I’m a farmer in Kentucky. I’m also the customer this website is written for.
I’m a veteran. I’m a beginning farmer. I grow on about an acre of leased ground — I don’t own the land, I rent it, and everything I build has to make sense on rented dirt. My operation is a small nursery and market-garden business, and like every small grower I know, I needed a longer season. That means a high tunnel.
A good 30×72 tunnel kit runs about twelve thousand dollars delivered. I don’t have twelve thousand dollars sitting around. What I have is an EQIP application — filed, in the ranking queue, waiting on a site visit from my NRCS agent — and a stack of formal quotes from tunnel companies, because I did the shopping before I did the buying.
Here’s what I learned fast: the information is all out there, but it’s scattered across federal PDFs, state payment schedules, vendor sales pages, and things your agent tells you in a parking lot that never get written down. The payment rates are published but nobody shows you the math. The vendors all quote differently — one includes freight, one doesn’t, one leaves the end walls off the quote — so the prices can’t be compared until you force them onto the same page. And the single most important rule in the whole program — do not buy anything before your contract is signed — is the one people break because nobody said it loud enough.
So I’m saying it loud, and I’m publishing the rest of it too. Every number on this site is one I’ve used on my own application: Kentucky’s real payment rates, my real delivered quotes, the Code 325 standard as my agent enforces it, the sequence I’m following so I never take on debt before the grant is obligated. When sixteen suppliers answer my quote requests, their prices go in the table. When my site visit happens, what my NRCS agent says goes in an article.
I’m not a consultant and I’m not selling tunnels. I sell a $49 toolkit of the paperwork I built for myself, because building it twice is a waste of your time. Everything else here is free, because the farmers who need this most are the ones counting dollars the way I do.
If you’re a veteran, a beginning farmer, or anybody farming small on purpose: you qualify for more help than you think, the rates are better than you’ve heard, and the whole thing is winnable if you do it in the right order. That’s the site. Let’s get you a tunnel.