Tim Schartner eases his Dodge Ram over puddled ruts and parks it dead center of a grand plan: Tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes, with all the flavor and nutrition produced by well-amended soil, just the right amount of water and August heat — except grown hydroponically, harvested in February and eaten in a BLT a few days later. Sunk into the Exeter loam, powder-coated steel supports fan out in every direction like an illusion of infinity, but the glass-encased greenhouse that will eventually be finished here only covers twenty-five acres — a third of his fields.
“I think we are a generation away from losing our farms because of the encroaching commercial value of residential development; it’s going to force their sale,” says Schartner, the third generation to work these fields. “I wanted to keep the family in agriculture, and to do that I had to bring us to what was relevant in agriculture.”
Schartner began planning this $60 million project two years ago, but the idea of large-scale greenhouse farming has been rattling around in his head since he took a boat ride through Epcot Center’s Living with the Land exhibit at age eight. He was awestruck by the coconut trees and corn plots thriving in a computer-controlled environment under a glass geodesic dome.
State agriculture officials see CEA as an important addition to the state’s farming portfolio. Rhode Island grows less than 5 percent of its land-based food; regionally, New England produces less than 10 percent. In 2014, Food Solutions New England, a network of food sustainability advocates, released its regional food vision, 50 by 60: New England would produce 50 percent of its food by 2060. Rhode Island supports this goal via its own food sustainability program, Relish Rhody, a five-year food strategy plan to develop the agriculture and fishing industries and market their products.
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