Crop

As Jamie Brown shifts his gaze upward and squints at a pair of tall barns backed by a cloudless October sky, the reverence in his voice is nearly as clear as the autumn sun's rays. All around him at Triadelphia Lake View Farm, families are taking advantage of an unusually pretty day to pet farm animals, take hayrides and pick pumpkins. Layers of peeling red paint on the barns distinguish the two oldest structures on the 100-acre Glenelg farm at the end of meandering Triadelphia Road.

Unimpressed with the elementary school in her Baltimore neighborhood, Bobbi Macdonald set out to create her own. She founded the City Neighborhoods Foundation in 2003, the year her oldest daughter started kindergarten and the state of Maryland began allowing charter schools. Ten years later, the nonprofit is running three schools: City Neighbors Charter School, City Neighbors Hamilton and City Neighbors High School. All are known for student engagement and attendance rates that top 90 percent.

LOS ANGELES -- The cold snap that has devastated this year's California citrus crop could also dramatically curtail the number of lemons, oranges and avocados produced next year, farmers and agricultural officials said yesterday.Some farmers expect their citrus production to be half of normal next year because the persistent cold weather is killing young orange and lemon trees and decimating new growth on older citrus trees.Avocado production in Tulare County is likely to be wiped out completely for 1991, said the county agricultural commissioner, Lenord Craft.

The empty lot in West Baltimore is usually a desolate spot, the sort of place people visit to leave an old mattress in the bushes or sneak a drink at night. But this week, chain saws buzzed, trucks rumbled and residents shoveled compost at North Fulton and Lorman streets in Sandtown-Winchester as workers set up a 3,300-square-foot organic greenhouse, breaking ground on one of the city's biggest entries in the fast-growing national movement known as urban farming. The farm, now called Strength to Love Farms, will eventually be able to grow more than 150,000 pounds of fresh produce a year, all to be sold and distributed locally, according to Alex Persful, president and chief horticulturist of the urban agriculture firm Big City Farms.

"This could be my best crop ever," Joe Mullhausen said yesterday morning as he disappeared into a thicket of dark green corn stalks towering 10 feet, maybe 12 feet, above the ground. Mullhausen, 70, a stocky, white-haired farmer, planted 130 acres of field corn this year at his home farm near Prospect and on rented land in northeastern Harford County. He said the ears are longer, thicker and the kernels are deeper. "I doubt that I will live long enough to see a better crop than this," he said.

Connoisseurs of the peach may be disappointed this year -- tasty, locally grown peaches are in short supply.According to the Maryland Department of Agriculture, two-thirds of the state peach harvest -- which would be coming to market just about this time -- fell victim to a brutal January freeze that destroyed tree buds early in their development.Most of the crop in Carroll, Frederick and Washington counties -- the state's main peach-growing region -- "was wiped out," M. Bruce West, head of the department's crop reporting service, said yesterday.

WAYSON'S CORNER -- Claude McKee scanned the crowd of 200 or more that gathered at the sprawling Triangle Tobacco Warehouse for the opening session of the annual Southern Maryland tobacco auction and said that he had never seen so many people at previous sales."

Amish farmers from Cecil County were among those attending the opening of last week's tobacco auction in Charles County, where the Farmers and Hughesville warehouses are the state's only remaining tobacco auction sites. Although the number of tobacco farmers has fallen in almost every county since Maryland started its buyout of farmers in 2001, the number is increasing in Cecil County, traditionally a nontobacco area. The reason is the Amish. Amish tobacco farmers - who for religious reasons do not participate in government programs - have crossed the Pennsylvania border into Cecil to try their luck at tobacco in Maryland.

As temperatures rose yesterday, California's Central Valley orange growers were in a sunnier mood after initial inspections showed that last week's big chill may have spared more of their crop than they first feared.Instead of facing catastrophic losses, farmers were cautiously optimistic that they might be able to salvage 50 percent or more of their crops. That could be good news in the long run for consumers, who nevertheless face a short-term spike in orange prices at the supermarket as soon as today.

FAHANE, Somalia -- Until a few weeks ago, Haji Shekhey Abdi's people were facing starvation. Civil war combatants had stolen their cattle, their tractors and their food. Terrorized villagers were afraid to work in the fields or take their produce to market.But Mr. Abdi, his four children, six grandchildren and the rest of the village recently brought in a crop of corn, their first in two years. As they have for centuries, they thanked the god of Islam. But this year they also thanked the United States.

