Sheep and lambs roam everywhere and bleating echoes all around the property, which is bisected by a rutted dirt path off Bernardston’s Eden Trail.
A dozen or more of the cross-bred, larger yearlings — some with fluffy wool that’s every child’s epitome of a sheep, others with the more matted fiber — are clustered around a giant roll of hay, devouring it from every angle on a frosty Tuesday morning in a large, open-air barn.
Farmer Mark Duprey is tending to a newborn lamb discovered just an hour or so ago, with some blood still coating part of its tiny white body. He places it in a round, makeshift pen to be cared for by its mother.
So far this winter, more than 260 lambs have been born on Leyden Glen Farm, where the lone human caretaker is surrounded by roughly 300 ewes and 260 lambs, each weighing maybe 10 pounds a piece.
“By New England standards, this is a pretty big operation ,” he says, wearing a work jacket and Nepalese woolen stocking hat to ward off the 30-degree chill. “By world standards, it’s pitifully small. In New Zealand, this doesn’t even reach hobby stage yet.”
‘Eat and eat’
Meanwhile, north of Eden, Mark’s brother, David, uses a Unigrip claw extending from his red Massey-Ferguson tractor to lift a 1,000-pound bale of hay for his dairy herd on his Sunbrite Farm. A few of the Holsteins, fronted by one named Mindy, look on nearby, anticipating that it might be nearing lunchtime.
“The damn cows just eat and eat,” says David, as another bale of hay grinds together with corn silage in a red Trivolet Solomix nearby, creating that evening’s “total mixed ration” meal. Then, on second thought, he corrects himself: “eat and shit.”
The dairy farmer, also wearing a stocking cap and a work coat with some matted fibers poking out, feeds about three of these large bales each day to his herd, which numbers about 110 cows in all. “Probably more than I should have,” he said.
The two brothers, working either side of the road, are a little like their herds: different, but both tied to the land where they grew up, the fourth generation to care for this terrain close to where Bernardston, Greenfield and Leyden intersect.
The farm, started by their grandfather, George, and his father, Octave, about 100 years ago, is the site of Burke Fort, the first and largest of the settlements in town, where 50 people took shelter during the French and Indian War. The 225-acre farm was passed on to Norman Duprey, who operated it as a dairy farm with about 40 Holsteins. He was helped by his brother, Albert.
Sunbrite Farm’s bottling plant — from which Norman Duprey had his milk delivered around Bernardston, Greenfield, Turners Falls and Northfield by a milkman named Harold ‘Woody’ Wood in the 1950s and ’60s — is partially used as the current farm’s milk room and partially as the farm’s workshop.
When Norman Duprey, who was one of a dozen dairy farmers operating in a town that now has two farms, died in 1965, David was just 12, and Mark was 8.
At a time when the county’s abundant dairies were beginning to diminish, the Dupreys auctioned off the herd and farm equipment in 1966. The land was semi-idle, rented occasionally to neighboring farmers for growing hay and pasturing their animals.
Milk processing at Sunbrite had ended a couple of years before Norman’s death at age 46 and neither of the boys, or their younger brother, Michael, had shown interest in dairying.
“I didn’t really give it much thought,” recalls David, now 60. “My mother used to say I spent most of my time getting in the way and, if given a chance, I would have liked driving a tractor.
He recalls only being part of a 4H dairying club and even showing calves with friends in Bernardston. “I wasn’t really a farmer like they were farmers, because there weren’t cows here anymore. I don’t even remember how I went about getting calves to show, or where I kept them.”
Brother Mark recalls having chickens and selling eggs in the years after his father’s death, with his mother driving him on the route. Eventually, he went on to study animal science at the University of Massachusetts. It was during an exchange program at Oregon State University his junior year that he took a course in sheep production and thought, “Great, I can use my degree, but I don’t have to milk cows twice a day. I can have an off-farm job.”
At Oregon State, he also met his future wife, Kristin Nicholas, a visiting University of Delaware student majoring in fiber design. Her mastery of knitting, yarns, and marketing would become critical to paying for their farm together.
