Rocket Farm

Rocket Farm: Tom Higgs cultivates a crop of flying devices

The Higgs farm in Price, Md., has been producing crops for nearly 47 years, mostly food to feed the dairy cows, Tom Higgs says. But in the last five years, more than soybeans and corn have sprouted from Higgs’ land. He’s also witnessed a bumper crop of rockets.

The rockets aren’t a newfangled breed of hybrid corn, cantaloupe, or cauliflower. They’re just your basic—and not so basic—flying devices destined for the skies.

When rockets found their way to the farm, Higgs was pursuing his own air-based hobby.

“I was into radio-controlled planes. I have my own flying strip right here on the farm. One day I was flying, and two guys driving by stopped to watch,” Higgs says. “I guess they were building up the nerve to ask me about using the farm to fly their rockets, which were bigger than anything I had ever seen before. I was interested, so I said yes.”

And what began that day as a couple of rocketeers using the land as a rocket range evolved into an entire club launching from the site.

“At first they were launching near the main farm, but the noise scared the cows,” says Higgs, chuckling. “So we moved them onto another farm.”

Once a month from October through May, the model rocket club, calling itself Maryland Tripoli, hosts a launch at the Higgs farm that attracts enthusiasts from all over Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and as far away as northern New York, North Carolina, and West Virginia. The 5-by-5-mile field (about 150 acres) is cleared for 14,000 feet of airspace straight up and about 32 launch pads.

“We get an average of 110 people per launch and everything from a rocket that weighs less than an ounce to rockets weighing several hundred pounds,” says Dave Bullis, Maryland Tripoli prefect (organizer).

“I launched a Thunderhead that weighed 207 pounds and had nine motors (a pre-manufactured cylinder of propellant) on board. We’re really lucky to have this farm. Tommy Higgs doesn’t ask for anything in return, not a cent or anything else,” Bullis says.

Higgs enjoys his front-row seat to the action. At nearly every launch, he and his family run what affectionately is called The Roadkill Cafe.

“I set up a grill and cook hamburgers and hotdogs,” Higgs says. “It’s a way to earn a couple of extra bucks and watch the rockets. Someone in the club was doing it but stopped for one reason or another. It just got passed on to me.”

Higgs doesn’t see anything extraordinary in helping someone out when he can, even if it means occasionally finding a rocket initially declared missing in action dangling from a tree top or embedded in a crop field two miles from the launch site.

Those are the kinds of things that you can’t do much about once the rocket is airborne and drifting in the wind. But the rocketeers do make sure to control everything else possible.

Delaware Tripoli prefect Joe May is a veteran launcher at the Higgs’ farm. He has launched all sorts of rockets on the site, including his largest, an 84-pound, 16-foot-tall Draco. And he is always conscious of the humans who own and work the land and the cows that live there.

“The main precautions are to use only biodegradable recovery wadding (protective material between rocket motor and recovery parachute) and to pick up any spent igniter wires and any debris you create,” May says. “The field is used to grow feed for the Higgs’ cows, and he wouldn’t be very happy if he found a rocket part or igniter in the stomach of one of his animals.”

Higgs and Bullis make sure that everyone follows the rules. Higgs wants to keep his cows and property safe and his neighbors happy, while Bullis wants to keep the launch site.

“If he (Tommy Higgs) wasn’t so generous, our club wouldn’t exist,” Bullis says. “You need three things to make it work: a landowner, a motor dealer, and a guy to organize. If one of them fails, it’s a no-go.

“And if you don’t have a landowner, you’ve got nothing.”

Tracy Leinberger-Leonardi is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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