Are Deep Winter Greenhouses futuristic or idealistic?
St. John’s University’s Deep Winter Greenhouse (DWG) was not built as a utopian scheme; it was built to make a profit. Which in a way, made the project even more ambitious. Growing produce during a Minnesotan winter is nothing new – university biology departments across the upper Midwest have operated heated greenhouses year round for decades – but to do so profitably would be a Christmas miracle. The heating costs are too high, and produce shipped from the south priced too low.
In 2012, however, the St. John’s entrepreneurial club thought they could beat conventional wisdom. The students designed a high tech greenhouse that could grow produce during the winter months without the assistance of a heater, and spent $70,000 to make their design a reality. The produce they grew, said the students, could be sold at a premium to local buyers, as the entrepreneur club would be the only producer in town selling fresh, locally grown vegetables during the winter.
To say it didn’t work out would be an understatement. The entrepreneur club abandoned the DWG after only one growing season. The little they managed to grow didn’t even cover operating costs, much less make a return on the investment.
Cautionary tales like this one, however, have not dampened the enthusiasm of a growing DWG community. A quick Google search for winter greenhouses in Minnesota will yield how-to guides, workshops, a robust Facebook group, conferences, classes, and even a DWG research seminar at . The community that sponsors these events boasts an eclectic collection of retirement-age hobbyists, homesteading families, and alternative agriculture devotees, all of whom are committed to the idea of a next generation greenhouse that could grow produce in below zero temperatures and with minimal heating. And for them, it is not just an economic opportunity at stake; what hangs in the balance is an ideal agricultural system that can produce fresh, local food all year round, can eliminate the carbon footprint of transported foodstuffs, and can endure a hypothetical agricultural crisis.
In January, some 30 people from this community drove to St. John’s rural location for a tour of its DWG – the first in a series of DWG tours across Minnesota hosted by the Sustainable Farming Association (SFA), a “farmer-to-farmer network” that advocates for sustainable agriculture. But on this frigid January day in St. Joseph, Minnesota, farmers were conspicuously absent from the scene. Only a couple of commercial growers had bothered to attend. Which prompts the question: does the DWG fan club know something that farmers – and apparently St. John’s student entrepreneurs – don’t know? Or are they collectively day dreaming, and farmers know better?
Inside the Greenhouse: Troubleshooting the Idyllic
The DWG always faces south, and the angle of its Lexan glass depends on the latitude.
About two dozen DWGs exist across Minnesota today, mostly in backyards or on small homesteads, and no two greenhouses are identical – size and shape depend on the owner’s needs and ambitions. The DWG at St. John’s measures roughly 30 feet by 40 feet, with a 20-foot ceiling. More important than size, however, is that the DWG succeed in two regards: maximizing sunlight, and minimizing heat loss. To achieve that, Deep Winter Greenhouses are built with polycarbonate glass, as opposed to polyethylene film which is the flexible plastic sheeting seen on most ordinary greenhouses. For the DWG at St. John’s, students used three layers of polycarbonate Lexan glass, maximizing heat retention while still permitting the entry of sunlight. The polycarbonate glass wall faces south and was constructed at an angle to maximize exposure to the winter sun. Inside the greenhouse, wintery light filters through the translucent Lexan glass and illuminates rows of floating greenery. “Gutters” of lettuce float in midair, suspended by sets of chains. Because space optimization is key, students have arranged these gutters around the greenhouse in a way that maximizes each plant’s exposure to the sun.
Today, this DWG is under the stewardship of students like Mike Collins, a St. John’s senior and resident of the university’s “eco-houses”. Mike explained that after the entrepreneur club gave up on the DWG as a business venture in 2013, eco-house residents adopted the hand-me-down greenhouse as their own. According to Collins, the greenhouse has fared better since the hand-off. “Entrepreneurs are good at starting businesses,” said a grinning Collins, “but not at growing things.”
Every Sunday, students harvest the DWG’s lettuce and sell it to the university’s dining hall.
In the 2015 season, under the green thumb of the eco-house students, the greenhouse yielded its first ever profit: around $30. Lower heating costs made this possible – it took a few seasons of experimentation before the students could rely on the emergency heater less frequently. As he spoke to the tour group, Mike gestured to the greenhouse’s heater which is fastened to the greenhouse’s side wall and is programmed to turn on when the greenhouse temperature falls below 45 degrees. Although according to Mike, the DWG can usually maintain a temperature of 50 degrees without assistance. This is warm enough to grow lettuce and spinach, which students begin to harvest in December.
