Warren Farm

Week one done! I can't believe I am already 1/4 of the way through the summer institute. Today, we visited Warren Farm www.warrenfarmnh.com in Barrington. The property abuts the BHW and is owned by Randy and his wife, Heather Warren. Randy's father passed along the 244 acre property to his son and Randy and his wife have been growing berries, various veggies and Christmas trees to sell to the local community ever since. The back of the property has extensive woods (eventually connecting to the BHW) that allows the family to supplement their income by splitting and selling firewood.

The property itself has an interesting history that dates back to a time where the locals felt it necessary to build a garrison to protect themselves from the Natives (even though relations with nearby tribes were fairly cordial). In 1769, a man named Pelatirah Danniells built the house on what is today the Warren property. Like many of the area's first settlers, he used the property for sheep pasture. The wool market was booming in New England and there were many mills located in Barrington to process wool. In 1875, the barn was built using the roof from the garrison across the street which had fallen into disrepair. After the Civil War, cotton from the south flooded the market and the wool trade crashed. The mills in Barrington closed and homes were abandoned. Danniells left and aside from a brief inhabitance by a logger, the next owner was a family from Dover who used it as a vacation home. The wife however, never liked the rural setting and when her husband passed away, let the property become overgrown until Randy's father arrived in New Hampshire. A new professor at University of New Hampshire (then almost exclusively an agricultural and mechanical school), he brought his family from Ithaca, NY, purchased the land and began farming it.
 At one point, the state tried to take the Warren farm area, which eventually lead Warren to have the land protected as conservation land, never to be subdivided or developed.

 As somewhat of a side project and the belief that it is the right thing to do, Randy Warren has taken a portion of the land and converted it into a bird and wildlife sanctuary. He told us how most of New Hampshire is made up of "forest, grass and pavement (including houses/buildings)" and that the environment in between forest and grass is missing. This habitat characterized by low shrubs, tall grasses and small deciduous trees is an important home for birds, rabbits and other small animals. Since he began clearing out large sections of woods (something that to many seems like the opposite thing to be doing when trying to "protect" an area) and allowing nature to follow its successional course, he has seen an increasing number of rare birds and other endangered species that have taken up residence at his farm permanently or during their migrations.

This is after a couple of years of regrowth after clearing the land. While it looks "messy" this area provides great habitat for all sorts of animals

This area was just knocked down this year, this summer and fall they will be selectively removing some of the wood while allowing the rest to decompose.

To help speed the process along, he will also be planting blueberry bushes which are one of the key species found in early successional areas. 

After a visit to the farm stand to buy sugar snap peas, blueberries, hand made soaps, maple syrup and pictures from a local photographer of wildlife seen on the property, we thanked Randy and Heather headed back to campus.

The afternoon was spent first with Betsy's reading facilitation, which conveniently was about local and sustainable food sources. We played a "guess the seasonal fruit or vegetable game" and then worked on a webquest that had us finding the regulations and process for a food to be USDA certified organic (which over the last couple of days I have learned has a lot more sides to it than meets the eye) and then looked up local farms.
After, we were shown how to use an excel based program that could calculate the biomass and carbon storage abilities of a plot of land. We used our data that we collected on Monday to calculate and make graphs.

For our 150 meter squared plot:

Plot Biomass (g/plot)			3,640,856
Plot Carbon Storage (g C/plot)			1,820,428
Biomass (g/m2)			24,262
Carbon (g C/m2)			12,131

Remember that DBH stands for Diameter at Breast Height. You can see that even though most of our trees were hemlock (orange triangle), most of our biomass (and carbon storage) came from the maple and oak category (which also includes beech trees) since they were older and much larger. It's interesting to note that our 1 mixed hardwood (the Basswood tree), had the second largest biomass, that was a BIG tree!

Well, week one closed, time to catch up on some sleep, complete some readings, relax and get ready for next week when we will begin our projects. One final picture:

Daisy, the adorable and apparently very resilient 2 year old who followed us all around the property.