At Chatham University’s Eden Hall Campus, home to the Falk School of Sustainability and Environment, working farmland serves a dual purpose as a living laboratory engineered to tackle the most pressing real-world issues facing the fresh produce industry.
Rather than conducting high-level research isolated in academic silos, the university utilizes its active farmland to test actionable, scalable solutions. From solar high tunnels and caterpillar systems to rigorous soil health management, Chatham’s practical trials are designed to help specialty crop growers build climate resilience, extend their growing seasons and remain economically viable amid extreme weather events and shifting market demands.
A primary focus of Chatham’s living lab is managing unpredictability on the farm through sustainable soil and pest management strategies. Laura Livingston, director of sustainable agriculture at Chatham University, highlights cover cropping as one of the most immediate high-impact practices available to commercial specialty crop growers.
“Thinking about cover crops as ways to increase the number of solutions or potential solutions to agroecological problems that people are facing on their farm ... [it helps] increase soil health and soil integrity for the larger rain events, which is what we see a lot in Pennsylvania in terms of our impacts of climate change,” Livingston says.
On campus, these practices are regularly tested to address specific operational hurdles, serving primarily as mechanisms for weed suppression, crop rotation and breaking up stubborn insect and soilborne pest life cycles.
Beyond field management, Chatham leverages controlled environment agriculture to help growers capture off-season revenue and build reliable, year-round relationships with market buyers. Operating movable high tunnels, solar high tunnels and caterpillar systems on campus allows researchers to evaluate succession planting and climate control during harsh winter months.
“I really think they are particularly helpful in Pennsylvania during winter months. ... Being able to grow crops, we do a lot of fall planting for either winter or spring harvests,” Livingston says. “It creates a lot more economic opportunity and also potential to connect with markets and consumers during the off-months. ... It does add more precision in our ability to create environments that are helpful for the crops that we choose to grow in those spaces.”
However, Livingston emphasizes that adopting controlled environment technology requires a measured, business-minded approach rather than a rush toward heavy capital expenditure.
“I do always get nervous with just saying, ‘Go get the biggest, best, most technologically advanced high tunnel out there,’ because you want to make sure your market is right, that you’re making the best economical choice,” she says. “Starting small with caterpillar tunnels and even just with row covers over winter and experimenting with that ... is a really great way to slowly build up over time the capacity to grow in different seasons.”
While on-farm climate adaptation is vital, Chatham’s work extends past the harvest to address the persistent structural barriers within the commercial supply chain. Small to midsize specialty crop growers frequently struggle to break into larger grocery, foodservice and institutional market channels. The fundamental challenge rarely stems from product quality but rather from scale, postharvest capabilities and strict commercial standards, Livingston says.
“Sometimes there’s insufficient production volume,” she notes, highlighting the friction between small operations and large-scale buyers. “Institutional purchasers ... need larger and consistent quantities, and smaller farmers have a harder time being able to have the high quantities that are desired.”
Furthermore, meeting the exacting expectations of commercial buyers requires infrastructure that many independent farms lack.
“Obstacles like product consistency ... an established market like a food chain really wants extremely consistent products,” she says, citing examples where institutional buyers require pre-cleaned, pre-processed cloves rather than whole heads of garlic. “Farmers might be able to produce produce that is really high quality, very beautiful, but [it] still would need to be processed in order for consumers or markets to want to deal with it.”
To solve these supply chain bottlenecks, Chatham collaborates directly with local urban and regional producers through informal produce aggregation networks and food hubs. By establishing shared standards for growing methods, coordinating postharvest handling and acquiring collective processing equipment, smaller growers can pool their yields. Livingston says this collective model enables independent farms to meet the volume, consistency and prep requirements demanded by larger grocery outlets and commercial catering services without sacrificing their independence.
Underpinning all of these initiatives is Chatham’s distinct approach to higher education research. Lacking the vast extension network of a traditional land-grant institution, Chatham focuses on deep, participatory research models where growers are active partners rather than passive subjects.
“What we do very well, I think, is get research grants with farmers to do participatory research and to do some of that produce aggregation and seed-keeping work together,” Livingston says. “That includes writing grants collectively, receiving funds and deciding together how we want to spend it, what type of data we’re collecting [and] what type of outward-facing materials we want to put together.”
By bringing local farmers into the fold to co-design research projects, co-present at industry conferences and host hands-on field days, Chatham ensures that the practical discoveries made in its living laboratories bypass traditional academic silos and move directly into the commercial fresh produce ecosystem.
