s increasingly difficult to do that. I don’t avoid pesticides because I fear them but because people in “high places” do and because I can’t get the right ones in the right quantities for the various patches I have. Quantity and access are both problems. Back in 1985, I paid nearly $200…  » Read more

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New York Grower Harvests 1,300 Acres of Sweet Corn Annually

If you’d like to eat fresh sweet corn on the cob every week of the year, you’ll want to know the Gill family from Hurley, N.Y. They can fix you up. Not only do the Gills grow 1,300 acres of sweet corn every year on the home farm in the Hudson River Valley, near the base of the Catskill Mountains and an hour north of New York City, they can “fix you up” year round with corn from Georgia and Florida. “We probably do a million boxes a year,” said John Gill. At 48 ears to a box, that’s four million dozen, of which just over a third comes from Gill Farms itself. The rest is from growers they work with in southern Georgia and near Homestead, Fla. The Gills organize the packing and selling of all that corn. “We sell sweet corn from our home farm from…  » Read more

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Michigan Running Slow in the Race to Preserve Farmland

In 1974, Michigan and Pennsylvania bolted from the starting gate together, as they began efforts to protect farmland from conversion to non-farm use. That year, each state passed legislation providing property tax breaks to farmers who signed contracts of 10 or more years agreeing not to develop their land during the contract period. For Pennsylvania, that was the first step on the road. Pennsylvania has built on that foundation with a purchase of development rights (PDR) program that has raised and spent more than half a billion dollars and protected more farmland than any other state. This year, the state will reach a milestone of 3,000 farms with PDR easements covering 300,000 acres. Michigan, by contrast, has not built much. The state legislature approved a PDR program in the 1990s that funded the preservation of a handful of farms. In 2000, it revised the law and…  » Read more

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