Kyle Peveto

As the LSU AgCenter Extension agent for St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, Anna Timmerman has become a trusted source of information for the citrus industry, home fruit and vegetable growers and small producers who sell at the more than 30 farmers markets in the Greater New Orleans area. Timmerman’s expertise was so well respected that she was named the state point of contact for citrus earlier this year.

Timmerman arrived in Louisiana 15 years ago after earning an associate degree in crop and soil science from Michigan State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Art Institute of Chicago. Timmerman moved to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and worked in landscaping. She joined the AgCenter in 2016 and earned a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in the School of Plant, Environmental and Soil Sciences. Timmerman manages to combine her passion for agriculture and horticulture with painting. She keeps chickens and combines their eggs with pigment to create egg tempera paintings of landscapes and flowers.

In an interview earlier this year, Timmerman discussed her love for growing plants and educating others.

What does the horticultural world look like in Greater New Orleans?

Gardening is a huge pastime here in New Orleans, as is market farming. There are over 30 farmers markets in the metro area. You pick the day of the week; there's at least one farmers market. I'm working with about 200 urban and suburban specialty crop producers, ranging in size from many acres to a single backyard. There's also a growing market for local cut flower producers, locally grown herbs and specialty nurseries. These are usually new growers in our industry who start with the backyard nursery certificate but who are scaling up, building a couple of greenhouses and starting to get into more of the retail nursery space.

How did you become interested in horticulture?

I am from west Michigan, which is a huge specialty crop area that produces greenhouse crops, blueberries, asparagus and apples. I grew up on the family farm and began to work at a fairly young age alongside other members of the extended family. My grandparents did the local farmers markets, had a roadside stand and had a cut flower operation, so I learned a lot from them. By the time I graduated high school, I was doing two farmers markets myself and had about an acre in production that I was solely responsible for. I was kind of born into it, and I still do a lot of growing and experimenting at my house in the Ninth Ward where I raise vegetables, cut flowers, chickens, rabbits, ducks and goats.

What are the top challenges that you see for citrus?

The biggest one is that we desperately need a cure or proven disease-resistant cultivars when it comes to citrus greening disease. That's No. 1. Once the trees get it, there's no cure, and they decline pretty rapidly and die within a few years. I know that the citrus crop was about 80% down this year in Florida, and I suspect we're kind of in that ballpark here in Louisiana, too. The second one is land access and bringing in some of these new and beginning farmers that I'm working with. It's really hard for them to get loans or the capital they need to get the ground to grow on. A lot of them start out on empty lots here in the city with 60 by 120 feet. Land costs, student loan debt and insurance prices have locked a lot of my younger growers out, and I don't know how to fix that yet. Maybe partnering some of them with the older, retiring growers, doing like some kind of mentorship initiative.

What do you think is the future of citrus in Louisiana?

I don't see demand going away from the consumer side. We need to start adapting some of the newer technologies I've been researching — growing citrus in containers or even in-ground under an insect exclusion screen. It keeps the pests out, including the Asian citrus psyllid, and I end up using fewer pesticide products, which is great when it comes to consumer preferences. I'm growing trees that were grafted to a dwarf rootstock, allowing for a high density of trees in a small space. In year four of production, it averaged close to 8,000 pounds to the acre. Florida is doing the same thing with grapefruit and juice oranges. I'm doing it with satsumas since that’s our largest citrus market, and I've got four growers adopting the screens as a growing practice at this point. I'm trying to push some of my urban growers into growing citrus and other fruits in containers using precision agriculture techniques. The orchards are compact, relatively easy to care for, and can be adapted for organic markets. Container orchards like mine always bring a lot of comments from traditional orchard growers, since it looks more like you're growing tomatoes than oranges, but it works.

Kyle Peveto is the editor of Louisiana Agriculture.

This article appears in the spring issue of Louisiana Agriculture.

Anna Timmerman evaluates citrus grown in a screened environment at the Docville Farm in Violet. Photo by Kyle Peveto