In addition to attending the Great Lakes Expo, UVM Ag Engineering attended the New England Vegetable & Fruit Conference in Manchester, NH. This conference is very well suited for the small-scale and highly diversified farmers that populate the North East.
This conference is filled with a variety of vendors at the trade show, presentations covering specific details of individual crops and varieties, and even talks on designing your farm with an eye on food safety. Another interesting activity that went on was the farmer to farmer sessions that are not presentations but a lead conversation to discuss what works and what doesn’t on your farm. A lot of tips, tricks, and common complaints are all brought up and shared during this literally circled up conversation.
If you’ve never been here are a few photos from the event, which was very snowy in mid-December.
Here is a short highlight video from the conference!
The presentations that Chris gave at this conference can be seen below. This first one is all about designing your facilities with a food safety mindset. If you’ve never thought about your infrastructure design from this perspective before I’d encourage you to check out this presentation!
This next presentation discusses the importance of proper precooling curing practices and a few methods that you could remove the field heat from your harvests.
The following video has some overlapping principals with the previous on precooling however, this presentation was given specifically to a group of blueberry growers so it has a focus directed towards berries.