Itch to farm
South of Eden, David, who graduated Greenfield Community College, began in the mid-70s pondering a way to live on the farm, close to his mother, Betty.
“I thought this is as good a spot on this earth for me to be, right here,” says David, who now lives with his wife, Debbie, in the house he grew up in.
“I kind of had the itch and said, ‘I’m going to see if I can make a living here. But living on a farm can be kind of expensive. Not knowing what else to do, to have the farm here, I said ‘I guess, I’ve got to have some cows.’”
After GCC, David stayed close to farming, working for Farm Bureau Feeds, then at Greenfield Farmers Exchange, and then at the Agway fertilizer plant at the East Deerfield rail yard. There, unloading fertilizer one day, he suffered a life-changing accident: his right foot slipped through a grate and the bottom of his leg had to be amputated.
“At that point in time, I was at a crossroads: ‘What are you going to do now?’”
He used workers’ compensation payments to attend the University of Massachusetts, but after the two-year agriculture program, which he enjoyed, David decided he wasn’t cut out to be a student and decided, after raising some beef cattle, to try dairying, despite his prosthetic leg.
“I wanted to try farming at that point and there were some heifers I was raising,” recalls David, who bought a small tractor, began haying and took out a Farmers Home Administration loan to put a milking herd together.
“My mother sort of discouraged me, telling me, ‘Work with your brain and not your back. But she supported me once she saw I really wanted do it,” says David, who’d married in 1979 and bought a house nearby, on South Street.
Keeping the traditional Sunbrite Farm name, David and Debbie started farming in 1982 on 112 of the family’s 225 acres — all but about 40 of them open for haying and pasture land. When his mother died in 1985, she left the other half of the property north of Eden to his two brothers. He now rents an additional 75 to 100 acres to grow hay.
Making it pay
David Duprey jokingly calls the farm where he and his brothers grew up “the land that holds the world together,” a suggestion that in all of the hustle and bustle of a spinning world, this a piece of heaven that moves along at its own cud-chewing pace — even with its daily equipment breakdowns and other routine agricultural headaches.
What helps keep the farming operations together, though, are Mark’s wife, Kristin Nicholas, and David’s wife, Debbie. Both have spun their own off-the-farm jobs to help pay the bills.
Kristin has put her fiber design training and her background creating knitting patterns for sweaters and other garments to work in a diverse collage of teaching, designing and other artistic endeavors — right down to arranging and shooting photos of her own prepared lamb recipes to guide the farm’s meat customers.
“It makes my head spin sometimes to think all we do,” says Kristin. “We’re, like, psychotic busy … all the stuff we do to try to make money.”
Mark adds, “We both do really neat things that make no money. We wonder how we can keep doing any of this stuff. It’s like reverting to the old model of doing six different things to make a living.”
At Sunbrite Farm, one of the eight original dairy farms that created Our Family Farms milk marketing cooperative in 1997, Debbie worked for 10 years off the farm as the cooperative’s manager. A couple of years ago, she returned to work at the Richard D. Smith paper company in Greenfield, where she had worked for 18 years when the couple’s three children were young.
“She needed to get a place that provided health insurance,” says David. “My wife has always worked off the farm and her off-farm income probably made the difference between (the farm) staying in business or not. I made a deal with her long ago: I’ll pay the taxes, the insurance, the mortgage and you put the food on the table. That’s how it’s always worked out.”
The irony of the labor-intensive work of a farm not putting food on the table is one that’s only to clear to David, whose farm income has also had a hard time keeping up with mushrooming health-care costs. So that, too, has fallen to Debbie, “which is a biggie.”
Debbie, who grew up around farms in Leyden but not on one, met David through a mutual Leyden friend before he bought his dairy herd.
“I had no idea what I’d be in for,” she says with a laugh. She periodically helps milk the cows a 6 a.m., but more often works on the books, which she likes to do around 11 p.m.
