Join us as we travel to Brooklyn, Wisconsin to talk to the head farmer of a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm that operates year-round thanks their Ceres HighYield™ Kit greenhouse.
Learn about farmer Bethanee's story and her journey with deciding on a greenhouse design that would benefit her CSA business.
Winterfell Acres' website: winterfellacres.com/
Learn more about the Ceres HighYield™ Kit design: ceresgs.com/greenhouses/highy...
Song is "With Hope" by Analog Heart
My name is Bethanee Wright and I own Winterfell Acres in Brooklyn, Wisconsin just south of Madison. We run a CSA which is organic vegetables for about 120 families every week and we just built a Ceres HighYield™ greenhouse kit. I ended up going to college and just absolutely fell in love with farming and local food and I ended up getting a job at a couple farms and managing a couple farms before I was able to start my own. When I started farming I really had no other way to sell vegetables to people except through CSA. All the markets in the Madison area are pretty saturated and so in order to grow and sell produce I basically reached out to my family and friends and said would you like to buy a box of vegetables from me through the Summer? And I started off with about 20 members in 2014 and I’ve progressively grown to about 120 this year and this will be my ninth growing season. How did I find out about Ceres? In my Winter of research in trying to figure out what kind of greenhouse I wanted to built I knew I wanted to build something that I could grow year-round in and I wanted something passive-solar and as near net-zero as I could. And I read their book, The Net-Zero Greenhouse and just reached out and Jackie at Ceres was immediately responsive and put a couple bids together for me and helped me understand how the system works and we were pretty much off from there. Ceres is the only company building greenhouses that are hyper efficient with the geothermal system, they call it a GAHT® system. I did a ton of research, I looked at all sorts, and priced out all sorts, of greenhouses, and I would say the Ceres greenhouse is the most efficient and they have the best system I had seen for geothermal. They are the most insulative greenhouse with, the only one with a geothermal system that basically, I don’t want to call it plug and play, but they give you the design, and you do it and it works. My main original goal with building the greenhouse was to grow year-round so that I can sell to my chefs year-round. I have a couple restaurants that buy from me and if I could sell lettuce greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, that sort of thing year-round to them, they would absolutely buy from me. And so that was my main goal, was to be able to sell to my chefs who really love what I grow year-round. We seeded radishes, lettuce and arugula in early December which is normally a time where you never want to seed something because there’s just supposedly not enough light to grow, and we were harvesting maybe six weeks later. And that was before the system, the geothermal system, was fully setup too. So we built this greenhouse pretty much as a business, from a business standpoint. We wanted to extend our season, increase our income, or at least maintain our income and something we didn’t realize, with the greenhouse, was how magical it is of a space. Like if you walk in there in early March when there’s still snow on the ground and you can feel all of that oxygen coming in to your body when you walk in there, it is magic. So I think I’m gonna setup a little pool, and a couple chairs, so that in the Winter when it’s a really warm sunny day and it’s 75 in there, we’re going to have a little pooltime. It’s like medicine, medicine for your soul. So we didn’t expect that, but it’s this really magic place where we’re like ok, the farm is becoming even more magical.
Негізгі бет Ғылым және технология Greenhouse Grower Story: Winterfell Acres CSA Farm
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