Connor Koch: Intern Spotlight

Surrounded by car repair shops, you would never believe what was going on inside an abandoned filing warehouse, but behind those doors is Area2Farms in Arlington, Virginia. My name is Connor Koch, I was born and raised in Montgomery County, Maryland. I am a student at the Institute of Applied Agriculture at the University of Maryland and I worked as an Urban Farmer at an indoor farm this summer.

Area2Farms, a Public Benefit Corporation, their whole motto is “Move the farm, not the food.” Customers can choose to get a bag of our freshly harvested produce delivered to their door on Wednesday afternoons or Thursday mornings. Each harvest bag usually contains six items with a large weight of lettuce, microgreens, sage, shoots, onions, tomatoes, etc. Our weeks would often follow a routine, coming in on Monday preparing our microgreen trays, seeding our trays, watering our microgreens, and then placing them in our germination chamber in order to be harvested the following Tuesday for next week's harvest. On Tuesdays, we would spend the whole day harvesting. Our Chief Science Office (Tyler) and our Head Engineer (Tim) would pull totes from our silos onto racks for the farmers to harvest. Some days were worse than others, if we were lucky we would pack Tuesday afternoon, if we weren’t so lucky, we would be harvesting up until Wednesday morning and then go into the fridge. On busy weeks we would harvest up to seventy totes in a day in order to meet the requirements for the harvest bags. On
On Wednesdays, we would be in the refrigerator all day packing the bags for our customers. We would fill huge Uline totes with the harvest, weigh out each individual harvest, and pack the harvest into resealable bags which are further taken to a brown Area2Farms bag, taken to customers.

Wednesdays were always my favorite day, simple tasks and most memories made. Something about being excluded from the rest of the company, sitting in a fifty-five-degree room in the middle of the summer with the rest of the farm team really made me enjoy my summer in Arlington. Thursdays were for cleaning up what we have done/used from Monday through Wednesday. A lot of washing. We hand wash each individual tote, tray, cup, etc. If it backs up we call it “wash mountain.” In addition, we sanitize our microgreen reservoirs. Throughout the week when they get watered, all the excess dirty water gets dumped into reservoirs which hold the water for the week. We empty them, sanitize them, clean the pump, and then fill them back up in order for the current microgreens to be transported to a sanitized area. This process can take up to an hour if you’re handling the task by yourself with three reservoirs. Friday is a day for seeding, transplanting, and preparing for the following week. “How can we set ourselves up for a successful week?” Most of the time we would be transplanting our seedlings into clean totes with fresh coco. In addition to transplanting, we would seed up to thirty trays of two hundred. Our plant breeder (Andrew) would give us a list of trial seeds that needed to be seeded for the week. Finish those two tasks and the week is finished. Counting down till next week when we open our farm to the public for a tour. I genuinely looked forward to coming to work every day, knowing I was making a difference in my community. I aspire to use the knowledge I learned on the farm such as organic farming, and team building to further pursue Agricultural Business Management in the future!