“The biggest adjustment has been living on a tight budget, squeezing out every nickel,” she says. “But I love living around the animals and I really like where I live. Raising the kids, it was wonderful. We never really had a vacation, but we had three four-wheelers and we’d go out in the woods and have a picnic between chores. That’s just what we did.”
Marrying the farm
North of Eden, Mark Duprey, 57, stands in the “modified greenhouse” he built in the early 1990s, on the 112-acre property where his younger brother, Michael, a contractor, also does maple sugaring and cuts cordwood.
The structure, with a breathable fabric along the bottom 4 feet to provide ventilation, serves as a large protected area for the lambs and yearlings during the winter; this winter was cold enough that he had to use heat lamps to keep some of the most vulnerable lambs warm.
Although the flock overwinters here, and in the surrounding 15 acres or so of open terrain, Mark keeps the herd on various rented fields, as well as other land he owns in Greenfield and at home in Leyden, less than 10 miles away but seemingly on a different planet because of the different cultures between the two neighboring towns.
Mark and Kristin bought their first Romney sheep together in 1980, before they were even married.
“My mother-in-law said, ‘Some people get an engagement ring; Kristin got four sheep,’” recalls Kristin. “When you marry a farm boy, you marry the farm.”
Dividing his time between selling construction blasting equipment and tending his flock is a balancing act, Mark says, but since the most labor-intensive winter feeding and lambing period coincides with shutdown of the road construction, he manages.
“I’m trying to farm in New England, a land of 3-acre pastures,” he says. “What I do would be so much easier with 100 acres without the constant moving from one spot to another. People left New England for a very good reason. Our land base isn’t suited to large-scale agriculture. If you’re in Idaho with 26,000 ewes on (federal) land, it’s a different way of doing things. I rely very heavily on different landlords and 80 percent of the land I farm doesn’t belong to me.”
The two brothers keep their farming operations separate, but they sometimes share equipment if a tractor breaks down, for instance. They also cooperate when Mark’s sheep work their way back to over-winter in Bernardston each fall — usually with Mark driving them, traditional-style, on foot along Eden Trail, kept in check by border collie Ness. Along the way, David lets the sheep graze one of his hay fields in late October or early November.
“By then, I’m usually pretty sick of haying,” jokes David. “Basically, I give him that whole crop and hopefully by then I’ve got enough of my own.”
North and south, the Duprey brothers work constantly, tending their animals, repairing equipment and trying to make farming pay. It isn’t easy, but each brother says he thinks he can do better with his own brand of farming than what goes on across the road.
“I’ve seen what he goes through and I have no particular interest in sheep,” says David. “When it comes right down to it, I think I can make a better living with my cows.”
The price paid for milk now, about $22 to $23 per dozen-gallon hundredweight, is higher than it’s been in a long time, he says. But he adds quickly that so are the costs of feed and fuel.
“Cows are more of an interest for me,” he says, “though there are times when I have a cow that falls down and I say, ‘Why don’t I have sheep or goats? At least I can pick them up.’ Otherwise, it’s 1,500 pounds of dead weight.”
He’s still recovering from a torn rotator cuff on his left shoulder after a 1,200-pound cow that thought he was trying to harm her calf attacked him in a pen last fall.
“She started pounding me and I says, ‘I’ve got to get out of here or this freakin’ cow’s going to kill me!’ She put her head back, snort, POW. Back up, do it again … She really did a job on this shoulder.”
Duprey relies on three part-time helpers, especially to help lift the milking machine given his damaged left arm.
“I do a lot of things, but I just can’t do that.”
He adds, “I think farming with one leg has been my weakest link. Some days just I just don’t do well. And now that I’m slowing down and can’t do what I used to be able to do, at least at this point in time, none of my (three grown) kids want to farm.”
Helped also by Debbie handling the dairy farm’s bookkeeping, David, like his brother, laments “One of the worst things about farming, and it always been this way, is the financial end of it, never mind the work.”
Yet getting additional income from Our Family Farms, which does its own distribution, marketing and promotions, “has made a huge impact on being able to continue.”
Still, across the road, Mark points out that a dairy farm like his brother has is a huge investment. And unlike his sheep, cows need to be milked twice a day.
