 Hi, my name is Bill Warner, Snug Haven Farm. I've been farming since 1989 or 1990. I'd have to really look back long ways to figure out which one it is, but either way that's 30 years or better. The hoop house is pretty much any protected structure over the ground. Usually it's in the shape of a quantset or a half circle. I just kind of tell people when I try to describe it at market, it's an umbrella over the ground. I'm just protecting the crops inside from the extremes of the weather. So the plastic keeps the wind off. It heats up earlier in the day, stays warmer later at night. It keeps the real cold off, it keeps the snow off. So it's just a pretty much any protected environment and they just happen to be the easiest thing to cover a lot of area and put plastic over and protect a lot of ground with minimal cost. You know, hundreds of years ago people were extending the season as long as they can with glass jars, with window frames on top of straw. And it doesn't take much to extend your season. So with the technology of the greenhouse structures, people have been extending season with plastic over that greenhouse structures and planting in the ground. And so then you have the fresh food for a lot longer period of time. The difference between a hoop house and a greenhouse is that a greenhouse is usually heated all the time to a certain temperature to make it the optimal conditions for plants and things aren't grown to be eaten out of. They're growing plants and starts and they're on benches. They're not grown in the ground. Greenhouses cost a lot more to put together because of all the tables and the watering system and the gravel on the ground. And you get more return, but it costs a lot more. Where hoop houses is just covering a growing area to produce food. Oh, the benefits of a hoop house are enormous. I think it gets you out. It shortens winter. Most people think our winter starts in December here. I like to think it starts right about the beginning of January. And most people think it goes through March. I like to think it ends at the end of February. A hoop house gives me crops at a different time. And I don't have the same crops everybody else has when they have them. So I kind of call it the gas station effect. Or if you're old enough even, I hate to say the CD store effect. There's a lot of food in your neighborhood, a lot of gas stations, a lot of video stores. And yet you choose which one you need to go to by convenience or which one you went to first, which one you've been going to. So I can usually get to market with stuff before people. So I already have an in on getting those people as my customer. I just have to, once I give them good food, they're going to stay with me. I don't ever want to say I'm controlling mother nature because then the next thing you know, there won't be any hoop houses left. We're actually able to protect ourselves from the extremes. And that's the biggest clue. We can handle some heat, we can handle some rain, we can handle some cold, we can handle some wind. It's like buying insurance. We're just better protected all around from all the extremes of the climate. And a lot of farmers are struggling with that right now. You know, when I go to conferences and talk to my other farmer friends who like farm, I like to call farming outside, they have issues with all the climate change now. Now, while we have little bits of it, we don't have near the issues they have where they're losing crops, they're losing this or that or their fields. They can't plant because it's too wet. We have done some outside farming and we have had more troubles with those crops recently. So it's just a protection issue and it spreads out my season. So I don't have to all the pressure in about a five month season. When you're trying to choose how to put a hoop house and what site to put them on, our farm is probably the lesson and not the best spot in the world for it. You want flat sites, you want to grade it away so that water's not coming in and you want to flatten, grade it and up a little bit so water doesn't seep in on the sides because you don't have protection on the sides. Now on our farm, we don't have flat ground and we built most hoop houses before all the studies were done on how to build your site for them. But you just want to keep water from coming in. Hoop houses, a greenhouse person will tell you you got to run them north south for even light on your plants. And so they tried telling people for years to put hoop houses that way. But you want to run your hoop houses east west so that the sun is hitting some part of it at a 90 degree angle and you absorb a lot more heat. And then in the summer, when the sun's up in the middle of the sky, it doesn't really matter which way. So you might as well, you're putting it up for extra season and protection. You might as well run them east west. Not everybody has that. But if you can get a wind block on the north, that's advantage. We have some hoop houses on the hill that the moment we built them, the warranty was invalid because our slopes probably like somewhere between six and eight percent, which they tell you not to do more than one percent. The irrigation systems, the problem with hoops in the middle of winter is you don't, or with hoops in general, is you don't get all the rinsing that natural rain gives it. And when you're watering with well water, you get a lot of, you might get some salt or you might get some irons or you might get other minerals that aren't normally going to be found in the rain. And it does affect the soil somewhat. It can become more compacted or it can become drier. When we change the plastic, we try to change it in the summer and leave it off for a couple of months so it rains in there. So it's nice to go with a sprinkler system in the winter so you are rinsing down some of that. We use drip tape more in the summer because those crops do better under drip tape and you're not getting that rinsing effect. You'll sometimes see a little ring of white after you drip tape. And it's some of the salts that when the water evaporates, the salt has to ride up to the top of the ground with the water and then it'll leave that little white ring. In general, hoop houses seem to be ahead of the pest cycle like the butterflies. We're often harvesting stuff before the butterflies are going to lay the eggs for larvae. But one problem we do have is we're in early March right now and our aphid population is going to explode. And so we do have some situations where the natural rinsing would have probably helped take care of that. They'll start getting on my leafy greens and so we'll have to, there's a couple of organic sprays you can use for that. We prefer not to, but you just can't charge a lot for spinach and have a lot of aphids with it, unless you come up with a fancy name for it, maybe. Because in high tunnels, we have a buildup of nutrients and salts near the soil surface. We're really trying to think creatively about ways we can overcome those challenges in this unique environment. One of the things we've been trying in our lab is to work with cover crops and growing those in high tunnels because we found that cover crops can help to cycle nutrients a little bit more naturally like you might see in an open field environment. Cover crops are crops that are not harvested. They're grown exclusively for other benefits such as improving soil quality. Sometimes they can attract pollinators if they flower. So there are a lot of environmental benefits that you can get by using these non-harvested crops. The challenge in high tunnels is that there aren't a lot of spaces in which we can grow other crops. It's a high value real estate and farmers logically want to be able to grow crops as much as they can that they can sell. Where high-tunnel cover crops would exclusively be planted to improve soils. And so it's been a little tricky trying to figure out when, where, and how to get those cover crops to grow in tunnels. But we think we can get there. Maneuver and compost are wonderful fertilizers and they're heavily utilized by organic farmers often because they're accessible and they're easy to apply. But they can have some downsides as well. And one of those downsides is that when you apply something like a manure, it can have a high concentration of some nutrients, especially things like phosphorus. And if you put that overload of phosphorus on it, it's more than this crop can take up. You end up with losses. So the fertility that you've added to feed the crop that's not used by the crop can cause imbalances in your soil. So you end up with having too much of a good thing, too much of those nutrients that you put on through the fertility. Many, many farmers are, they have high tunnels. They're putting up high tunnels because there's cost share dollars behind them. It's actually, it can be very inexpensive or sometimes free to put up a high tunnel. So many farmers are doing this and very successfully. But what that, we don't really know how to manage the soil as well. And we're finding that after now eight or 10 years of production in tunnels, we're seeing a lot of problems that we didn't really expect. We're seeing a lot of nutrient imbalances. The salinity issue I mentioned earlier is a problem. So things that we really, we really need to think together with farmers about ways in which we as scientists can work with organic producers to try to figure out how we can use cover crops better, how we can get organic matter to be added to high tunnels and improve those soils without impacting their production. That can be tricky, but I think together we can make that happen.