Beyond Season Extension: High Tunnels for Season Creation and Economic, Community, and Environmental Sustainability

Rural Action is a membership based nonprofit focused on asset based economic development in Appalachian Ohio. It works to address regional issues such as poverty, environmental degradation, and weakening community involvement through programming in environmental education, zero waste initiatives, watershed restoration, sustainable forestry, and sustainable agriculture. The sustainable agriculture program supports agriculture that is good for the community, economy, and environment through focus areas such as food hub development, online branding and marketing, healthy food access, farm to institution, peer to peer education, and technical assistance for farmers.

Rural Action Sustainable Agriculture has provided education on season extension since 2009 and has identified a need for farmers to adopt growing methods that make year round production possible in order to reach lucrative off season markets, stabilize income and make year round employment possible. Rural Action is membership based and works with a broad range of stakeholders; Kip and Becky Rondy, owners of Green Edge Organic Gardens, are Rural Action members and longtime partners in our sustainable agriculture work. They have created a successful and replicable model, which we termed “Season Creation”, for year round growing in the Appalachian region. This SARE PDP project included general season extension techniques, including all four seasons, year round marketing, Community Supported Agriculture, economics, and summer high tunnel production. The main focus however was winter production inside of unheated, gabled high tunnels. This included reasons for winter production, infrastructure guidelines, use of infrastructure, schedule and selection of crops, covering, irrigation, managing crop threats, harvesting handling and storage, marketing and sales, employee roles and management, certifications, food safety, and equipment suppliers.  All of this information was made available to both workshop attendees as well as attendees at additional offsite trainings that the Rondy’s conducted. Materials included a professional high quality folder of all of the materials printed out, two informational posters, and a manual. These materials were also given in electronic form to interested educators on a loaded flash drive.

Green Edge Organic Gardens is located in Amesville, OH. They produce organic mushrooms, micro greens, and a diverse range of produce, relying strongly on the use of high tunnels for year round production. They generally employ 12 full time equivalent positions, and offer four summer intern positions. They are recognized in Ohio and Central Appalachia as leaders for their work in season extension and have a reputation as a replicable, real world example of a successful model for rural farmers.  This two year SARE PDP partnership with Green Edge Organic Gardens has supported them in educating both farmers and agricultural professionals on their Season Creation model. It has given them a viable profit center based around there intellectual capital, i.e. they have gained experience as peer to peer educators and have gained expertise in sharing there model. They are now sought after throughout the region as educators. Rural Action is committed to continue to partner with Green Edge to give them graphic, curricular and development support as they continue to expand their educational programming to include more and more aspects of their whole farm system as well as to reach a larger audience.

• Background on Rural Action: Working on asset based economic development. We define sustainable agriculture as agriculture that benefits the community, economy, and environment.
• Green edge background: Green Edge created a model that is a replicable but not a widely used strategy. Part of their farms mission is to positively impact their region and their world. They wanted to create an educational profit center around their methods that would support them in sharing their knowledge in an economically sustainable way.

The goal of the North Central SARE Professional Development program is to supply resources to build awareness and skills related to sustainable agriculture concepts. This is done through both competitive grants and State Coordinators.  Rural Actions “Beyond Season Extension” project was a competitive grant that also created and supplied professional materials that are currently being used by Ohio State Coordinator Mike Hogan.

The area of sustainable agriculture awareness that was focused on was sharing successful economic models of high tunnel production with both NRCS and Extension professionals, as well as with the many Non-Governmental Organizations, and volunteer groups that are now using high tunnels specifically, and season extension in general as a way to address a variety of economic, educational and hunger issues. The last two farm bills have included the support of the construction of high tunnels through the EQUIP program as a priority. This Farm Bill program gave us a chance to use SARE PDP resources to address the following issues:

• Large scale USDA Farm Bill investment through the EQUIP program for the construction of unheated high tunnel structures, without relevant information on winter production for Agricultural Educators and Natural Resource Conservation Service staff.

  • Seasonal limitations of specialty crop production in the Midwest region.
  • Loss of mid-size growers, < $500,000 in the Midwest region.
  • Lack of twelve month income/ way to reach markets year round for specialty crop growers.
  • Lack of knowledge of general formulaic models of winter month high tunnel production.
  • Lack of knowledge of site specific construction and siting techniques for 12 month production.
  • Lack of production budgets and specific economic information for winter production.
  • Lack of specific information around marketing for winter production.
  • Lack of horticultural knowledge around winter production.