By Jim Cline

WHATELY, Mass. (WGGB) -- Roger Lewis started the business in 1932.  Tim Nourse, a salesman with the Farm Bureau, became a partner in 1969 and then bought out Lewis in the 1970s.  

They got their stock plants from the United States Department of Agriculture, until they started their own tissue culture practice, or micro propagation in 1983. That has become a big business. 

Nourse Farms now propagates and grows plants 12 months out of the year. Someone is attending  to the new propagation building on a daily basis.

The farm is supplying a wide range of customer, from the large commercial grower and companies that run a mail-order business to the home gardener, and Nate Nourse says there are now a lot more of the latter. 

"A big reason who our business has grown so much is the locally grown effort," he says, "and the economy being tougher, people going back to gardening that they had left by the wayside in the good times."  

Nourse says they're not going to the Cape every weekend, they're staying home and gardening. 

"We've seen the Internet business and the home garden business increase between 15 and 30 percent every year," he says.   

Five years ago it was 10 percent of the business.  Now it's 20 percent.  

He says Massachusetts leads the nation in direct farm sales.  He says there's something like $40 million going from the consumer to the farm.  Here in the Pioneer Valley, a lot of that has to do with the "buy locally grown" concept.