(Morrisville, NY \u2013 Jan. 2014) The \u201cBuy Local\u201d phenomenon has been great for businesses like GandM Farms in Morrisville. Ginger Scoville, who manages the farm\u2019s day-to-day activities, works with her husband Mike and their family to plan, plant, grow, harvest and market\u00a0naturally grown vegetables and raise chickens for eggs. She also prepares and\u00a0sells a variety of hot sauces, salsas, and all kinds of jams and jellies with her own GandM Farm label. Theirs is the quintessential small farm, selling produce along with an assortment of value-added products.<\/p>\n
Ginger is a familiar face at the Hamilton and Clinton Farmers Markets, as well as at the Winter Markets in Poolville, Cazenovia, Hamilton, and Morrisville.\u00a0 But as her customer base grew, she ran into problems storing produce for short and extended periods of time.\u00a0 Even the extra refrigerator and freezer in their garage couldn\u2019t maintain the kind of environment needed, much less extend the shelf-life of the produce to be sold.<\/p>\n
Add to that, the Scoville\u2019s temporary root cellar in the basement, which consisted of\u00a0bins of dirt and sand. It left much to be desired in preserving the carrot crop, in particular. And the trips up and down stairs grew very tiresome.<\/p>\n
Luckily, a grant program launched statewide by Cornell Cooperative Extension and funded through New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets came to Ginger\u2019s attention. As the grant program\u2019s name\u00a0indicates \u2013 \u201cIncreasing Cooling Space for Small Farms\u201d – it was exactly what Ginger needed.\u00a0 So she applied and was one of 65 New York farmers awarded funding.<\/p>\n
Her cooler is 6\u2019 wide and 8\u2019 deep. Its spray foam insulation is 6 inches thick throughout, so fluctuations in temperature and humidity will be a thing of the past. A wireless remote system constantly records the temperature and humidity, so it can be monitored without even entering the cooler. And when Ginger is away from the farm, all she has to do is call into the unit to check on its status. A great example of \u201cCool\u201d technology at its best.<\/p>\n
She estimates that cooler will not only extend the farm\u2019s storage capacity, but will also give her more time to harvest and clean produce, reduce losses, and eliminate those tiresome trips to the basement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Morrisville, NY \u2013 Jan. 2014) The \u201cBuy Local\u201d phenomenon has been great for businesses like GandM Farms in Morrisville. Ginger Scoville, who manages the farm\u2019s day-to-day activities, works with her husband Mike and their family to plan, plant, grow, harvest and market\u00a0naturally grown vegetables and raise chickens for eggs. She also prepares and\u00a0sells a variety […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23679,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agfarming","category-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}