North Carolina’s Onslow County is not the easiest place to start a commercial vegetable farm. The obstacles are many.

First, there’s the limited availability of land. Located in the southeastern part of the state on the Atlantic coast, Onslow and the counties surrounding it are growing rapidly. Subdivisions are going up all over, which drives up the price of land dramatically. There are big farms, certainly, but most of them focus on traditional crops like tobacco, corn, soybeans and cotton. The growers, most of whom are getting up there in age, are used to farming with heavy equipment and aren’t interested in raising labor-intensive vegetables.

When added to the pest and disease problems caused by the area’s high heat and humidity, such obstacles make growing vegetables a difficult job.

Difficult, but not impossible. That’s the assessment of Mark Seitz and Larry Kent, who are teaching Onslow County residents how to be successful vegetable farmers. Seitz, an area commercial horticulture agent for North Carolina Cooperative Extension, and Kent, manager of the Onslow County Farmers’ Market in Jacksonville, see a lot of potential for vegetable growers in the region, despite all the obstacles.

Population growth, though it has its drawbacks, has increased the demand for local produce. There’s also Camp Lejeune to consider, a Marine Corps base that houses about 100,000 people. The Marines and their families are a highly transient population, but their world travels have given them a taste for exotic produce, a taste that isn’t completely satisfied by eastern North Carolina’s traditional vegetable crops, which include collard greens, cabbage, turnips, beets, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers, Seitz said.

The growing demand for local produce led Kent, Seitz and other Extension educators to create the Horticulture Enterprise Leadership Project (HELP), a class for aspiring vegetable growers.

Kent came up with the idea for HELP after three of the biggest produce vendors at the Onslow County Farmers’ Market retired about three years ago. As the market manager, Kent had to figure out how to fill the shortage (a common problem in area markets, he said). He thought educating new growers might do the trick, so he approached the local Extension office for help.

Eight or nine people signed up for the first class, held in spring 2007. Seitz and Kent teach the class with help from Extension agents Robin Taylor, who teaches produce handling and food safety, and Jeff Morton, an expert on soil sampling. The classes are held on a half-acre plot of land donated by Kent, who used to be a grower. He also gives access to a 20- by 100-foot high tunnel so students can learn the difference between growing outdoors and growing in a controlled environment.

There are two HELP classes per year, one in spring and one in fall. For 14 to 16 weeks each season, aspiring growers learn the particulars of growing vegetables in their region – everything from production to marketing. The cost to take part is $25 per person, which covers the cost of fertilizer, seed and other materials, Seitz said.

Classes are held Friday evenings, for about two hours. The first half hour is dedicated to education and the rest of the session is dedicated to garden work such as planting, weeding and harvesting. When the vegetables are ready for harvest, two or three students sell them at the Onslow farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. Each student is expected to volunteer one day a month at the market, which gives him or her experience selling and promoting a product. The market’s board donated booth space to HELP and pays for the required product liability coverage up front. The class repays the insurance fee from the money it makes selling produce at the market. Whatever money is left over is divided among class participants, he said.

The class is open to anyone in Onslow County. (Seitz hopes to have similar programs in neighboring counties one day.) To date, participants include retirees from the Northeast who are unfamiliar with eastern North Carolina’s climate, military families, kids, high school students, teachers, people looking for second careers, salespersons and farmers, according to Seitz.

“We’re trying to get the group to realize that to be successful, you have to have something unique on the market, have a product that nobody else has,” he said.

For example, this spring the students experimented with pak choi, an Asian vegetable. They grew about 200 heads and sold them all in one day, he said.

HELP is starting to make an impact. Twenty-two people signed up this spring. The project also has created two new vendors for the Onslow market, which now has six produce vendors – with room for more, Kent said.

One of the new vendors is Cheryl Davis. Her family owns a hog farm in Richlands, which gave her an advantage over other aspiring vegetable growers: She already had access to farmland and a small greenhouse.

