Jerry Faulring needed a change. Hydro Lawn, the landscaping company he co-founded in 1973 had grown to a five-state business with tens of thousands of customers, but after nearly 20 years he wanted to stretch his mind to solve new problems. And he was ready to get back to his farming roots. In 1990, he started his nursery production career with 25 acres known as River Farm Nursery. But once he caught the growing bug he wasn’t satisfied with 25 acres, and after a five-year search, he found a 200 acre farm in Frederick County, Maryland with some of the finest soil he’d ever seen. Faulring earned a degree in agronomy from Purdue University and he grew up near two dairy farms in New York, so he knew quite a bit about good soil. He purchased that land, which would become Waverly Farm, in 1996 and began planting in 1997.
Waverly Farm is known for high-quality field-grown finished trees and shrubs, 90% of which are propagated on site. The nursery’s success is due in part to the intentional method of exploring new ideas, learning from mistakes and carefully maintaining the land, which includes rebuilding the rich, living soil lost with each crop of plants he sells.
“It starts with the fact that I get bored really easily,” Faulring says. "So I have to have something going on other than plant and dig, plant and dig.”
When he gets an idea or sees something intriguing at a progressive operation, the gears start turning until he figures out a way to make it work at Waverly Farm.
How to build good soil health
Faulring's background in agronomy provided a solid backbone on soil management, which he says should be the no. 1 goal of any field production nursery.
Ten years ago, soil improvement wasn't a major issue for horticulture. But the interest has ramped up lately, as concerns about reducing runoff and erosion and the benefits of increasing water holding capacity become more important.
Depending on where they’re located, nurseries may have sandy, clay or silt soils. Waverly Farm has a silty clay loam. That dash of clay in the mix tips the Maryland nursery’s soil toward the heavier side of the scale. But in nursery production, Faulring says a heavier soil is desirable because the root ball holds together a lot better when you dig and later during transport.
When you’re selling caliper B&B trees and shrubs, you lose a lot of soil with each root ball you dig up and ship out; about 250 tons per acre.
It all starts with horse manure. Waverly Farm creates compost on its farm using horse manure from neighboring farms as source material. Faulring says this is the best stock material for woody plant production because of the compost it produces, which favors support organisms like fungi.
By using this organic matter to create a rich soil, Waverly Farm develops a better plant. As an added benefit of sourcing its fertilizer nutrients from its own farm-produced compost, the nursery is unaffected by fertilizer price fluctuation. Fertilizer prices can vary from $400/ton for nitrogen up to $1,200/ton, Faulring says, but the pricing rollercoaster doesn’t affect Waverly Farm. While there are costs to composting and to deliver the compost to the field, he's saving money and building soil health at the same time.
Horse manure is not in short supply in Maryland. Many horse farms don’t have the capacity to implement a program to remove the mess. That’s when Waverly Farm steps in. A few local contractors collect manure from local equestrian sites, which have anywhere from 3 to 125 horses. They bring it back to Waverly Farm, where it’s processed over 18 months.
There are complications to this method. Not everyone has easy access to that much horse manure or soil management knowledge and equipment. It’s not a solution for everyone. Waverly Farm receives about 8,000 tons of manure annually, which results in about 4,000 tons after composting.
“You have to have the space to do it, you have to have the determination to see it through and make it work,” Faulring says.
Find the right machinery
Waverly Farm uses advanced tillage equipment and techniques as well as sustainable practices to protect its valuable soil.
The nursery uses an IMANTS Rotary Spading Machine to work its farm-produced compost 20 inches deep into the soil. Faulring says that outdated tillage systems such as moldboard plows, discs and rototillers harm the soil by breaking it into fine particles. By contrast, healthy soils have a crumbly texture composed of large particle sizes that enhance drainage while holding good moisture and oxygen levels, not just fine grains of sand, silt and clay. This is called friability. Friable soils’ crumbly structure promotes microbial activity and root growth. It is characterized by large clumps that break easily and smaller aggregates that are harder to break. Faulring says if you have that kind of soil structure, you don’t want to destroy it by breaking it down into fine particles. The granulation is vital because it maintains airspace and oxygen in the soil which are essential for growth. In the presence of adequate organic matter (like Waverly Farm’s compost), support organisms abound in the form of fungi, bacteria, mycorrhizae, protozoea and nematodes. When soil particle size is reduced, that underground life fails and plants have to go it alone.
Eight years of research at Waverly Farm funded by USDA and implemented by Maryland Extension showed Waverly Farm's soil management system holds 26% more water than the same soil managed traditionally. As a result, the nursery’s plant material tolerates digging, transportation and transplanting better and lasts longer in holding yards.
One key to maintaining soil health at the nursery is by preparing the soil with a spade plow set to a slow rotor speed of 40 RPM.
Faulring says the first pass levels and fills holes left behind from harvesting and incorporates surface debris into the soil. Next, they apply the compost and make one more pass with the spade plow to mix the mineral-rich deep soil with the compost.
“You’re bringing up soil and mixing it, making topsoil as we go,” he says.
The low RPM gently cultivates the soil while maintaining the desired particle size.
One of the big differences between Waverly Farm and other field growers is apparent when you see the root ball of a Waverly plant. Customers are fans of the larger-than-typical, wider-than-typical machine-dug root balls. Faulring uses an Italian-made Pazzaglia digging machine.
