Farm Show’s Food Court Helps Farmers

By MARTHA RAFFAELE

HARRISBURG, Pa. – For John and Margery Donovan, no visit to the Pennsylvania Farm Show is complete without filling their stomachs with homegrown culinary treats from the food court.

At lunchtime Monday, the 73-year-old Gettysburg residents were looking forward to baked potatoes, fried mushrooms and milkshakes, "and then we have to wait a whole year until we can have another such feast," Margery Donovan said.

With its offerings of pulled pork sandwiches, maple candy and shoofly pie – to name just a few temptations – the food court does more than sell food to the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the show each year.

The proceeds help 11 nonprofit commodity associations pay for agricultural research and activities to promote their products throughout the year. Last year, the organizations sold more than $1 million worth of food, according to the state Agriculture Department.

The Pennsylvania Vegetable Growers Association posts a sign at its stand advising patrons that their money helps support research at Penn State University. The association will decide this month which research proposals involving vegetables and small fruits to support this year, said William Troxell, who serves as executive secretary of both the association and of the Pennsylvania Vegetable Marketing and Research Program.

"Our budgetary goal is to fund at least $30,000 worth of projects each year," Troxell said, adding that the group was able to spend close to $40,000 after last year’s farm show.

The vegetable growers have channeled a lot of their money into projects such as breeding disease-resistant tomatoes, snap beans and pumpkins to eliminate the need for fungicides, Troxell said.

Penn State research projects also benefits from the sales of apple and peach sundaes, cider and other apple products at the State Horticulture Association of Pennsylvania booth, said Dwight Mickey, a Chambersburg farmer who helps organize the booth.

"On my own farm, Penn State has been conducting a chemical peach thinning project," an experiment intended to provide a less costly alternative to manual labor used to rid peach trees of excess fruit, Mickey said.

One of the larger booths belongs to agri-business group PennAg Industries, encompassing poultry, fish, and even baked goods. Its food-court revenue supports college scholarships, among other things, said Christian R. Herr, assistant vice president of PennAg’s poultry council.

Additionally, the food court provides the organizations an opportunity to educate non-farmers about how the food they eat gets to the grocery store, Herr said. At its booth, PennAg is passing out napkins printed with statistics noting that, among other things, agriculture provides one in seven jobs for Pennsylvanians.

"We’re going to use 25,000 napkins this week – might as well send them out with a message," he said.

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On the Net:

Pennsylvania Farm Show: http://www.farmshow.state.pa.us

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – Minnesota’s warmer winters of recent years could allow the planting of more flowering and fruit trees that were once considered not hardy enough for the state.

Average winter temperatures have increased across the nation in the past 15 years, and a new analysis by the National Arbor Day Foundation lays out expanded "hardiness zones" for trees more commonly rooted in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa and points south that could expand their growing range to Minnesota.

"It opens up some new options," said Woodrow Nelson, the foundation’s communications director. "People in a much larger portion of Minnesota can experiment with flowering cherry trees, apple trees and even flowering dogwoods."

The changes proposed may seem less surprising than ever after an unusually warm winter in much of the Midwest, with temperatures running 10 to 20 degrees above normal.

In its study, the Arbor Day Foundation used the last 15 years of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 5,000 weather stations to redraw a hardiness zone published by the Department of Agriculture in 1990. The result was a dramatic shift in winter hardiness zones in many states.