By
JOANNA DETZ/ecoRI.org News staff
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| As a year-round grower Skip Paul views his hoop house as a savings bank for his winter crop of greens. Because of the warm weather this fall, his hoop house crops are maturing ahead of schedule. (Joanna Detz/ecoRI News photos) |
Standing
inside one of the five hoop houses at Wishing Stone Farm, where he has already
started his indoor winter crop, Paul says that because of the mild fall he’s
actually still harvesting vegetables from his fields outdoors.
“Usually
you see temperatures dropping significantly, so by this time during normal
years, we would have had all our carrots and beets in,” he says. “This year has
been so mild, we’ve postponed harvest. We’re pulling in a half-acre of
broccoli. That is unbelievable. It’s clearly a sign of global warming or
something to be able to harvest broccoli almost until Christmastime.”
What
Paul is seeing in his fields is part of a larger trend, which was detailed in
February by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a revised plant hardiness
map. The map showed most hardiness zones in the lower 48 states are
now about 2.5 degrees warmer.
A shift in average temperatures and warmer-than-normal falls has meant a longer growing season for Rhode Island farmers. In fact, a drive along Route 77 in Little Compton reveals a few still-green fields shrugging up kale and other crops not typically seen outside in mid-December.
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| Fields in Little Compton,
including those at Wishing Stone Farm, are still yielding crops in mid-December |
“There
was never a reason to extend the growing season before, so now that there’s a
market for crops farmers deliberately try to extend growing season. And they
can take advantage of warmer falls,” Ayars says.
Even
if there had been a longer growing season a decade ago, farmers would still
have harvested before the first frost simply because there was no market for
their late fall and winter harvests, according to Ayars.
While
the winter markets do provide an outlet for late harvest and year-round
growing, Paul says they can only absorb so much.
“Winter
markets … are flat or slightly down because of the economy or the fact that
there’s an explosion of new winter markets sprouting up everywhere,” Paul says.
To
supplement sales at winter markets, Wishing Stone is offering a year-round CSA
for the second straight year.
There
is also the issue of how the warm weather has been affecting the timeline of
the plants in Wishing Stone’s winter hoop house, which will sustain the farm’s
market and CSA commitments during the winter months.
As
a year-round grower, Paul sees his winter hoop house as a sort of a savings
bank. Paul explains that he invests by putting plants in the hoop house in late
fall. He then withdraws from that savings bank from late December through the
end of January, knowing that what he cuts will not re-grow due to the low
levels of sunlight during that period.
Standing
in the entrance of the hoop house, Paul looks out over rows of salad greens and
explains that because of the warm fall, the winter greens in his hoop houses
are maturing ahead of schedule.
“These
plants are way ahead of where we want them to be. We’re going to have to take
more out of this bank account than we anticipated,” Paul says.
The
rapidly maturing plants will need to be cut sooner, making it difficult for
Wishing Stone to keep enough product growing through the last week of January.
But,
like most farmers, Paul recognizes he is at the mercy of forces he can’t control,
so he must accept the vagaries of the changing climate. He is not worried. It
will just take some planning.
