Moulton Farm Practices Sustainability Through Diversification

The Garden Center at Moulton Farm offers a variety of plants that are suitable for New Hampshire’s climate. (Tom Caldwell Photo)

By Thomas P. Caldwell

Today’s Moulton Farm represents the evolution of agriculture over generations, as farmers adapt to changing economic conditions as well as finding sustainability through diversification. What we know today as agritourism is only the latest form of survival in a challenging business.

Located at 18 Quarry Road in Meredith, Moulton Farm offers fresh produce, baked goods, and the plants or seeds that allow patrons to establish their own gardens. There are also gardening events for children and other special activities.

Moulton Farm also offers space to independent vendors: Cider Bellies Doughnuts uses authentic ingredients and uses traditional techniques to offer a range of fresh doughnuts, while a fish vendor whose family has a history working in the fishing industry offers what many Moulton Farm customers say is the best product they have found anywhere, according to John Moulton.

“Our mission here,” he said, “not only is farming, but it’s retailing. We sell nearly all of our product right to the consumer.”

He credits the success of the farm operation to “really great managers and employees.”

Then there are the customers: “I’ve been very, very, very fortunate to have incredible support from so many people that understand that it’s 12 or 14 hours a day. You know, I was in here this morning well before five, and if I get home by seven or eight tonight, I feel fortunate. And this goes on seven days a week.”

Does he get a break during the winter months?

“It’s just like being on vacation; I only work 40 hours a week,” he says.

The store at Moulton Farm features fresh fruit and vegetables, including fresh strawberries, as well as other made-in-New Hampshire products. (Tom Caldwell Photo)

Moulton Farm dates back to the late 1800s when John’s great-grandfather bought part of the farm that lay opposite today’s marketplace. John said he was a railroad employee in Massachusetts at the time, and he bought the farm to sustain his family. They took in summer boarders, “which was kind of typical of the small farms in the area,” John says. “They served a very local summer population.”

He added, “It’s interesting how we refer to agritourism now as a contemporary term, when, in fact, it was at the beginning, and it was how small, diversified farms survived — even, you know, 100-plus years ago.”

John remembers when his grandfather raised dairy cows and delivered bottled milk, with a few customers coming to the farm to pick up milk at the source. John’s father continued operating the dairy farm after obtaining a degree in animal science from the University of New Hampshire.

“He followed a trend that we would see, where farms would focus more on one thing, one enterprise,” John said. “The enterprise that he chose in the ’40s was that of dairy. So his choice was to raise dairy cattle and milk them, and sell the milk wholesale to a dairy, first to a local dairy here in Meredith, Clark’s dairy, and then eventually, in the ’60s, he was selling to Weeks Dairy in Laconia.”

About that time, like many of the small farms that were finding dairy farming to be not economically feasible, his father sold the dairy herd, and, by about 1970, he had gone to work as a food inspector for the NH Department of Health.

A larger dairy farmer nearby built a new barn to automate the milking process and used the fields at Moulton Farm as supplemental fields to raise corn and hay, with John’s father retaining the use of a few acres, cutting a small amount of hay to sell and planting a half-acre of corn.

“They always had a fairly large garden,” John recalled, “and that’s how the produce business began.”

They would sell corn at a roadside stand. John said, “I remember, in the seventh grade, hand-painting the sign that said, ‘Butter or Sugar Corn, 50 cents a dozen’ and when the corn was gone, the sign came in, and that would repeat itself for a few weeks out of the summer.”

It was a way to raise college tuition money, and John pursued a teaching career. He used his time off during the summer to continue selling produce from the farm. Then, when he left teaching in 1993, he looked to expand what the farm offered.

By then, even the large dairy farmer who had been using some of the Moulton Farm property went out of business “because he wasn’t large enough. He couldn’t develop the economic efficiencies that you needed to be in a single-stream type of agricultural program.”

John also recognized that his family farm could not survive strictly upon traditional agriculture, and they began diversifying with greenhouses and different crops. By the early 2000s, they added a commercial kitchen and expanded the garden center. They have continued to expand since then. A couple of years ago, they built a new barn “exactly on the footprint of where the old barn was located,” but rather than holding dairy cows and storing milk, it is an automated processing room that handles and washes produce, with large coolers to keep the products fresh.

While the Moulton Farm is now diversified, its core mission is still farming and the growing of crops. They plant crops on five separate farms in Meredith and Center Harbor, through arrangements with other landowners.

Apart from normal economic uncertainties, they have had to deal with the challenges of weather. This year, the farm has experienced an unusual amount of rain and low temperatures that have delayed the growing season. The excess water and saturated soil slowed seed germination and delayed the growth of warm-season crops.

“We have the diversity going on that can be a cushion,” John said, noting that they have installed miles of raised beds for many of the crops, which can help avoid over-saturation from the rain.

To cope with droughts, they have installed a trickle irrigation system, but John said managing for a wet year is much more difficult than managing for a drought year or a dry year.

That does not mean that they are lacking produce in their store. Their ‘eight-and-a-half” greenhouses keep the store supplied with fresh vegetables. They practice “CEA” or controlled environment agriculture. John says, “If we’re going to even make a dent in raising more food in New England, that may well be an approach to take,” noting that many large greenhouses are being built with that in mind.

Their hydroponic greenhouse allowed them to start picking lettuce in March.

What they do not produce on the farm they obtain from other local sources. They work with a number of local farms to buy meat, apples, or “whatever they might have of good quality, depending on the season”, John says. “We do depend on folks who are good at what they do. We are good at what we do and, and on the large fruit size, we do our own strawberry program.”

The garden center sells organic seeds, seed-starting supplies, soils, mulches, and plants, even offering planting services.

“We try to make sure that we are offering plants that we know will grow in this area,” John says. “There is barely a vegetable plant that we sell that we wouldn’t grow ourselves in the field. We know which ones work, which ones we prefer, and so we’re using all the same varieties for plant sales. It’s the same ones we plant here at the farm.”

He adds that the Moulton Farm also serves as a major employer for Lakes Region residents, with 30 full-time equivalents, more than half of them working there year-round.

“We’re not just here for six weeks in the summer, but we have this great employee base and we employ them year-round, hopefully offering a good job to a lot of people.”