Still, $30 barely begins to return the original $70,000 investment. Nor does it account for the countless hours that students voluntarily put into the greenhouse’s weekly operations. Therefore, the St. John’s DWG balance sheet show little promise as a for-profit venture, although students insist they “are not in it to make profit.” Instead, students are excited to sell their produce to the campus dining hall on a weekly basis, which gives them the opportunity to eat what they’ve harvested. The DWG’s purpose at St. John’s is wholly educational and experiential.
If profits were there goal, the major problem they face is one of volume. The students spoke frankly about the greenhouse’s limitation. “We could meet your needs, but it doesn’t produce a lot,” said Collins. This January, they hoped to produce 8-9 pounds of lettuce a week. At the end of the day, these small yields cannot compete with cheaper food imported from conventional farms further south.
Still, the story of high-risk, low-reward didn’t seem to daunt the DWG’s visitors on January 16, during the SFA-sponsored tour. As Collins explained the greenhouse’s basic design, several in the group took out note pads to record the details. And when at the end of the tour Collins asked if anyone there was interested in building a DWG themselves, seven or eight hands shot up. A minority, to be sure – but then again everyone in the room had already taken their interest to unusual lengths, spending their Saturday mornings ostensibly driving several hours into rural Minnesota. For such small yields, this greenhouse has a rather large gravitational pull.
Saving Humanity One Greenhouse at a Time (Vacation Not Included)
One of the hands that shot up belonged to Dan Moe. One of the only farmers in attendance, Moe believes revolutionizing agriculture and making a living do not need to be mutually exclusive. Moe is planning on building his own DWG on his certified organic farm in Hutchison, Minnesota, and he intends to incorporate the DWG into his farm’s business operation as part of an effort to supply food to customers year round.
At 2,000 sq. ft., the greenhouse Moe plans to build will be twice the size of the DWG at St. John’s. Speaking with the authority of a farmer who has been growing vegetables, fruits, and herbs all his life, Moe dismisses the possibility that his plan isn’t economically sound. But for Moe, it’s about much more than just profit. When asked why he wants to build a DWG, his answer either totally avoids the question or gets to its heart, depending on how you look at it: “I’m a farmer. That’s who I am.” He tops it off with a touch of philosophy. “You don’t stop eating during the wintertime, so we shouldn’t stop growing it.” It is seemingly obvious to Moe that it is in his interest as a farmer to grow produce all year round.
But if DWGs are as common sense as Moe would like us to believe, why aren’t more farmers building them? Is there really a market for high-cost DWG produce when cheaper foods imported from the south are readily available? Moe’s answer was part “there is a market” and part “there should be a market.” Co-ops and farmers’ markets want fresh food all year long, Moe claims, and it’s in the consumer’s interest to have fresh food all year-long for nutritional reasons. It doesn’t matter, Moe says, if your food is grown organic when it’s been shipped 1,500 miles. The nutrition disappears.
Dan Moe, on the left, speaks to others after the conclusion of SFA’s tour of the DWG at St. Benedict’s College.
Moe accepts that some consumers will always prefer cheap over local. But he thinks the real reason Minnesotan farmers haven’t embraced deep winter greenhouses is one of “cultural bias.” The belief that you “can’t plant anything after fourth of July” runs deep in Minnesotan farmers. Plus, according to Moe, most farmers treasure their vacation time. “They think in the winter, ‘I need to live! I need my vacation time in Mexico!’” Winter vacation as a sacred cow doesn’t rest well with Moe, a native Californian who believes farmers should work all-year round.
Moe’s point about farmers’ vacation time seemed vindicated at the next DWG tour stop at St. Benedict’s College (St. John’s sister school), when the other farmer in attendance cited vacation as a reason she wasn’t interested in building a DWG. “We do work all summer, and like our winter break,” said Lisa, an organic farmer who didn’t give her last name. “Also, when you’re doing commercial ag, six pounds of yield won’t pay the bills.” She was referring to the yield rate of St. Benedict’s DWG, which produces only about six pounds of produce weekly. “But if there was a happy medium, maybe we’d be interested.” When pressed on the issue of vacation, she changed her answer some. “Well, the winter time isn’t really a vacation.” Record-keeping and planning for the next year keeps the winter busy, Lisa said.
