Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] NRCS hoophouse program

market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Market Farming

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] NRCS hoophouse program
  • Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 09:56:28 -0400



On Sep 7, 2011, at 9:45 AM, Richard Stewart wrote:

In the end I think this simply shows us that the government should help not-for-profit research and studies that are deliberately designed to benefit ALL of us 

But that's precisely what this program is intended to do.

It's intended not only; maybe not even primarily; to help the specific growers who get a hoophouse out of it. It's intended to find out, in real world conditions, in which circumstances, and under what types of management, hoophouses are useful. (If some counties are defeating the purpose by not actually requiring decent trials, or not actually requiring decent record keeping, this isn't the fault of the program, but of the local administration. Complain locally, and vehemently.)

You can do all the trials you want in universities and research institutions, and they certainly should be done as preliminaries; but at some point it's necessary to find out what works on actual farms, under a much wider variety of conditions than are obtainable at a limited number of research institutions, and under an entirely different set of constraints than those at a not-for-profit organization.

I thought it was a great advance when Cornell starting doing trials on actual farms, and not only in their own fields.


-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page