It was the first time Kai D'Angelo had ever picked a pumpkin, and the 4-year-old knew just what he was looking for. As he ran to hop onto a cow train ride at Clark's Elioak Farm in Ellicott City this week, he said his pumpkin would be a small one, and orange. Kai and his father planned to carve the pumpkin into a jack-o'-lantern for the front porch of their Columbia house. His mother said she was happy they had something fun to do together as they roamed over the farm. "He is fascinated with tractors and farms and farm equipment," said Jennifer D'Angelo.

Gov.Martin O'Malleyhas requested federal disaster relief for 13 counties in the state that have experienced "widespread crop losses" this year due to drought and extreme heat. In a letter dated Tuesday, O'Malley asked Tom Vilsack, secretary of theU.S. Department of Agriculture, to issue a Secretarial Disaster Designation for the counties based on Maryland Farm Service Agency data showing they are experiencing crop losses of more than 30 percent this year. "I urge you to act quickly upon this request so that appropriate relief can be made available to eligible producers," O'Malley wrote in the letter.

Devin Partlow had a comfortable defense contractor job, earning six figures as a computer programmer. But the 27-year-old Severn resident also had a side project that he grew to love more: a mobile app that helps connect people and plan activities and events. What came next for Partlow is similar to what's happening across the country, as a fresh generation of entrepreneurs embark on Internet ventures, increasingly with the assistance of new programs geared toward helping startups.

Queenstown farmer John Draper's corn crop looks bleak - ears that normally have 18 or 20 rows of kernels have 14 rows due to a lack of rain. Others have few or shriveled kernels, and some stalks haven't grown any ears at all. Yet, with a shot at harvesting about 60 percent of his normal yield, Draper considers himself fortunate. Drought conditions that have persisted across Maryland are expected to cut this year's corn crop yield in half. The weather also is threatening soybean crops, and driving up prices for all types of grains, squeezing livestock and poultry farmers.

It happens after every natural catastrophe. Once the winds die down, the water recedes or the fire is doused, shady contractors appear on the scene to make affected homeowners victims twice over. "You see a rash of this after a natural disaster," says Bill Gruhn, chief of Maryland's consumer protection division. "Sometimes they take the money and don't do the work; sometimes they take the money and terribly overcharge people. And sometimes they take the money and do very poor work.

Is late blight going to attack tomatoes this year? I've heard rumors. How can I tell if I'm seeing late blight or early blight? Late blight disease, which devastated tomato plants in 2009, has been found in states all around Maryland, but not in Maryland yet. The late blight fungus likes cool damp conditions (think of the potato famine in Ireland — same fungus), and we had a spell of that weather. Keep an eye out for brown blotches that start at the leaf tip or edges.

Wholesale coffee prices perked to a four-year high last week after warnings that an ebb in crop cycles compounded by weather problems in Brazil, which produces nearly 30 percent of the world's crop, could cut the harvest significantly next year. For American consumers, the increase set off rapid-fire price increases as large as 14 percent by the nation's three largest coffee roasters - Folger's parent Procter & Gamble Co., Maxwell House-maker Kraft Foods Inc. and Sara Lee Corp., which makes Hills Brothers, Chock Full O'Nuts and MJB. The upward pressure is expected to continue, with coffee futures jumping to more than $1 a pound after the forecast of supply shortages by the London-based International Coffee Organization.

CLEMENTS -- In the dim warmth of the stripping shed, Betty and Walter Russell work side by side, stacking piles of papery tobacco leaves as neatly and gently as if they were dollar bills.The care they take is second nature, as much a part of tobacco farming as nursing the seedlings in the spring and hanging the cut plants to dry in the fall. The Russells grow tobacco on only 19 of the 170 acres they farm in St. Mary's County, yet they depend on it more than on any other crop."Tobacco pays our bills," says Betty Russell, 45, peeling the red-brown leaves from the stalks.

I recently came across a local newspaper headline from May 18, 1945, noting, "German Prisoners For Farm Work. " The idea that Carroll County was the home of German prisoners of war during World War II was nothing new to me. I had heard many oral histories, tall tales and folklore passed down from previous generations about German POWs in Westminster during the war. The combination of our heritage of German settlers — mostly in the northern...

The first crop of tech startups have launched at the new business accelerator program run by Silicon Valley-based Wasabi Ventures at Loyola University Maryland. The tech startups are varied. One is CodePupil , a website that teaches people how to build websites through exercises and games; PointClickSwitch.com , a site that helps homeowners easily switch their energy providers; and Vidstructor , a video platform for the sports and fitness training industries. The accelerator's office is in the Govans community of North Baltimore, a few minutes away from Loyola's campus.