BUNNELL — Paying the bills. It's tough for a new business venture to do that, so Brittany Cowart is calling the first year of her fall festival, complete with crop maze, a success.
"We did all right," she said. "Hey, we paid our bills. More people will already know about it next year. It will be better."
She and Dalton Kinney spent the summer grooming her family's property on State Road 100 West for the event, a dream that took her years to accomplish.
Besides planting and tending a field of sorghum, corn's cousin, for the maze, she needed some 20 varieties of pumpkins, winter squash and gourds for the full fall effect. That was something she would have been hard-pressed to do without help from the Flagler County Extension Office and the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Hastings Partnership, also known as PWACS — Partnership for Water, Agriculture and Community Sustainability.
Mazes are popular and common in the Midwest where corn grows well, said Flagler extension agent Mark Warren, so it's taken time for the idea to take off, but sorghum is catching on. The bigger challenge is getting a decent crop of pumpkins and gourds to grow in the heat and humidity of Florida.
"They research both types and management practices here," he said as he provided a tour of the Cowpen Branch facility in Hastings. "The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) will at new selections and Doug Gergela (research coordinator) will pick ones that may do well in a tropical climate for variety trials."
The goal of university extension offices — started 150 years ago with the adoption of the Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1862 — is to disseminate information to local farmers that can help them diversify their businesses, if they want to, or to otherwise increase production and efficiency.
"Getting the information out is done more at my office," Warren said, "but it is definitely supported by what is done out here."
Gergela said there is no breeding program in Hastings, so research begins with seeds. He got to name a new variety of chip potato, the Elkton Potato, last year but it took 15 years of study.
"It's a long process," he said. "If you want a producer too invest, you have to give them some assurances."
The researcher showed off some of his remaining pumpkins and squash — nine varieties of butternut squash alone.
Gergela said the tri-county area of Flagler, Putnam and St. Johns is unique because of farmers' ability to grow crops over the winter.
Trials at the facility include thousands of varieties of fruits and vegetables each year, Gergela said, which also works at double- and triple-cropping to reuse a sheet plastic "mulch" for plant protection. The same area used to grow gourds and pumpkins will now be used to test 16 varieties of cauliflower. Ideally a third planting of processing pumpkins, the ones that end up in cans as pie filling, will be planted afterward.
"It's similar to cabbage, so it might be an option for some of our growers," he said. "We are trying to find varieties where you don't have to cover the head. It's labor-intensive (to pull the leaves around and band the heads to keep the vegetable white).
Additionally, the facility does tests for more efficient water usage and alternative, and natural, fumigation methods that are less costly and more environmentally friendly.
"If it wasn't for this station, Brittany wouldn't have been able to pull this off," Warren said. "This research and the Extension (Offices) is the vehicle that gets this done."
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