Davis raised and sold pumpkins, gourds, Indian corn and mums on the farm before she and her husband signed up for HELP last fall. They saw an opportunity to tap into the demand for locally grown vegetables but wanted to gain a fundamental knowledge of raising produce before they really dived in, she said.

HELP taught them the fundamentals of harvesting, marketing, seeds, soil, nutrients, weed control, safe handling practices and much else. Davis also learned a bit about organic farming, which she might look into one day.

She joined the Onslow market last fall, where she started selling her pumpkins, gourds and Indian corn. She anticipates good sales from the crops she learned to grow at HELP, including lettuce, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes and cucumbers. The class also inspired her to look into purchasing a high tunnel to help with season extension, but she needs to generate more cash flow before she can do that, she said.

Pumpkins and gourds complement two of Brenda Renyer’s passions: autumn and crafting.

That passion for growing and creating has helped Brenda and her family turn Renyer’s Pumpkin Farm in Wetmore, Kan., into a local destination.

It all started as a hobby, more or less. After they were married, Brenda moved in with her husband, Doug, who lived on what used to be an 80-acre corn and soybean farm in the northeast corner of Kansas, about an hour north of Topeka. Doug grew up on a dairy farm and had fond memories of his childhood, so when his wife suggested they start growing pumpkins he fell in love with the idea, she said.

Several years ago, Brenda wanted to hold an open house in the fall to show off her crafts and she thought pumpkins would be a nice addition. So, one weekend a year they turned their garage into a gift shop that specialized in crafts and pumpkins, she said.

They decided to venture into agritourism eight years ago, but didn’t really know what they were doing. They were basically “messing around,” she said. They didn’t realize how much potential their business had until they went to a North American Farmers’ Direct Marketing Association (NAFDMA) conference a few years ago in California.

That was an eye opener. They got more serious about their business after the conference and decided to expand. Brenda had already developed a clientele through her craft making and thought the farm could expand on that base. She was right.

“Little did we know how big we could get.”

They’re hoping to have at least 5,000 people visit the farm this year, she said.

The farm is now open five full weekends every fall and offers a host of agritourism activities (most of which were inspired by ideas they picked up at NAFDMA conferences, Brenda said). The farm’s Web site, www.renyerspumpkinfarm.com, lists some of the activities: u-pick pumpkins, corn cannon, hay rides, corn maze, pumpkin train, grain bin play area, pumpkin slingshot, animal area, duck races, two-story playground, tube slide, straw bale maze, concessions, picnic area, scarecrow, John Deere trike track and a family photo area.

The Renyers grow pumpkins, gourds and Indian corn on about 10 acres. The pumpkins come in all varieties, shapes, sizes and colors. Brenda has been enjoying the warty new Super Freak pumpkins this year.

“We grow it all,” she said. “I like having different kinds of pumpkins.”

Customers can pick the pumpkins in the fields or buy them pre-picked at the gift shop. They also can buy crafts, mums and gourds, many of which are used to make handmade gifts. Brenda has made snowmen, penguins, birdhouses and other items out of gourds.

Renyer’s Pumpkin Farm is in a rural area, which limits its customer base. Most visitors come from the small communities within 20 or 30 miles of Wetmore. The farm pulls some people from the Topeka area, but it’s a long drive, she said.

The farm has given the Renyers family a great opportunity to work together. Brenda used to be a teacher, but farming and crafts have become her full-time occupations. Doug still has a full-time job, but does a lot of work on the farm. Their son, Clay, 14, helps out, too. It’s been a great way for him to learn about running a business and handling money, Brenda said.

The Renyers want to continue to expand their business, but they know they have to be patient.

“There’s so much we want to do,” Brenda said, but “everything takes time and money.”

Michigan – along with the other seven states and two Canadian provinces in the Great Lakes Basin – is either undertaking one of the greatest environmental protection and conservation measures in the history of the world, or participating in one of the biggest scare-driven boondoggles of all time.

