The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Tassinong Farms up and running
By Alissa Johnson
It is December, and snow coats the ground in the Crested Butte South commercial district. As the shortest day of the year comes and goes, growing season is months away. Shades of green and farmers markets are a distant memory.
Yet inside of a refurbished shipping container, Tassinong Farms general manager Kate Haverkampf has been planting lettuces and herbs. Tiny seedlings, no bigger than her thumb, line germination trays, and in as little as five to eight weeks, they will grow into lettuces, kale, basil, shiso (often used in Asian cooking) and edible flowers.
Haverkampf looks more like a ski bum than a farmer, wearing a trucker’s hat and ski jacket. But her hat features an illustration of a head of lettuce and says, “Lettuce Head, Tassinong Farms.” She worked throughout the fall to secure approvals to bring her farm to Crested Butte South and supply the upper end of the valley with fresh, local micro-greens. During the deep freeze of January, families and restaurants alike will be able to sample fresh, local produce.
A hydroponic farm
Tassinong doesn’t look like a farm. At the moment, it consists of two shipping containers behind an exposed foundation, just past Camp 4 Coffee on Gillaspey Avenue.
Painted white and green with the words “Freight Farms” in big green letters on the side, they’re in the middle of a makeover.
The containers will be covered with siding and roofs, and this spring, construction will begin on a mixed-use building on the existing foundation. There will also be a farm stand, but for now, there’s a chalkboard sign hanging on the bright green door of a shipping container, welcoming visitors to the farm.
Inside, the container feels like a combination commercial kitchen and laboratory. A stainless steel counter lines the wall across from the door, and the rest of the space is taken up by hanging metal towers lined with a growing medium made of recycled plastic bottles. Strips of LED lights hang between the towers—they’re turned off during the day, but at night they fill the container with a reddish-purple glow.
“Their daytime is our nighttime,” Haverkampf explains of the plants, and it’s easy to see why. Planting and harvesting under florescent lights rather than the colored electric glow makes sense.
The towers are empty for now, but trays of germinating seeds line a shelf under the stainless steel counter. The domed plastic lids that cover them are lined with moisture on the inside, and the tiny seedlings they protect have been growing for nearly a week. Haverkampf will soon transfer them to seedling trays and plant another round of seeds.
It’s hard to believe. The farms arrived on a Tuesday. Haverkampf spent two days training and getting them up and running with a representative from manufacturer Freight Farms, then planted the following Thursday. Now, one week later, the seeds have germinated and tiny green leaves line the tray.
“It’s pretty amazing. When they pulled up with [the containers], they looked pretty much like this. Things were tied down for transport, but this was all here,” Haverkampf said.
At three weeks, she’ll transfer the seedlings to the towers, sticking each plug into the growing medium so that it’s angled toward the lights. A watering system will circulate through the plants, and a computer will monitor the nutrient and pH levels, adjusting as needed. It will also turn the lights on and off and monitor things like CO2 levels and temperature.
While Haverkampf will spend a good deal of her time at the farm planting and harvesting, she can also monitor the containers using an app on her phone. It’s easy to imagine how the feel of the container will change when it’s lined with lettuce heads and kale, but now—in its beginning stages—it feels futuristic, and many proponents call it just that: The way of the future.
A different way to grow
When Haverkampf begins selling produce, it will have a dramatically smaller footprint than much of the food that lines local grocery shelves.
It will use 90 percent less water than outdoor farming, and the produce will be herbicide- and pesticide-free. Rather than being trucked in from hundreds or thousands of miles away, it will have grown just down the valley (in some cases just down the street) from the families and restaurants that use it.
Using data from existing farmers, Freight Farms estimates that the leafy green machines (their name for the shipping containers) yield the equivalent of 12 full harvests over the course of the year.
Compared to the yield of a one-acre outdoor farm—75 percent of which tends to be marketable—93 percent of the yield will be sellable. And whereas one acre of a traditional farm could yield 23,760 mini-heads of lettuce in a year, a leafy green machine can yield 48,468 mini-heads of lettuce.
For Haverkampf, the approach makes sense in a high-altitude region with a short growing season.
“This is high tech farming, and if you follow a lot of the articles right now, this is the wave of the future. I’m not cutting-edge because people have been doing this for many years now. Twenty years from now I might be considered one of the first, but with our climate, climate change, trucking, and how bad it is for our environment to go so far to bring food in, this is a solution,” she said.
It’s also giving Haverkampf a career in a community where that can be hard to create. “I’m excited to get up every day to go to work because this is new and interesting, and I believe in it.”
Growing a business
There is, of course, a learning curve with any new venture. In addition to spending two days with the Freight Farms rep, Haverkampf traveled to Boston last September for training and continues to communicate with the company by text and email. The company has sold just over 50 farms, and Tassinong was the first to purchase two at once.
“The first month is, I think for everyone, about getting to know and understand and feel confident [running the farms],” Haverkampf said.
One night, Haverkampf checked the herb farm on her phone only to discover it had reached 97 degrees (with only the LED lights as a heat source, no less). Basil loves heat, so the plants were fine, but Haverkampf did need to make adjustments for the local climate.
In light of the learning curve, Freight Farms suggests that farms start slow when it comes to selling produce. They recommend taking two to three months to get used to growing, build awareness, and give people the opportunity to sample the greens.
“It’s tempting. I know what I should be yielding, and I want to say ‘I’m going to have 250 heads of mini-lettuce ready to go in four weeks, so let me take your order,’” Haverkampf said.
Instead, she’s going to wait for harvest, then invite people to stop by and try the produce. If they like what they taste, they can place future orders on the website, which also lists “what’s growing” (www.tassinongfarms.com). And while Haverkampf toyed with the idea of home delivery, she’s starting with pick-up. Leaving fresh lettuce, greens and edible flowers on frozen doorsteps seemed like risky business.
“I want to provide a product that’s awesome from the first time somebody buys it,” she said.
The best way to stay in the know is to watch for announcements on Facebook or sign up for the Tassinong Farms newsletter. For now, the farm is a work in progress, but one that Haverkampf is excited to bring to the community.
As she said, “People could have definitely said ‘We don’t understand this, no.’ But no one’s said that. It makes me love our community that everyone is going to listen, invest their time to understand it… I am really appreciative of our community for all of that.”