The “Shiny Things of Sustainable Agriculture”
That DWGs have instilled an odd, devoted fascination in some Minnesotans does not at all surprise Ryan Pesch, an organic farmer who crowdfunded and built his own deep winter greenhouse about 45 minutes southeast of Fargo. “People get enamored with some of the, I call them ‘the shiny things’ of sustainable agriculture,” said Pesch over the phone. “Maybe winter greenhouses are one such shiny thing?” The DWG, it turns out, is fairly typical of hot trends in the world of alternative agriculture. Pesch poked fun at a few of them, such as fertilized eggs, aquaponics, and fermentation. “They would ferment their toenails, if they could,” said Pesch, laughing a little.
For his part, Pesch offered an explanation similar to Dan Moe’s explanation as to why DWGs have not taken off on commercial farms. “I think people always go for .” Although unlike Moe, Pesch considers the wariness of his fellow farmers reasonable. At first, Pesch wasn’t sure he wanted to take on the extra commitment himself.
So most farmers are reluctant to invest the extra time, energy, and capital into something that isn’t clearly worth the trade-off. Can anything convince them otherwise? Here, the conversation takes a darker turn.
“Only a crisis” will make farmers see the wisdom of DWGs and growing food in the winter, said Moe, who stuck around St. John’s after the tour group left and discussed with students the dangers ahead if Minnesota agriculture didn’t change course. His example of a game-changing emergency was a transportation crisis that cuts off wintertime Minnesota from the food supply farther south. What’s worse is, “by then it will be too late.” DWGs take time to build, and food takes time to grow.
The students and a few others stood around Moe in a circle, attracted to his farming expertise and his message. Listeners nodded their heads in agreement as Moe dispersed his warnings. Some may doubt the likelihood of the kind of crisis Moe fears, but Moe is not alone in his thinking. Later, the SFA representative told the tour group that DWGs are not about profitability; it’s about resiliency and survival for when something happens.
Not Quite Not Viable
In the event of a wintertime food crisis, we now all know to go to Moe’s farm. But in the present, do DWGs make sense?
According to Pesch, the DWG has worked well for his farm, despite challenges. The key was integrating the greenhouse into a larger farming operation. “I kinda came around with this notion of how it would stack into other enterprises,” said Pesch. “It seemed to make good sense.” He gave the example of onion plants. Typically, organic growers spend hundreds of dollars on onion plants shipped from Texas, and in the past Pesch would drive more than three hours to pick up those plants at a supplier in southern Minnesota. Now, he can simply start his own onion plants in the greenhouse before the spring thaw. The additional DWG produce he can grow is sold easily to his existing customer base, whom he sells to directly.
Ryan Pesch and his family raised $8,242 on a Kickstarter campaign to help build his DWG. Photo Credit: The Pesch Family
It is worth noting that Pesch does have a day job off the farm. “It is more of an endeavor for somebody that does this 100 percent full-time,” said Pesch. The DWG modestly supplements his family’s income, but he doesn’t rely financially on the greenhouse, and for him the DWG is a low-input project. Pesch’s DWG was cheaper than St. John’s DWG, too; it cost approximately $16,000.
A few other farms have had similar modest successes. Paradox Farms in Ashby, Minnesota built its greenhouse for a mere $5,000. Still, one of its owners, Sue Wika, admitted to Produce Grower magazine in 2014 that in the DWG’s first two years of operation, the greenhouse only managed to break even. But Wika was optimistic. In the DWG’s third season, she believed they would make “a nice little profit.”
As for Moe’s greenhouse, we will have to wait and see. Because his planned greenhouse will be twice the size of St. John’s, that might solve the problem of small yields. And as far as customer demand, Dale Woodbeck, general manager of three store co-op in the Twin Cities, believes there is a place in the market for people like Moe. Even at higher prices, people pay for local food. But Woodbeck, who is a SFA board member at-large and attended the DWG tour, is more interested in the greenhouse’s potential for personal use. The health and psychological benefits of working in a greenhouse, Woodbeck said, shouldn’t be discounted.
Personal use, at least until Moe’s crisis arrives, may be DWGs’ more realistic future. And that may be enough for the non-farmers who’ve gravitated toward the idea. For them, maybe the true appeal never was DWG’s potential for agricultural revolution. Maybe the simple combination of modern technology and an old-school desire to reconnect with the earth is enough to ignite our interest.
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