“The ball doesn’t tip over; it stands,” he says. “Plants aren’t blown over by the wind anymore.”
Waverly Farm has four of the Pazzaglia spades. Faulring lost four of his five original machines in a 2017 fire, but replaced them as soon as he was able because they’ve become a crucial part of his growing system.
Hedging his bets
The idea for one of Waverly Farm’s latest product offerings came about after an August 2012 trip to a nursery equipment trade show in the Netherlands. Faulring and a few colleagues toured several nurseries there and in neighboring Germany. When he visited a nursery named QuickHedge, he came away impressed and inspired. Hedge production is challenging in the nursery because of the scale involved with growing, grooming and harvesting miles of hedge plants. QuickHedge, however, invented an in-ground growing system for finished hedges, with 30 miles of hedge in production and only four full time workers.
“It was just stunning; it was a light bulb moment,” Faulring says. “And I said, ‘We’re going to do that! Just for the fun of it. Even if we never sell one; it’s just fun.”
Once he was back in Maryland, Faulring started thinking about how to make it work. In Germany, QuickHedge grows in a very light, high organic sandy soil. They sell their hedges in sections one meter long. All production is handled with GPS driven equipment: planting, pruning, undercutting and harvesting. The final product is chopped into sections and lifted into a cardboard box that two workers are able to pick up and move.
The final product is a very narrow hedge, 16 inches wide, with a small root system, but by undercutting it frequently, the root system is compacted. That results in a smaller root mass.
Faulring had a few challenges that prevented him from directly adapting the QuickHedge model. Waverly Farm’s soils are too heavy for workers to handle it and box it up the same way. Also, he wanted his hedges to have a wider base of either 24 or 32 inches to accommodate a larger root ball.
“We knew we couldn’t put that in a box,” says Laura Hagmann, Waverly Farm’s sales and shipping manager. “They would just crumble and break. Our customers need big material; they don’t want small material.”
Faulring did some quick calculations on soil weight and decided to adjust the model. QuickHedge plants 3-5 plants per meter. Waverly plants one plant every two feet, and then digs a traditional root ball as individuals. Each plant is numbered. Then the customer places each numbered shrub in the trench in the order that they came out of the ground. Simple-to-follow installation instructions are provided to customers to ensure the slow-growing plants can make an immediate impact in the landscape.
Faulring has been growing the actual hedge plants for years. He has 26 varieties in production, from the expected evergreens like boxwood, hollies, yews and viburnums to the classic English privet hedge to deciduous options like European beech and Persian ironwood. They’re large too, as most have been growing from 5 to 10 years. Depending on the cultivar, hedges are between 4 and 7 feet tall.
Currently, he has 7 miles of hedges in production, taking up about 5 acres. It’s not Waverly Farm’s primary revenue stream and he doesn’t anticipate ever planting more than 10 miles.
“I don’t want hedging to be our entire business, but it’s kind of cool,” he says. “When they’re in full leaf, I can’t stop staring at them because they’re so perfectly pruned.”
The planting is done by a GPS-guided auto-steer tractor and pruning is done by incorporating an off-the-shelf grape shear for vineyards onto a high clearance tractor manufactured by Damcon in the Netherlands. Faulring says he had to modify the tractor’s configuration to make it a bit higher and wider, but the result was perfect. He can prune a 500-foot-long hedge in 10 minutes. It would take two workers two days to do the same job by hand.
Faulring has received positive feedback about his finished hedges before, but MANTS 2023 was the first event his team put materials together in advance, like the hedge-specific brochure, and displayed the product itself.
“We’ve got material to sell and suddenly we’re selling it,” he says. “I didn’t think it would take off real fast, but it’s doing well for spring orders.”
Changing minds
Faulring is 76 years old, but he’s not slowing down. He’s learned over time not to overreact to strong years or bad years. His team has 20 H-2A workers, some of which have been returning each year since the early 2000s. Even though the business has grown 60% in the last three years, he still has the same number of workers.
“We’re not changing anything,” he says. “We’re planted full every year. It’s the perfect-sized business.”
Faulring is a big believer in understanding your costs and charging a fair price for your product. Waverly Farm has raised prices each year, at an average of 5% for the last three years. Even with costs doubling for supplies like heating oil and gasoline, inflation and payroll increases, the nursery has remained profitable.
I’m a pretty good budgeting manager,” he says. “I manage our costs really tight. Even though expenses are going up, we made more money last year than we've ever made.”
Faulring has written his thrice-yearly “It’s Time for Sharing” column for the Maryland Nursery, Landscape and Greenhouse Association for about 15 years. The articles are based on his successes and failures on the farm, with honest reflection about what worked, what didn’t, and why. His main reason for writing the articles is a desire to share what he’s learned and convince growers to open their minds to new ideas. For example, his efforts have gotten five nurseries in Maryland heavily engaged in adding organic material to their soil and proper tillage.
“It’s a generational thing,” Faulring says. “There is a tendency to do what dad did or what Grandpa did. I call it ‘legacy farming.’ To get them to change, you have to have really solid evidence that it's going to be worth it.”
His published columns as well as his Field Grown Blog are available on Waverly Farm’s website. Years of hard-won wisdom is chronicled there, and Faulring is happy to share it.
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