You could choose your side during a contentious half-day session at the Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable and Farm Market EXPO in Grand Rapids, Mich., in early December.

The day before, the Michigan Legislature had moved one step closer toward a historic measure, passing from committees the critical bills needed to solidify the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact.

It was pretty well conceded that the full Michigan Legislature would pass the measure and the governor would sign it. Two other states, Minnesota and Illinois, and the two provinces, Ontario and Quebec, have already done so. In Indiana and Pennsylvania, lawmakers are considering the measure; in New York, it has passed both chambers but not been signed into law; in Wisconsin and Ohio, it’s still in the talking stage.

When all the states and provinces bordering the Great Lakes have passed the compact, Congress must approve it to give it the force of federal law. But there is still some distance to go and lots of forums in which to carry on the argument.

In addition to the question of the Great Lakes Compact, the Michigan Legislature has been running over with new laws regulating the state’s water and its users.

The two chief antagonists in the EXPO discussion were Jay Lehr of Columbus, Ohio, a featured speaker at the EXPO, an expert in groundwater issues and a critic of “politicized environmental issues,” and Jim Bredin, assistant director of the Office of the Great Lakes in the Michigan Governor’s office and a proponent of the compact.

The key feature of the compact is that it would ban diversion of water from the basin into other watersheds, except when that water is contained in products like apples, beer, vegetables and milk. It can’t be piped away or hauled away in tankers, although there is still ongoing controversy about bottled water. Currently, big bottles – bigger than 20 liters – can’t be hauled off, and Michigan has placed limits on a large water bottler taking water from wells.

Lehr started the discussion in an assertive way.

“I hope Congress and the other states will have more sense than the Michigan Legislature,” Lehr said. “We don’t need new laws to protect the Great Lakes.”

He said that Michigan citizens have been victims of scare tactics. “You are the most water-rich state in the nation, but you’re being treated as if you were in a desert.”

The compact also compels states to address water issues related to pollution and water use, and the Michigan Legislature passed several laws that impose some limits, require registration of wells and in other ways govern the withdrawal of water from the Great Lakes and the state’s streams, rivers, lakes and groundwater. Irrigators fear they could be deprived of water for crop production.

There is much disagreement over the so-called consumptive use of water by growing crops and of the net effect irrigation or crop growth has on the loss of water from the region.

Irrigators fear that, as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner put it, there’s “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”

The Great Lakes is the largest basin of fresh water in the world, Lehr said, It contains some 300 quadrillion gallons of water and pours out, through the St. Lawrence Seaway, some 237 billion gallons per day. Despite the activities of irrigators and others, water continues to pour over Niagara Falls. There is no evidence that consumptive use has tapped into the basin’s stored water by exceeding the billions of gallons of annual replenishment from rainfall.

Michigan citizens, Lehr said, have been scared into the belief that political pressures from a growing population in the sunny, arid American Southwest might lead to a federal-led water transfer system to water the Western deserts. While Congress, 20 years ago, agreed that such a diversion would never occur and has agreed to let the Great Lakes states manage the water, Michigan citizens wanted a better guarantee. But, Lehr said, “the day of mega water projects is over. If Arizona wants water, the Mississippi River is bigger in outflow and a lot closer. ”

Lehr argued that Michigan, lying in the heart of the Great Lakes, has access to an abundant resource and is in fact shooting itself in the foot, giving away its natural power to the federal government and to other states with less access to the water. The state is limiting its right to use a resource it already controls, he said. Other states with smaller interests would have equal power.

He criticized the Michigan Farm Bureau for choosing not to fight for a larger, abundant-water principle but instead deciding to settle for a place at the table and a voice in setting the rules and regulations that regulate water use and limit its use by Michigan farmers.

Dipping his toe into deeper waters, he plunged ahead. He compared the Great Lakes to the atmosphere and said that it was “patently absurd” to think that we can alter the Great Lakes by human activities – any more than we can cause atmospheric changes that lead to global warming.

