Maryland Farm & Harvest Visits Garrett, Harford, Prince George’s, and Queen Anne’s Counties During Season-Ending Episode

Episode Celebrates the “Best of” Eight Seasons of MPT Series

Bees from a hive at Hope Honey Farm in Hyattsville. Photo Credit: Maryland Public Television’s Maryland Farm & Harvest.

ANNAPOLIS, MD (March 5, 2021) – Maryland Public Television’s (MPT) popular original series Maryland Farm & Harvest, now in its eighth season, will feature farms and locations in Garrett, Harford, Prince George’s, and Queen Anne’s counties during an episode celebrating the “best of” eight seasons of the popular original series. The final episode of the season airs on Tuesday, March 9 at 7 p.m. 

Maryland Farm & Harvest has been taking viewers on journeys across the state since 2013, telling hundreds of stories about the farms, people, and technology required to sustain and grow agriculture in Maryland, the state’s number one commercial industry. 

Nearly 10 million viewers have tuned in to Maryland Farm & Harvest since its debut. The series has taken MPT viewers to more than 350 farms, fisheries, and other agriculture-related locations during its first eight seasons, covering every Maryland county, as well as Baltimore City and Washington, D.C.  

Past episodes can be viewed on MPT’s website while episode segments are available on the series’ YouTube channel. 

Maryland Farm & Harvest’s March 9 episode features these four segments from past seasons of the series: 

• Breeding Bees (Prince George’s County). In this season six segment, Maryland Farm & Harvest viewers learned that Maggie Mills of Hope Honey Farm in Hyattsville isn’t an ordinary beekeeper. She raises bees and bottles honey, but her specialty is breeding bees, specifically a process called grafting queens. Through the use of macrophotography, this segment delivers a unique up-close look at how a queen bee ascends to the throne, while explaining to viewers why up to one-third of the food we eat relies on healthy bee colonies. This story originally aired on November 13, 2018, and earned an Emmy® Award from the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
  
  
• Soy to Soy Oil (Queen Anne’s County). Maryland Farm & Harvest visited Coleraine Farm in Queen Anne during season four. Here, viewers met farmer Sonny Eaton and got a glimpse of his 3,000-acre farm’s soybean harvest. Then viewers traveled to the Perdue Agribusiness Oil Refinery in Salisbury to see how soybeans are transformed into edible soy oil. This story originally aired on January 17, 2017.
  
  
• Farm Photographer (Harford County). During season three, Maryland Farm & Harvest profiled Edwin Remsberg, a Fallston-based photographer who captures images of agriculture and the work of farmers in Maryland and across the country. While farms can often look picture perfect, Edwin is the person who many farmers call on to capture that beauty. But, photography is not his only talent. Edwin still finds time to raise sheep on his 20-acre Harford County farm. This story originally aired on January 19, 2016.
  
  
• The Local Buy: Mushrooms (Garrett County). During this season four segment of The Local Buy, host Al Spoler visits Backbone Food Farm in Oakland where he meets Max and Katharine Dubansky. Here, Al learns about their use of draft horses in place of mechanical tractors on their farm. In this case neither one is needed, as Max shows what it takes to grow mushrooms on logs and bales of straw. Al then gets a taste of mushrooms in a cream cheese spread. The recipe is available on mpt.org/farm. This story originally aired on January 31, 2017. 

The March 9 episode also includes a photo montage featuring the Maryland Farm & Harvest staff’s favorite behind-the-scenes moments during eight seasons working on the show.

New episodes of Maryland Farm & Harvest air on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. on MPT-HD and are live-streamed on MPT’s website. Encore broadcasts are available on MPT-HD Thursdays at 11 p.m. and Sundays at 6 a.m. Each episode also airs on MPT2/Create® on Fridays at 7:30 p.m.

Series host Joanne Clendining, who recently earned her second Emmy® award from the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for her work on Maryland Farm & Harvest, returns for season eight. She is joined by Al Spoler who handles duties for each episode’s The Local Buy segment. 

The Maryland Department of Agriculture is MPT’s co-production partner for Maryland Farm & Harvest. Major funding is provided by the Maryland Grain Producers Utilization Board.

Additional funding is provided by Maryland’s Best, Maryland Agricultural Resource-Based Industry Development Corporation (MARBIDCO), MidAtlantic Farm Credit, Rural Maryland Council, Maryland Agricultural Education and Rural Development Assistance Fund (MAERDAF), Maryland Soybean Board, Maryland Association of Soil Conservation Districts, Wegmans Food Markets, Maryland Nursery, Landscape & Greenhouse Association, Seafood Marketing Advisory Commission, Maryland Farm Bureau, and The Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment.

Other support comes from the Mar-Del Watermelon Association, Eddie Mercer Agri-Services, Inc., and the Maryland Agricultural Education Foundation (MAEF).

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Follow Maryland Department of Agriculture on Twitter @MdAgDept