Jamie Raley recently kicked his decades-long tobacco habit. The Maryland farmer can thank Gary Mangum of Bell Nursery and some local government officials for helping him get on a new healthier regimen — at least one healthier for his business. Raley's family farm, along with 41 other farms on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, have stopped growing tobacco and other less profitable crops and started growing flowers and plants — a switch that earned them and Maryland's changing agricultural landscape a page one spot on the June 29 Sunday edition of The Washington Post. 

The crop swap comes as cigarette smoking drops and tobacco's worth gets snuffed out with it. Gary Mangum, co-founder of Bell's Nursery of Burtsonsville, Md., saw the dual decline as an opportunity to turn all those fallow farms into feeder fields for his business — a main plant supplier to Home Depot. The farmers saw the opportunity as a way to keep their family on the land. And local economic development officials jumped at the chance to play matchmaker between struggling farms in its borders and the successful Bell's Nursery, the Post reported. Under the plan, the farms build half-acre greenhouses (and pay to do so) and plant seedlings they buy from Bell's. Then when the plants are mature, Bells pays twice the amount the seedlings cost, but only for healthy plants.

The idea for the factory-like network of feeder greenhouses, now known as Bell Houses, started out with county officials, the article said. They convinced Bell to operate it and then together started recruiting farmers to be part of Bell's "Grower Network". As part of the recruitment effort, Mangum stressed to skeptical farmers that his staff would work closely with newly greened thumbs to ensure they weren't losing flowers (and money).

The Lohmeyer family's efficient, high-tech and highly successful greenhouses earned them the "poster child' status for the program, the paper reports. And it's earned them a profit that far exceeds the $150 an acre government subsidy they get not to plant as much soybeans and corn. Four greenhouses turned $175,000 in annual profit this past year, Charles Lohmeyer told the Post, enough to let his son quit his job running a nearby convenience store and get back to life on the farm.  

--Amanda Long
along@safnow.org

 

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