When Jim Bredin took the podium, there were lots of points for counterattack, especially Lehr’s assertion that the Great Lakes – or the atmosphere – are just too large to be affected by human beings.

Man’s activities have altered the Great Lakes, as the presence of zebra mussels, sea lampreys, alewives and mercury in fish attest.

Bredin also said the federal government is not a party to the compact. Over the years, many states have made agreements with other states and turned to the federal government to give them the force of law.

Because of the involvement of Canadian provinces, the compact is unusual in that it crosses an international border but does not involve treaties between countries.

While the states involved have some equal powers, such as a right to veto proposed large water diversions anywhere in the basin, they do not have equal access to Great Lakes Basin water. The key unit is the watershed, not the states. The agreement not to divert water from the Great Lakes Basin into other watersheds affects different states differently. The state of Michigan is more than 99 percent in the watershed. Ontario also has a large stake. Other states have smaller parts of the watershed within their borders, and they agree not to move water from the Great Lakes Basin into other watersheds, even those within their borders.

The huge Mississippi River watershed comes astonishingly close to the Great Lakes, and claims some Lake Michigan water through the Chicago River, which was channeled to flow backward a century ago.

Bredin said the other states were making a large potential sacrifice in agreeing not to move Great Lakes water to the nether reaches of their states. In effect, they agree not to take the water outside the watershed but must be content to use it for ports, shipping, sports and recreation.

In Ontario, a key compact provision affects the movement of water from Lake Huron across the peninsula to Lake Ontario, an intra-basin transfer that is prohibited under the compact. That same provision applies in Michigan, which borders on four of the five Great Lakes.

The compact is not totally about conserving Great Lakes water, Bredin said. It is also about conserving the Great Lakes as a treasure, preventing and remedying pollution, controlling invasive species by setting rules about water movement and release of ballast water from ships and in other ways managing the resource to keep it pristine as well as undiminished in volume.

The compact states that all “parties have a shared duty to protect, conserve, restore, improve and manage the renewable but finite waters of the Great Lakes.”

In recent years, the state of Michigan has increased regulations affecting not only Great Lakes water but all water, including groundwater, in the state. Lyndon Kelley, an Extension irrigation specialist with a shared appointment by Purdue University and Michigan State University, said riparian doctrine is gradually being modified. The modification is occurring through legislation and court decisions.

For example, irrigators – when using lakes – can find themselves subject to allocations when lake levels fall to “trigger” levels. When pumping from wells, they can find themselves replenishing water supplies to neighbors whose shallower wells are depleted. Pending legislation would make it illegal to diminish a stream or river to where it can’t sustain its customary number and species of fish. New regulations require reporting of well locations and of withdrawals exceeding 100,000 gallons of water a day. Permits are needed by large users, those withdrawing more than 2 million gallons a day.

Jon Bartholic and Jeremiah Asher, from the Institute of Water Research at Michigan State University, reported on their work to develop an assessment tool so those wanting to use water – for example, an irrigator planning to drill a well – could predict the impact of the well on his neighbors or on local streams and lakes.

The assessment tool relies on public information on well locations and depth, information about stream flows and fish populations in some 11,000 “segments” of rivers and streams across Michigan and general knowledge of the state’s geology and hydrology.

Those wishing to look at or use the assessment tool should visit the Web site, www.gwmap.rsgis.msu.edu.

This flurry of water-related activity was spurred by the proposal of the Great Lakes Compact. Whether a great conservation effort or a boondoggle, public awareness of being surrounded by an incredible resource has never been higher.

The image of corn earworms floating on the winds is a bit tough to handle, but, of course, it’s not the worms themselves that float. It’s the moths that float in, and then they lay the eggs that give rise to the ugly larvae that gross out sweet corn customers.

Adding to the ugly side, these worms have gotten harder to control with pyrethroid insecticides in recent years.

