Dialing in Your High Tunnel for Less Work, Greater Yields, and Higher Profits

An Intensive On Innovative Management Tools for Growers Using Heated and Unheated High Tunnels

Lunch option available for additional $10 or bring your own

Limited scholarships are available for beginning farmers (those growing 10 or less years) who are active NOFA/Mass members. To apply please click here.

Description:

High tunnels, hoop houses, and greenhouses are one of the best tools growers of the northeast have to significantly increase their production, maintain a year-round market, and boost their bottom line. With proper management, a high tunnel investment that can pay for itself in just one or two seasons. Presenters Andrew Mefferd and Michael Kilpatrick, both veteran organic farmers from Northeast have worked for years to optimize the use of this simple but powerful tool for other farmers.

This all-day interactive intensive, ideal for the intermediate or advanced grower,  is intended to bring your management of tunnels to the next level. Whether you’re grappling with questions about when and how to heat your tunnel, how to push your season extension further, which varietals are worth growing, or how to optimize crop successions for year-round production, this intensive will provide you insight and inspiration for the next growing season and beyond.

Intensive topics include:

• Which Crops are worth growing and why?
• Irrigation, plastic, tech tools, and infrastructure options
• How to push the season even further
• On-site High Tunnel visit and audit at Stonehill College Farm
• Optimizing crop successions for maximum yield
• Heating: when, why, how, and how much?
• Adapting the lessons of the most successful commercial greenhouse growers for organic/biological systems
• NRCS representative to answer questions on EQIP high tunnel grants
• Guest presenters highlighting their innovative practices

About the Instructors:

Michael Kilpatrick is a farmer, presenter, and blogger who lives to help farmers apply business principles and best practices to farming and agriculture. He has managed a large certified organic farm, presented at farm and agricultural conferences, written a free e-book on winter production  and consulted with farmers around the country. He currently resides in Southwestern Ohio.

Andrew Mefferd has a book about protected growing coming out in February 2017 from Chelsea Green Publishing called The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower’s Handbook: Organic Vegetable Production Using Protected Culture.  He is the editor of Growing for Market Magazine, and has a MOFGA-certified organic farm in central Maine. For seven years, he worked as the greenhouse specialist in the research department at Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

Register Online Now or Mail In This Registration Form

More Info

For information on our refund and inclement weather policy, click here.

For more information contact Dan Bensonoff, education events organizer, at dan@nofamass.org or 860-716-5122