Peter Hughes is President of Red Barn Consulting and its sister company Red Barn Trading Company, LLC, both of which he founded with his wife Molly, a professional engineer. Red Barn is an agricultural consulting and engineering firm based in Lancaster that provides consulting services to agricultural clientele in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Texas, and Hawaii. Its business services over 1200 farm clients located within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed with the core mission to help farms exceed water quality standards through on-farm nutrient control. To help facilitate the relationship between point-source and non-point source nutrient credit trading, Peter started Red Barn Trading Company in late 2005 and to date has brokered 42 Nutrient Credit Contracts resulting in 446,257 pounds of nutrient credit offsets used for NPDES compliance.
Peter grew up on his family’s 2,500 acre dry land wheat farm in Washington State and earned a degree in Natural Resource Science and Biology from Washington State University. He worked in Western Australia on a 25,000-acre crop and sheep farm outside of Perth for two years before finding his way to the Keystone State in 2000. Peter has built a highly credible reputation within the environmental agencies and communities by bringing practical insights from the farm perspective to the table and has been very engaged in the State’s Chesapeake Bay WIP, particularly through his leadership in the Lancaster Clean Water Partners; aimed to unite the communities’ various perspectives to achieve a shared vision of clean and clear water in Lancaster County by 2040.