Amanda Loder was StateImpact’s multimedia reporter until the project merged with the New Hampshire Public Radio site in July 2013. She now serves as a reporter and Weekend Edition Host for NHPR. You can continue to follow her work at @AmandaLoderNHPR, at nhpr.org, and on New Hampshire Public Radio.
Upper Valley bioengineering start-up Adimab uses yeast to discover antibody-based drugs
Tomorrow morning on NHPR, we’ll hear from Tillman Gerngross, abioengineering entrepreneur in the Upper Valley. Tillman’s story is Part Three of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” examining how people across New Hampshire’s seven regions are navigating a recovering economy.
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The economy of New Hampshire’s Upper Valley has two really big things going for it. One of them is Dartmouth College in Hanover. The other is Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon. Thanks to these two research engines, this part of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee region sees new start-up companies launch each year in engineering, information technology and biotechnology.
But once those companies are born, the Upper Valley has something really big working against it: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just over two hours away, and home to Harvard University and MIT, Cambridge has more of everything these companies need — venture capital, office space, a large workforce of Ph.D.s. and proximity to Boston. For many Upper Valley tech start-ups, moving to Cambridge is a natural and inevitable step toward sustaining themselves.
At 34 years old, Tracie Smith runs one of the larger farms in the Monadnock Region using the community supported agriculture model. “I started on a small scale, and over the last 15 years, I built it up each year,” she says. “But all of it was with the aim to follow my passion and grow good food. I’ve always been an idealist at heart.”
“We’re aiming every year to be able to keep our employees and pay them more and look into health insurance,” Smith says. “You can’t have a sustainable business if you’re losing people because you can’t offer them enough.”
“By the time I pay for all the overhead, supplies, and just the pay that I’m paying them–which isn’t even enough, in my opinion–insurance is a tough thing,” Smith says. “It would make it almost not profitable for me. That’s my goal, to get to the point so they can justify coming back every year.”
“Everyone was talking about universal health care, and it would be helpful to small businesses, I think, because it’s a huge cost,” Smith says. “But it doesn’t look like that’s happening, so I’m bound and determined to figure it out.”
Since I spoke with Smith, she’s figured out how to pay for about half of her returning employees’ insurance premiums. “Whether we have to grow the business, which I keep doing, in the aim to make it more sustainable, financially, that’s what I’ll do,” Smith says.
As part of our weekly “Getting By, Getting Ahead” series, StateImpact is traveling across New Hampshire, gathering personal stories from the people behind the economy. In our second installment, we visit a small farm in the Monadnock Region.
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Tracie Smith has been selling mixed vegetables and herbs at farmers’ markets since she went to college. At UNH, she studied environmental horticulture. Today, at age 34, she still looks the part of a college hippie farmer, with her long curly hair and grubby jeans.
But as she inspects the crops at her farm near Jaffrey, it’s clear her casual looks shouldn’t fool you. Smith is a determined businesswoman. For the past 15 years, she has run a farm that uses a model called “Community Supported Agriculture,” or CSA for short. It’s a kind of subscription program where customers buy a bulk “share” of Smith’s vegetable harvest during the spring, summer or fall. And business is booming. Continue Reading →
The Monadnock region's seen big growth in the number of small farms selling produce direct to consumers.
Tomorrow morning, NHPR will air the second part of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” which tells the personal stories behind New Hampshire’s economy. The upcoming piece will profile a small-scale farmer from the Monadnock region, and the challenge she faces in trying to get her employees health insurance.
If you’d like to find out more about the growth of small-scale agriculture in the area, and the economic challenges facing farmers, check out our regional snapshot. You can also find our first installment of “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” the story of a White Mountains innkeeper, here.
The local food movement is gaining popularity, especially in the Monadnock region. But that doesn't necessarily mean big money for small farmers.
Tomorrow morning on NHPR, we’ll introduce you to Tracie Smith, afarmer in the Monadnock Region. Tracie’s story is Part Two of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” examining how people across New Hampshire’s seven regions are navigating a recovering economy.
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Farming has long been crucial to New Hampshire’s Monadnock region, where rows of vegetable and fruit crops pock a hilly landscape of hearty green forests. But lately, there’s a new economic opportunity for area farmers: The growing popularity of something called “community supported agriculture.” Continue Reading →
Ed Butler bought the Notchland Inn with his husband, Les Schoof, nearly 20 years ago. “It’s supposed to get easier as you get older,” Butler says. “But that has not been the case here.”
The Notchland Inn was built in 1862. It is a classic Mount Washington Valley business: Small, independent, and catering to a niche market of elopements, newlyweds, and romantic getaways.
“There are some who succeed better than we have, who do have a little more breathing room as their businesses mature,” Butler says. “We are continuing to grow our bottom line. It’s just tougher doing it.”
With the inn’s unpredictable bottom-line, it’s becoming more difficult for 62-year old Butler and Schoof to plan for retirement. “There are ways to survive, and we will survive, and eventually, not have to be here forever,” Butler says. “Or, if we are here forever, then we’ll eventually become gentlemen innkeepers, because after awhile, you can’t do all the physical work you did 10, 15 years ago.”
