On the Move While Harvesting Butternut Squash at the Upper Marlboro Terp Farm

On the Move While Harvesting Butternut Squash at the Upper Marlboro Terp Farm

Lindsay Barranco, Experiential Learning Coordinator, University of Maryland Institute of Applied Agriculture                                 

On a sunny, beautiful day in late September 2023, students from INAG123 People, Planet & Profit: Digging into Sustainable Agriculture, took a field trip to the Terp Farm and Central Maryland Research and Education Center’s Upper Marlboro Facility. This course is popular with many students from numerous undergraduate programs, but also includes Institute of Applied Agriculture (IAA) students who are enrolled in the 2-year certificate program in Applied Agriculture. Students began the tour by hearing from facility manager, Donny Murphy, about some of the agricultural implements they use at the Upper Marlboro Facility for cultivating the fields and harvesting crops.

After Donny’s talk, Guy Kilpatric, manager of the Terp Farm project at the Upper Marlboro Facility, took the group on a tour of the hoop house storage area for harvested vegetables, which contained multiple bins of acorn, butternut and spaghetti squash, all of which goes to the UMD College Park Dining Facilities (and we learned that butternut squash can be stored for a full year!). Students then walked out to the radish fields, where they could pull up a watermelon radish – which when cut in two, revealed a brilliant interior of pink and green. The last part of the visit involved harvesting butternut squash using a conveyor belt that led to the wagon. As Guy drove the tractor slowly forward, he pulled the attached wagon and conveyor belt along as students picked butternut squash, and then placed it on the conveyor belt for other students to retrieve and stack onto the wagon (see video). A group of 24 students harvested hundreds of butternut squash in 15-20 minutes, which would have taken one person hours to accomplish.

Thank you to Upper Marlboro Facility Manager Donny Murphy and Terp Farm Manager Guy Kilpatric for the time they spent teaching students about harvesting, equipment and crop production.