Farm Market Teacher

As more and more consumers at Tim Jaggars’ farmers market admit to never having seen food in its raw form and to mistrusting the American food system, Jaggars meets them where they are. 

“Surprisingly, most of my time with customers is spent teaching them how to prepare food,” he says. “It takes a lot of education about how we grow vegetables and beef to connect people to food.”

Two of his sisters join him at the weekly Newfoundland, Pennsylvania market 15 miles from the farm where they wow buyers with eye-catching displays of Robinson Family Farm offerings, some unique in color, shape and name. 

All started from seed, you can take home flowers, herbs, vegetable plants, onions, purple potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, beets, green and purple cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, black “Rock” and tri-color “Watermelon” radishes, peas, beans, summer and winter squash, tomatoes, cucumbers (slicing and pickling), long skinny Japanese eggplant and peppers, both hot and sweet. And garlic. 32,000 heads of White German and Red German hardneck garlic last year in 2022, to be exact.

Serving “Visitors from the East” 
Jaggars’ location outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, leaves him sitting pretty when it comes to feeding vacationers who come to visit northeast Pennsylvania from the East Coast for recreation. Repeated feasibility studies for agriculture done in Wayne County, where he is president of the Farm Bureau, ring the same bell over and over: You are within three hours of one-third of the population of the US.

For those born into farming, they might choke on the notion that there are people who have never seen the greens on top of carrots or beets. But not Jaggars. He is the perfect ambassador for agriculture: non-judgmental, generous, gracious.

And it’s no wonder his customers feel at ease admitting their ignorance. He seems all too excited to teach them about composting, microbes, micro fungi and the wisdom of keeping a closed beef herd. Next thing he knows, they’re asking him how to run a canner to put up fresh excesses for the long winter ahead. Just like Grandma used to do.

Jaggars, his sisters, parents and a nephew make up the workforce at this operation with each of the younger generations holding full-time jobs “on the side.” 

On 176 acres of rocky, acidic ground that used to be part of a larger holding owned by his great-grandfather when a vibrant coal industry was just over the adjacent mountain range, this team is growing and evolving a successful business.

In recent years they constructed a 48- by 72-foot covered barnyard and 40- by 50-foot dry stack manure storage to better manage their cattle and nutrients. Then they added homegrown ground and cuts of beef to their offerings at the weekly market that runs May through mid-October. 

They bought and reassembled two used greenhouses: one dedicated 100% for germination, the other in use as a high tunnel. They developed a process to deep bed their cow and calf pairs with wood chips and mulch hay from fall until spring pasture season, composting this rich black material with horse manure to feed their produce fields.

“We don’t buy any (commercial) fertilizer,” Jaggars  explains. He’s forever on the lookout for ways to incorporate innovative conservation practices into the farm’s operation. For example, he sows cover crops in the fall to hold the soil in place, then incorporates the cover crops back into the soil during tillage in the spring.

This farm relies heavily on their New Holland PowerStar™ 75 tractor. Jaggers says, “We use it for almost everything: mowing, baling hay rounds and squares, wrapping and moving bales, loading, plowing and disking, forming the raised bed mulch layer, planting, harvesting.”

All about garlic 
A few years ago, Jaggars and crew decided to diversify their veggie offerings by getting into garlic. It’s a heavy-feeding crop, so to prep the first garlic patch they amended the soil with lots of farm compost. That first year, they planted 2,000 cloves in the fall, which yielded 2,000 bulbs. Since then, the cloves multiply by a factor of five as they grow. There were 10,000 cloves in all. 

They harvested the garlic by hand and sold only about 400 pounds of bulbs. They separated all the remaining cloves and saved them to plant the following fall, repeating the pattern but always rotating the patch. Another growing season and there were more than 30,000 cloves to plant in the fall of 2021.

But growing garlic is not just a simple plant-and-harvest cycle. Each year in the fall, Jaggars’ team immediately covers the newly planted rows and the empty rows between with mulch hay to protect the crop for the winter, reduce weed pressure and retain moisture. Then in mid-June, they break off all the spring growth called garlic “scapes” — the stem and flower bud. This provides another saleable crop for market and allows the plants to put more energy into the bulb. 

 As one might imagine, planting and pulling this crop can be a back-breaking endeavor. With typical farmers’ resourcefulness, Jaggars invested recently in a waterwheel transplanter with spikes that punch three rows of planting holes in stretched plastic film. The transplanter allows Jaggers’ wife and nephew to ride along behind the tractor and plant hundreds and thousands of onion starts and garlic cloves with more ease. 

Further, Jaggars is already dreaming up an “under cutter” blade he might fabricate to attach to the 3-point-hitch of the tractor. In theory, it would go down into the ground under the garlic bulbs, slicing through the roots and laying them down on top of the soil.

The next step after harvest is to trim the neck of each bulb to about 5 inches long and place it on racks for drying by hay mow fans. In time, they can grade the bulbs by diameter, using 1.5-, 2- and 2.5-inch PVC pipe as guides. They trim the neck shorter at this point, down to 1.5 inches and brush soil out of  the roots.

The smallest bulbs go on sale at the farmers’ market. The 2-inch bulbs are perfect for the wholesale market. And Jaggars is testing a niche local market for the largest bulbs — culinary garlic. “I’m giving away some of these largest bulbs to chefs just to raise interest,” he says.

Family strong
Jaggars proudly traces the farming tradition in all its variations through six generations of his family and hopes it will carry on into the future. But for now, he appreciates the unique passions, skills and moral support these folks bring to the enterprise: his parents Merel and Audrey Jaggars, his wife Lisa, sisters and spouses Tammy (and Bob) Neuman, Kathy (and Lenny) Sedorovitz, Kelly (and Ed) Jones and the Joneses’ son, Zach (and Jessica).

Standing still is moving backward, so the Robinson Family Farm is already dreaming of the day 
they will launch an on-farm store and put an end to trucking their goods elsewhere.

Follow along with the Jaggars’ family farm on Facebook at: facebook.com/TJaggars