“The real challenge, I think, is that the national chains can take a hit if the economy is slow,” Butler says of the chains that have sprung up in the area over the past few years. “They can actually come in and invest money in ways that family-owned businesses can’t, necessarily, because we only have one business. We don’t have dozens.”
As the country continues to struggle with high unemployment and a lackluster economic recovery, New Hampshire is doing surprisingly well. Unemployment is at five percent — much lower than the national average. And more people are starting small businesses. In our weekly “Getting By, Getting Ahead” series, StateImpact is traveling the state, gathering personal stories from the people behind the economy. For our first installment, we visit the White Mountains, where independent country inns that have drawn tourists for more than a century face new competition. Continue Reading →
The privately owned Town and Country motor inn located in the White Mountains.
Tomorrow morning on NHPR, we’ll introduce you to Ed Butler, an innkeeper in the White Mountains. Ed’s story is Part One of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” examining how people across New Hampshire’s seven regions are navigating a recovering economy.
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As you follow the winding highway through Franconia and Crawford Notches, weaving in and out of the White Mountains National Forest, you’ll encounter short bursts of economic activity. Mom-and-pop motels, country inns, diners, and small shops selling souvenirs, snowshoes and fishing poles all dot the Mount Washington Valley. Some of these outposts look as if they were frozen in the 1950s, built and marketed during the golden age of the road trip.
These heaping helpings of Americana are the traditional economic driver of the tourism-dependent White Mountains. In the late 1980s, a new element arrived. Major corporations began building up the North Conway area with outlet stores, restaurant franchises, and chain hotels. At first, this influx helped the older businesses. Rather than simply catering to the outdoorsy set, innkeepers could cast their nets to a wider crowd, bringing in people who wanted the ambience of a rural mountain retreat while indulging in some tax-free shopping.
Over the past seven or eight years, though, that dynamic has been changing. National chains have begun moving deeper into the Mount Washington Valley. This trend has been particularly upsetting to small innkeepers. “I think whenever you introduce another number of rooms to your mix, you are making everyone have to rethink their business model,” says Janice Crawford, Executive Director of the Mount Washington Valley Chamber of Commerce. Continue Reading →
Our weekly roundup of this week's most eye-popping posts
Before you dash away from your desk for Memorial Day weekend, here’s a bit of Friday afternoon refreshment: Your weekly roundup of StateImpact’s Top 5 posts!
Why NH Factories Are Struggling To Fill Jobs: By one estimate, there are 600,000 open factory jobs nationwide for skilled workers–and not enough qualified people to fill them. We look into the “skills gap” situation in New Hampshire, how the Community College System and federal dollars come into play, and why some critics say these kinds of job training programs are a waste of money.
How Much Is N.H. Paying For The Freedom To Take Risks?: The Granite State’s well known for for its laid-back stance on safety legislation. Whether motorists choose to wear seat belts or bikers strap on helmets is their prerogative. But according to a recent report, fatal accidents and injuries carry hidden costs beyond lost lives.
Q&A: Why There’s More To The “Skills Gap” Than A Worker Shortage: The companion piece to “Why NH Factories Are Struggling To Fill Jobs.” We put what’s happening with New Hampshire’s skills gap into national perspective. Using expert voices, we delve into why large manufacturers have rising expectations for workers and why it’s hard to tell if community college-based training programs actually work.
In the past, New Hampshire attracted more new residents, which bolstered the state's economy
The Granite State’s economy depends heavily on well-educated and highly-skilled workers. Historically, a lot of that labor pool has been replenished by out-of-staters. Given recent concerns about the ebbing waves of new Granite Staters, we thought it was time to repost a series of posts we did on the subject of migration, based on IRS data (and a cool interactive map from Forbes).
Your trusty StateImpact team has (temporarily) left the building. So our Latest Links feature is on hiatus until Thursday. But no worries! Our cyber-minions are holding down the fort, and will offer up choice nuggets of New Hampshire economic news until we get back!
And, if you’d like to save your browser some refresh-time, subscribe to our RSS feed!
It’s that time of the week again! We’ve rounded-up the Top Five StateImpact posts that crowd wisdom decided were on this week’s must-read list.
How Junk Mail Is Helping To Prop Up The Postal Service: After a brief hiatus from our Most-Read roundup, this post is back! It’s a combination of humor, hard facts, and shameless name-dropping of the kitschy-ist catalogs cluttering your mailboxes. In short, find out why Fingerhut matters more than most people know.
Why NH’s Waterfront Market Might Be On The Rebound: What a welcome you gave new StateImpact reporter Emily Corwin for her inaugural post! This piece puts a brief uptick in Lakes Region waterfront properties into perspective, examining whether it’s actually cause for optimism, or just a flash in the pan.
Three Reasons Why It’s Boom Time For NH Manufacturers: The Brookings Institution recently released a report delving into the relationship between geography and manufacturing. The upshot? New Hampshire’s fabrication renaissance is no accident.
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