“Sheep can have less land and more marginal land,” says Mark, who sells his meat at Amherst’s weekly winter farmers market and at the Northampton and Amherst farmers markets each summer. That’s where he can find customers who can afford to pay for local, grass-fed lamb.
“It’s my biggest struggle,” he says of the business end of farming. “I know how to raise animals, but raising them in profitable manner is a real challenge.”
Leyden Glen sells its lamb at Atlas Farm as well as at Green Fields Market, but Mark says he’s gotten away from wholesale sales to restaurants, with the occasional exception of the Wagon Wheel in Gill.
“You’ve got to give a pretty significant discount. And if you’re not making money in retail, you don’t say, ‘I’m going to make (that discount) up in volume.’ You’ve got to be profitable.”
On either side of Eden Trail, it’s clear the farm life is not paradise; it’s hard work, as farming has always been. Mark sees promise in the trend of more people appreciating having local farms and, to some extent, willing to pay a little more to ensure that their milk and their lamb are produced close to home.
“Even after the fad’s gone, I still think there will be a lot of people who’ve been exposed to the value of small, local agriculture and it’s kind of a neat time to be in this. I enjoy going to farmers markets because you’re around really smart people and that’s one of the reasons I like selling to Atlas. For years and years, all you heard was the demise of small farms. Now you’ve got best and brightest going into agriculture.”
NORTHAMPTON — In 1974, UMass Extension vegetable specialist John Howell visited area farmers to talk them into coming to Gothic Street on Saturday mornings to sell their produce directly to customers at a little thing he was trying to start called a farmers market.
“Some of them were skeptical — well, most of them were,” said Howell, who is retired and lives in South Deerfield. He convinced about six to leave their busy farms to come to the first Northampton Farmers Market that year, but even he did not imagine how integral the market model would become in the area agricultural industry.
“I said to people, ‘Wouldn’t this be neat?’ But I never thought it would be an important way for them to market and sell their produce,” he recalled. “I guess I was wrong… I was glad to be wrong about that.”
After the annual winter hiatus, the 40th season of the Northampton Farmers Market kicks off on Gothic Street Saturday at 7 a.m.
When the weekly market started four decades ago, it was only the third in the state, Howell said. A lot has changed at the market since then, from the diversity of products offered to the community’s views on local produce.
Interest in buying local produce, which started small in the 1970s, has skyrocketed, he said. As a result, more farmers and customers flocked to the market, started other markets, and found new ways to sell to customers.
“It really has taken off in all fashions — farmers markets became an important segment of marketing in Massachusetts, direct marketing at roadside stands has been going on,” Howell said. “And in the last 15 years or so, there’s been a big increase in CSAs.” (CSA refers to community supported agriculture farm-share programs.)
“It’s good for the farmers because they get more of the retail dollars, although they have more expenses, too,” he said.
Howell hasn’t been involved in the market’s running for more than 35 years, but he said he is “very happy to see it’s still doing well.”
Richard Tracy, 55, president of the volunteer committee that runs the market, agrees that the market is thriving. He is a regular presence, representing Intervale Farm in Westhampton, which he owns with his wife, Maureen Dempsey, 54.
For about the last 15 years, the market has had as many producers as it can fit — around 20 — and there has been a steady waiting list of farmers hoping to sell there.
“I think it’s a big milestone, something to celebrate,” Tracy said about the 40th anniversary.
“A lot of businesses come and go, markets come and go, and this is a real tribute to the vendors we’ve had and the customers from Northampton and the surrounding area,” Tracy said. “You need dedicated customers you can count on.”
Early years
The Northampton Farmers Market got its start a few years after one opened in Amherst, which Howell said was likely the first market in the state.
Around the same time, the Springfield Farmers Market was born when Howell’s predecessor, Walter Melnick, convinced farmers who sold their produce to retailers at a wholesale market on Avocado Street in Springfield to stick around after 7 a.m. to sell directly to consumers.
