5 minute read
Sweet success
How Cooperative Extension educators helped turn a dream into a thriving business
Stark Farm is one of the few producers of organic pick-your-own blueberries in New England. It enriches the greater community by hosting a farmer’s market on its property and serves as a real-world classroom for groups of schoolchildren who visit. But it would be none of those things if not for critical help from Extension specialists.
Chip and Maria Donnelly operate Stark Farm in a quiet corner of Dunbarton. They set their first blueberry plants in 2011 as a change in life was looming.
“Both my wife and I were looking ahead at retirement and saying, ‘What’s going to keep us busy?’” Chip explains. They both liked the idea of being a “no-spray” berry farm and reached out to Extension for guidance.
The Donnellys were initially planning to grow several kinds of berries, but George Hamilton, a since-retired Extension field specialist, talked them into winnowing their plan.
“He said, ‘Focus on one fruit because of this invasive fly that’s come into the country,’” Chip says. That fly was the spotted wing drosophila (SWD). Typically, it’s considered prudent to plant a diversity of crops to hedge one’s bets. In this case, limiting their production to blueberries would allow the Donnellys to focus their mitigation strategy.
So they kept planting blueberry plants, adding irrigation as they went, until they had 350 bushes across two-thirds of an acre.
Stark Farm opened to pickers in 2018. The bushes were still young, but the Donnellys encouraged visitors to “grow with us,” as Chip says, and return in subsequent seasons to see how the bushes matured.
But the winter of 2018-2019 was brutal, and when spring came, the young plants never came out of hibernation because they were dead from the ground up.
“We had 80-90 percent loss,” Chip recalls.
Instead of greeting returning customers, the Donnellys spent their second season as farmers pruning back their bushes, cutting them nearly to the ground.
They didn’t quit, though, because of Jeremy DeLisle, Extension field specialist, who assumed support of Stark Farm after Hamilton retired. DeLisle reminded Chip and Maria of their dream. He knew when to commiserate and when to cheerlead, and he promised that the bushes had strong root systems and would quickly rebound. He was right.
That same year, the Donnellys learned that productive fruit farms need a strategy for preserving their produce for paying customers. They put up nets to keep out the birds and fences to ward off the deer, bears, and turkeys. The system worked — for about a year.
“At the end of 2021, we discovered what every other farmer was talking about,” Chip says, referring to the SWD.
With Extension’s help, Stark Farm set traps to monitor the arrival of the fly, which lays eggs on berries for the larvae to eat when they hatch. Their life cycle is alarmingly rapid, and each female can lay so many eggs that the Donnellys knew it was already too late for that year’s crop. They closed for the season and called DeLisle.
“Quitting was high on the list,” Chip says. “We chatted with Jeremy and said, ‘This is the crossroad we’re at.’ He came back in the fall and said, ‘I think I’ve got an opportunity for you.’”
The opportunity was a Conservation Innovation Grant to purchase fine netting that would keep out the tiny flies with federal money routed through the Rockingham County Conservation District. With so few organic berry farms in New England, the efficacy of the exclusion netting hadn’t been verified locally. DeLisle said that Stark Farm would make for a great test case, and the grant would cover 75 percent of materials and installation.
It was an experiment for Extension and a gamble for Stark Farm. In addition to paying a quarter of the cost, the Donnellys spent the fall and winter making a plan they could send to the manufacturer — the netting is custommade — and then preparing their field to be completely enclosed in netting before the SWD arrived.
The bet has paid off. The Donnellys now start the season with the netting gathered into bundles running the length of the field. When Extension reports that the SWD has been spotted in monitoring traps in New Hampshire, the bundles are unrolled and the panels zipped together, creating an envelope around some of the only organic blueberry bushes in New England.
“The netting is 100 percent successful for us,” Chip reports. “We just completed our fourth year.”
He says their farm wouldn’t be where it is today without Extension’s well-timed help.
“It’s really hard to be successful. You have to work hard and learn a lot,” Chip says. “That’s what Extension does: They’re out there providing expertise to all types of farms, small, medium, and large, and backyard farms.”
In the case of Stark Farm, that expertise has made it possible for the Donnellys to stay true to their original organic vision.
“My wife likes to say, ‘The only thing that hits our blueberry bushes is raindrops,’” Chip says. “And that’s the truth.”