University of Illinois entomologist Richard Weinzierl has been monitoring this pest for several years. In 2006, he and other entomologists in six northern sweet corn-producing states began to cooperate in a North Central Region IPM Project. The project includes participants from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin and Ontario. It’s led by Bill Hutchison of the University of Minnesota, along with Weinzierl and Rick Foster of Purdue University.

Working together, they assess earworms to find out how susceptible they are to pyrethroid insecticides, work to improve methods of monitoring and predicting when migrations will occur and evaluate insecticides to control them. This is the third year in which they have been making recommendations to growers about what to do to achieve control.

Weinzierl described the program during a sweet corn session at the Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable and Farm Market EXPO in Grand Rapids, Mich., in December.

Earworms, like potato leafhoppers, don’t live year round in most areas of the Midwest that they infest during the summer. Earworms won’t overwinter north of southern Illinois (40 degrees north latitude). Instead, the moths ride on columns of rising warm air from their place of origin in south Texas and western Louisiana.

This “insect pump” moves the moths hundreds of miles north and drops them out in bands along the frontal boundaries where hot air meets cooler air and rainstorms result. Rains bring water, and also insects looking for host plants to lay eggs on. Earworm moths lay eggs on the new silks of corn.

Major migrations occur in August, but in some years – two or three years out of 10 – they can begin in June.

All this is, of course, not new. But since the late 1990s, the arriving moths have been harder to kill with pyrethroid insecticides.

“The level of control has decreased,” Weinzierl said. “It used to be 90 percent and more. Now it is 70 to 75 percent or even less: 50 percent.”

The onset of resistance begins at the source.

“Earworms that infest our late season sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers and snap beans come from southern source regions,” Weinzierl said. “Primary host crops in those source regions are cotton, sorghum, soybeans and corn. These crops receive numerous applications of pyrethroid insecticides. Pyrethroid resistance that evolves in southern crops may present a problem in the northern destinations of migrating earworms.”

Resistance does not build up from use of pyrethroids in the north, since the insects there are not destined to remain in the breeding population. They do not survive over winter.

While the potential exists for massive corn earworm control failures, so far only a few in-field failures have occurred in sweet corn fields in the north, Weinzierl said.

While the effectiveness of pyrethroids is declining, they are still the recommended method of control.

Here is the program recommended by Weinzierl and his cohorts for sweet corn growers in the north this coming summer:

Buy a wire Hartstack pheromone trap and lures that attract earworms. Use the trap to monitor earworm moth flights.

Continue to use pyrethroid insecticides as needed based on pheromone trap catches. Pyrethroids are still the best insecticides for corn earworm control. These include Capture, Warrior, Baythroid and Mustang-Max. Expect that Warrior, Proaxis, Capture, Discipline, Baythroid, Mustang/Fury and Pounce/Ambush will all be affected by any resistance mechanism.

If traps are catching moths, getting a first application on at row tassel or by first silk may improve control compared to starting sprays within two days of first silk, especially where adult control over a large acreage is accomplished. Small plots and sequential plantings may be more severely affected than large fields if moths continue to fly into these plantings from surrounding areas.

Application intervals of two to three days are especially important right after silking has begun.

Tank mixing (not rotating) with Lannate, Larvin, Sevin or SpinTor/Entrust may improve control.

Alternative insecticides include SpinTor/Entrust and Radiant (spinetoram). These are more expensive.

Bt sweet corn greatly reduces earworm numbers but does not give complete control (and does not prevent damage from western bean cutworm).

Read Extension newsletters for updates. Weinzierl’s updates are published in the University of Illinois Fruit and Vegetable News, online at http://www.ipm.uiuc.edu/ifvn. The Web site at Penn State, which will have up-to-date flight info, is www.pestwatch.psu.edu/sweetcorn/tool/tool.html.

Report any apparent control failures to the entomologists involved in the project or to your local Extension office.