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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Farm to school: Local farmer promotes children’s nutrition, sustainable agriculture

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Some families have a swimming pool, a willow tree or a swing set in their backyard. Matt Collogan has a greenhouse, a chicken coop, a compost facility and an assortment of fruit and vegetable plants.

His backyard is a small, three-fourths acre farm he calls Antlion Acre. Collogan, who holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is expanding. He recently ended a 10-year career as Airlie Gardens’ manager for environmental education to become a full-time farmer.

In September, Collogan and his three business partners at Antlion Acre — Heather Caveny, Marie Davis and Dave Silvia — will open Centripetal Farms, a 15-acre stretch of land less than one mile from Wrightsboro Elementary School.

“We’ve done almost everything before on a small scale,” Collogan said. “Now we’re scaling it to the 15 acres.”

Their primary goal is to utilize Centripetal Farms for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm to School Program, which supplies school cafeterias with fresh produce. It will be the first farm in New Hanover County to participate in the program. Lewis Farms, in Rocky Point, already contributes to the New Hanover County program.

Collogan also wants to incorporate his environmental education knowledge. He and his partners hope to supply food and instruction for after-school enrichment programs, and to coordinate field trips to the farm. Collogan emphasized the importance of providing children with fresh produce and nutrition education in schools where the juvenile obesity rate is high.

“We’ve taken our business plan to the [Wrightsboro Elementary] principal and the teaching staff, and they loved it,” he said.

Collogan, who took courses at local community colleges to learn about agriculture before starting Antlion Acre in 2009, focuses on organic, sustainable farming.

“Sustainable farming is trying to grow as much healthy food for as many people as possible with the smallest impact on the land as possible,” he said. “It’s minimizing waste, minimizing long-term negative impacts. We’re always bringing things in here that would otherwise go to waste.”

To maintain an environmentally friendly farm, Collogan and his partners refrain from using synthetic fertilizers made from chemicals. Instead, they use compost.

Collogan has 5-foot tall piles of the organic fertilizer in his backyard at Antlion Acre. He attended a one-week seminar at N.C. State University to learn how to make his own.

Collogan uses coffee grounds from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, cardboard boxes and various types of food waste in his compost piles. Then, bacteria decompose the materials into a nutrient-rich fertilizer.

“Compost is a living, breathing cake,” he said.

Using compost instead of commercial fertilizers reduces the amount of waste that enters landfills, is good for the environment and can increase crop yields.

“These are the biggest okra pods I’ve ever seen,” Collogan said of his crop.

He avoids using pesticides by employing a technique called crop rotation. At Antlion Acre, basil, tomatoes and eggplant are grown in rectangular beds. Every few years, different crops are planted in each bed to ensure the pests that target only one plant species will not destroy his produce. Collogan hopes to continue using crop rotation to add kale, collards and broccoli to both farms; he also plans to cultivate mushrooms.

“Seven acres of the farm are cleared and eight are wooded,” he said. “There’s a stream that runs through the wooded acres, and I want to grow mushrooms on logs out there.”

To adhere to organic farming standards, and his personal values, all of Collogan’s produce is non-genetically modified (non-GMO), meaning none of his seeds have been altered in a laboratory.

“Organic is a hard standard to maintain, but that means we have a premium product and it will be worth more,” he said.

Collogan and his partners also focus on ethical treatment of their chickens.

“Ninety percent of the chickens in this country … stay in a small space and they’re bred in such a way that they can’t even walk,” he said. “They’re just unhealthy.”

Collogan lets his Ancona chickens roam free. For aggressive roosters, he uses a device called a chicken tractor, a large, easy-to-move cage.

“You can move this along the pasture,” he said. “That way, they get different grazing land every day. They get to forage and they get to eat bugs. We give them supplemental feed as well.”

Collogan said consumers who buy meat and produce from local farms help reduce negative environmental effects caused by transporting agricultural products.

“The more we grow here in Wilmington, the less we import from afar,” he said. “That will reduce our environmental impact.”

To learn more, visit www.centripetalfarms.com

email [email protected]

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