Meet the Modern Farmer Cracking Cold Storage in the Coldest Places

In Fairbanks, Alaska, a radio advertisement from a local heat products store, The Woodway, says, “Fall is winter’s two-minute warning.” The growing season is short, from mid-May to mid-September, and it cuts straight to winter. You find the ground frozen by the first week of October. Temperatures eventually drop to -40 degrees Fahrenheit. During winter, the community is critically food insecure.

 

 

When farmers in cold climates take a well-earned winter rest, their communities still want local produce. Grocery chains provide food through winter, shipping goods from across the world, but this is expensive and can weaken local self-reliance and food security. Having no local options makes a town more dependent on outside food sources that the community does not control, and it reduces the amount of dollars staying local. It also renders Fairbanks less food secure because, like other rural towns in cold climates, it is at the end of a long, tenuous supply chain with a high chance of disruption from too much snow on hundreds of miles of roads to shipping delays as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. A lack of local produce during winter also means many farmers lose income from fall to spring.

 

Sam Knapp, a farmer in Fairbanks, has found a way to bridge that gap by building his own affordable, accessible cold storage. This has allowed him to sell his produce through one of the country’s harshest winters. He combines a science background with experience running his own farm, and after speaking with cold storage innovators across the country, he is sharing what he has learned in his new book, Beyond the Root Cellar.

 

Knapp with winter vegetables. Photography via Knapp.

 

Knapp has a B.S. in chemistry and physics. “My first job out of college was doing thermal modeling as an engineer. It is in my wheelhouse to think about heat transfer and phase change.” He then experimented with cold storage running a farm in Michigan. Knapp used Google Scholar to review studies on the storage needs of each vegetable he wanted to grow. For example, Knapp found that winter squash stores best after curing outside, which involves healing and hardening its rind, but curing will not happen in colder and wetter climates. To make up for uncontrollable wet and cold weather, Knapp introduced humidity control measures into his storage plans.

 

In 2020, Knapp moved to Fairbanks to start Offbeet Farm. There, he found farmers using root cellars and other cold storage techniques that were costeffective at temperatures well below zero degrees. But few farmers, if any, stored for more than a month or two. “Most farms here sell out by early September.”

 

So, Knapp set out to build a structure on his 1.5-acre farm that could store his produce through the entire winter, a time when temperatures drop to -40 degrees for weeks on end. The structure is 25 square feet, and looks like an ordinary outdoor shed, but it rests on specialized concrete forms that encase insulation and act as retaining walls. He now runs a successful over-winter CommunitySupportedAgriculture (CSA) and sells his produce through March.

 

 

“I built this building myself, and the total infrastructure cost was about $55,000. I have the capability of storing 35,000 to 40,000 pounds of produce.” With around 120 CSA customers, Knapp currently stores 25,000 pounds of produce, and he plans to expand each year.

Knapp’s cold storage shed. Photography via Knapp.

Knapp says cold storage provides additional revenue streams and work-life balance; both are hard to come by for small farmers. “Farmers around here get half the year off, and they enjoy that, but their growing season is intense. It’s rough. It’s hard to make it through that time. I rarely feel burnt out from farming.” With cold storage, farmers do not have to harvest and sell all of their produce within the short growing season. It also helps balance self-care and family.

 

Seasonal workers on the farm. Photography via Knapp.

 

Storability varies by product: While Knapp has found that he and his customers are still eating their cabbage into the summer of the following growing year, storing his onions has proven tougher. He is still searching for an onion varietal that can store well after almost 24 hours of sunlight during the subarctic summer, followed by a cold and damp fall.

 

Every farmer experiments, and Knapp is no exception. He’s made some surprising discoveries. For instance, Knapp had not anticipated the warmth made by the vegetables themselves. After being picked, vegetables still respirate, (that is, metabolize carbohydrates), and produce heat as a byproduct—so much so that even when outside temperatures hit -10 degrees, Knapp has to cool the unit to lower the inside temperature down to 32 degrees. “This last winter, there was one time when it was -25 out, and my cooling fans were turning on.”

 

Knapp in storage unit. Photography via Knapp.

 

While Knapp is proud of his innovations, he still relies on more established farmers in the area for best practices in storing and selling produce at a commercial scale through a Fairbanks winter. “Half of it is hard research. The other half is talking to other farmers.” Building cold storage also comes with up-front investment and risk. “It seems very risky at the start, (to put) all this money down to get into it in the first place.”

 

To learn how others got over this risk and technical difficulty, Knapp interviewed cold-storage innovators from Winnipeg to North Carolina in Beyond the Root Cellar. It also shares practical know-how, ultimately showing that cold storage is within reach for all farmers. For example, readers learn that many farmers can take advantage of their existing summer storage facilities.

“Many people are primed to do this already,” he says. “You can start storing 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of produce by investing a couple thousand bucks just converting some space you already have.”

Never one to get ahead of himself, Knapp also points out that, in every interview, he heard the same touchstone: “Start small.” Knapps book, Beyond the Root Cellar, will be released November 14.

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