Plant Science students harvest butternut squash at Terp Farm in Upper Marlboro
Image Credit: Edwin Remsberg
As Terp Farm enters its first full year of operation, the project continues to show promise, officials said.
Since May, workers and students have produced more than 6,800 pounds of produce at the Upper Marlboro farm. Now in their second year, lead agriculture technician Guy Kilpatric said they are reaching toward their end goal of becoming self-sustaining.
“We value our product and want to keep producing more, so by the end of the third year, we’ll be ready to function as a business operation,” Kilpatric said.
A $124,400 grant from the University of Maryland’s sustainability fund, awarded in February 2014, provided the two-acre, university-owned farm with startup funding for its first three years.
Kilpatric and other farm workers led 74 students to plant and harvest 15 different vegetables, ranging from carrots and turnips to beets and jalapeño peppers, according to the 2014 Terp Farm Annual Report.
More than half the food, which included 1,116 pounds of tomatoes, 428 pounds of cucumbers and 573 pounds of leafy greens, went to campus dining halls, according to the report, while the rest went to the university’s catering company and area food banks, including one on the campus.
Karyn Owens, a junior plant sciences major who worked on the farm, said she enjoyed seeing the food production process from start to finish.
“It was cool to me that we got to watch the seedlings while we were tending and caring for them,” Owens said, “then send them straight to campus where the staff was really excited to have these products.”
The first year was spent building a strong foundation for the farm, Kilpatric said. Volunteers worked with the soil, set up irrigation systems and plotted which crops to grow and where.
“During the first orientation, we’re by this beautiful pond near this huge field where we hadn’t even started planting,” said Owens, who completed her plant sciences capstone requirement at Terp Farm. “There was so much potential, and it was amazing to see it all transformed.”
But not everything went perfectly in the first round, Kilpatric said. The farm planned to grow sweet potatoes, but few of the plants survived due to poor irrigation. Since then, the team has improved its growing schedule and irrigation methods.
As the weather begins to warm and the second harvest season approaches, Kilpatric said he wants to ensure this year’s process is smoother and larger.
This year, Terp Farm participants will develop an in-house food distribution operation, which will wash and package produce right on the farm so it can be sent directly to dining halls, Kilpatric said. Currently, the food goes to a commissary first, but they hope to convert an old chicken feed mill on the farm into a production facility by March or April.
That facility will be needed if they want to reach their goal of at least doubling current productions, which Kilpatric said he hopes will include more onions, zucchini, squash and salad greens.
Educational outreach is still a main goal for the farm, he said, and Terp Farm will continue to draw volunteers from university students, most of whom came through plant and life sciences classes.
For Zachary Beichler, a plant sciences and landscape architecture student who graduated last semester, working at Terp Farm helped close the gap between the consumer and producer.
“There is a lot that goes into this process,” said Beichler, who participated in Terp Farm as part of the class PLCS433: Fruit and Vegetable Technology. “For students to work and learn how a tomato is grown first-hand, we all can get a deeper appreciation for how we get our food and become more health conscious.”
