Frostburg Grows: Changing the Future of Farming in Western Maryland

On the windy, flat top of an abandoned strip mine, Frostburg Grows’ high tunnel greenhouses, structures of metal arches stretched with taut polyethylene plastic, stand strong in the gusts of wind sweeping in through the mountains.  The plants grown inside of it, in raised beds, are shielded from the wind, heavy rain, and other damaging elements. They are safer from disease and the blight of weeds, and they are, for months longer than crops grown outdoors, shielded from frost, which ultimately kills them and ends the growing season. Even in November, they were growing tomatoes and lettuce, the last batches of which were harvested by the end of the month.

This fall semester, the four-person Frostburg Grows team sold 1,745 pounds of produce for $2,418 to Chartwells, Frostburg State University’s dining service. That’s about 200 pounds a week. Typically, fresh produce is expensive for dining services that cook thousands of meals a day and go through tens of thousands of pounds of food per month. It’s impossible for them to not purchase from a large food provider – Chartwells uses Sysco, for example – due to the sheer mass of food they deal with. “We cannot physically grow all the food they need,” says Corey Armstrong, project coordinator of Frostburg Grows.

However, they can grow some of it. While the big food providers are usually more cost effective, the Frostburg Grows team has been shocked to find that the cost of their produce is right in line with Cisco. So, by extending the season, they are making it easier for places like Chartwells to utilize local growers. And because Frostburg Grows is only a ten-minute drive away from the FSU campus, Chartwells can call them and have something they need delivered fresh that day. “If we make it as convenient, if not more convenient, they’re more likely to use us,” says Armstrong.

How is Frostburg Grows able to keep the prices of their produce low? “Part of it is that we are close and the overhead is generally low,” says Armstrong. They grow from seed. They collect rain water, so there is no water bill. They don’t use expensive fertilizers. They just meet the basic needs of the plant: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. There isn’t a huge workforce, just the four of them. The land they’re using is an extremely low-cost lease from a landowner who fully supports the project. They use topsoil made from their own compost (which they are turning now. It will be ready in the spring, and they won’t be buying a lot.)  They hope to be collecting food waste from Chartwells in the Spring. (In fact, Chartwells plans to buy a large composter for that purpose.) And they’re already collecting yard waste from the city of Frostburg. “A cool thing, a win-win,” Armstrong says, “is [the city of Frostburg was] taking it to the dump and paying fifty dollars a ton… We just take it, put it in a pile, and turn it with a machine every week or two, and that will eventually become soil.”

And making use of the leftovers from FSU’s dining services that would otherwise be thrown away is also a win. “We’d be taking the food from chartwells and using it to make compost to grow more food for Chartwells,” says Armstrong. The environment could certainly use a break from all the food waste dumped into landfills –  nearly 14 million tons every year in America alone, according to the EPA – which breaks down and releases methane, a greenhouse gas. Frostburg is as guilty of mass food waste as any other school. “The amount of waste in [the cafeteria] is horrendous,” says Pamela Detrick, assistant director of Dining Services at Chartwells. But soon, there will at least be something in place to help negate that.

Despite their successful growing season and competitive pricing, their purpose isn’t solely profit. They are an education center, primarily; in fact, when the project began and they were first releasing information to local papers and publications about the $300,000 of grant money they received, there were grumblings among some local farmers who thought they had an unfair advantage; they thought Frostburg Grows was trying to compete with them. So they have “had to backtrack and show people that this is an education and resource center,” says Dan Fiscus, assistant professor of biology at FSU and Frostburg Grows’ sustainability liaison.

Frostburg Grows aims to be a model for sustainable farming in the Western Maryland region, educating Frostburg classes and student groups, like the echoSTARS and the Physics club, who have come up for tours, community service and projects. There is teaching about the actual building and maintaining of greenhouses and about farming, of course, but they’ve also given the opportunity for education in other areas; for example, Dr. Sydney Duncan brought her technical writing class out to the Frostburg Grows site as part of a lesson on grant writing, so they could see what kinds of projects can be funded by grants.

But perhaps more importantly, Frostburg Grows seeks to help local farmers and to reinvigorate the farming community in the area. The main way they do that is by providing workshops on how to plan, build, maintain, and grow produce in high tunnel greenhouses. The workshops, which are designed for newcomers to green houses, consist of two parts: the first part is a class, complete with information from what materials to use, costs and prospective returns, and how high tunnels work. The second part is a hands-on workshop where participants can help build a high tunnel at the Frostburg Grows site. At the workshop in early October, farmers from all walks met Willie Lantz, Extension Educator of the Agriculture and Natural Resources department of the University of Maryland Extension in Garrett County, at the Frostburg Grows site to help construct the fifth high tunnel. Participants were able to actually help set up the greenhouse’s frame, get a look at how the water storage tank works, and more.

With their own high tunnels, farmers can extend their own growing season and continue to sell farmers market staples, like tomatoes and peppers, well into the colder months and rely on value-added products, like jams and canned produce, less. And some don’t even rely on such products; “Farmers are so busy farming, they can’t always farm for the three months in the wintertime,” says Armstrong. In other words, farmers don’t always have time to can and jar produce to sell during the winter. Because of the decrease in loss from weather and pests, high tunnels help farmers grow more food longer (like geronimo tomatoes, for example, 600 of which can fit in one high tunnel, producing 20 pounds of tomatoes each). That means more money for them, and thus, more money for the region. And if their prices are competitive with the big providers, local restaurants will be more likely to buy from them, and the hope is that that money will stay in the area instead of being sent off to places across the country and the world.

It may be hard to believe Frostburg Grows is only just getting started. “We’re just finishing phase one,” says Armstrong. Phase one, he says, was the construction. For two years, using the grant money and tools they received, they built the six high tunnels. Phase two will be figuring out where to go from here. They hope to sell solely to Chartwells – it would go against their purpose to sell at farmers markets – and to make enough revenue to become self-sustaining, since grants are unreliable. But they also plan to continue giving high tunnel workshops. Since they are finished building their own, they will likely give workshops on private farms, Lantz says.

And besides, relying on grants forever would defeat one of the core purposes of the program: helping shift the old methods people use to grow and sell food to more environmentally sustainable methods. That’s the bigger goal, and the one that will require more time and work. “We’re also going to look into Sustainability Leadership,” says Armstrong. He would like Frostburg Grows to provide education about how to implement change and how to get policymakers to implement change. “The ‘norm’ is not working anymore. It’s not sustainable anymore,” he says. And for any change to happen, policies will need to change; there need to be more policies that help young farmers to start up, since young farmers are the ones who are most willing and excited to try innovative technologies and techniques. There need to be different laws about how to implement food sales because the agriculture business is fairly restricted in what people can do and how they can do it. And how projects are funded needs to change; for example, earmarks, the funding of projects with the extra tax money left over at the end of the year, need to come back. “To funnel money into the right places, that would require policy change,” says Armstrong.

There is a lot to do to catch farmers in this area up to speed and to change the way Western Maryland deals with food, but it seems that Frostburg Grows is doing its part to make the necessary change happen.