This forward thinking group of farmers is working hard to bring us closer to a sustainable regional food system. And how amazing and exciting this will be when we can buy local grain!

[and it’s combine, not columbine, but we’ll forgive the newspaper because it is covering this good agricultural news]

[1] East meets Midwest: Men plan a Seacoast wheat crop

Dick Wollmar has long been interested in sustainability, slow food and organic produce. The former North Hampton selectman lives on Walnut Avenue property that’s been farmland since 1729.

Jeffrey Schick is a financial planner who lives in a suburban neighborhood in Hampton. He wants to be a farmer.

Together, Wollmar and Schick purchased an old columbine for harvesting grains and had it trucked from Iowa to the University of New Hampshire’s Kingman Farm in Madbury. The columbine is 11 feet tall, 14 feet long and 8 feet wide, said Schick. They drove it, on a Sunday morning, at six and half miles per hour, to Wollmar’s farm. It took them more than three hours.

It’s currently being stored in a hangar at the Hampton Airfield awaiting Wollmar and Schick’s next big adventure: growing wheat on the Seacoast. On conservation land.

They want to grow, as locally as they can, a crop usually associated with the larger expanses of the Midwest.

The men have put the word out they want to grow wheat and other crops on land set aside as conservation easements. They’ve gotten a good response, said Schick.

[2]  read the full article from the Portsmouth Herald >

Dick Wollmar will be at Saturday’s Winter Farmers’ Market in Exeter, come out and say hello and provide some words of encouragement! [3] Details about the Farmers’ Market >