With those markets in mind, Howell joined forces with Paul Walker, then president of the Northampton Chamber of Commerce, and former Hampshire County Planner Richard M. Gaffney to start up a market in Northampton.
The city agreed to let them close and use Gothic Street. “It started kind of slow at first but it was moderately successful,” Howell said.
The market moved to a space behind the Hampshire County Hall of Records on King Street for two seasons during construction on the Hampshire County Courthouse. A few years after he helped start the market, Howell said, his work was done and he left it to the farmers to run.
A young couple who was just getting started farming vegetables decided to take a chance on joining the still-young Northampton Farmers Market. John, 60, and Debra O’Leary, 57, of White House Farm in Southampton, attended their first farmers market in 1977 when they were 24 and 21 years old. They’ve been members ever since.
“We never knew anything about farmers markets,” John O’Leary said, until they heard about the one in Northampton. “We typically just saw stuff sold at roadside stands then. It was all new to us.”
O’Leary spent much of his youth on his uncle Chet O’Leary’s dairy farm at the Miller Avenue site that is now home to White House Farm. But he was always more interested in growing things than dairy farming, he said.
When he was at UMass studying fisheries and wildlife, he read a book called “Getting Cash from your Garden” and decided to give it a try. At his first market, he and his future wife sold lettuce and peas.
“People loved it, but then we ran out of things to sell and we said, ‘How do we make the season last longer?’” he recalled. “So eventually we put up more greenhouses and grew plants to sell.”
Now, they sell flower, herb and vegetable plants, as well as garlic, tomatoes, their own popcorn and fresh-cut flowers.
In their 37 years at the market, the O’Learys have watched as their customers’ children grow up to be new customers towing their own children by the hand.
Their children, Hannah Mazzoli, 28, and Ian, 24, also grew up at the markets. Now, Hannah works full time on the farm and specializes in growing and arranging flowers.
“Now I stand in the background and my daughter is taking over more and more. She answers people’s questions now,” O’Leary said.
Like John O’Leary, Richard Tracy was a young man when he tried his hand at growing vegetables and joined the market in 1980. His father, Dick Tracy, had decided to quit dairy farming, so the fields were open for the 21-year-old college student to start growing vegetables to sell at the market, then in its sixth year.
“There were probably eight or nine farmers there when I started going,” he said. The market had organized according to the guidelines released by the Massachusetts Federation of Farmers Markets in 1978. Members elect officers, and have chosen Tracy as president every year since 1984. He hasn’t been able to get anyone else to take over since, he joked.
Eventually, the market became popular enough that there had to be a waiting list for vendors. It was first come, first served, but about 15 years ago, the market committee realized it worked out best for everyone to have a diverse array of producers, he said.
These days, free spots that open up at the market are offered to producers with something different to offer. This year, the only new vendor will be Mayval Farm in Westhampton, a dairy farm that is starting to produce cheese, Tracy said.
In the last few years, Tracy has been pleased to see a number of new farms run by young people have joined the market, including Crimson and Clover Farm in Northampton, Kitchen Garden in Sunderland, and Mycoterra Farm in Westhampton. “There’s definitely some new interest there,” he said.
Despite the growing competition from new farmers markets, farm stands and CSA farms, Tracy said he hasn’t noticed a significant drop in customers — or income — at the Northampton market. Many of them come weekly. In addition, he said, regularly “someone new comes up and says, ‘I never knew this was here.’”
Vendors at the Northampton Farmers Market can only sell what they have grown or produced themselves. For Intervale Farm, that ranges from plants and vegetables to yarn spun from their sheep.
“We’ve also resisted adding professional bakeries and entertainment” as some farmers markets have, Tracy said. “Space is limited anyway but we don’t want to be competing with the shops that pay rent downtown. If people want coffee, they can get some right up the sidewalk.”
The Northampton Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. starting this weekend through Nov. 8. A full list of vendors is available at www.northamptonfarmersmarket.com.
The red-tinged shoots of stinging nettles are forcing themselves through the mulch underneath my gooseberries. Although they require some care to pick, they are a welcome and nutritious addition to soups and stir fries this time of year, and can be dried for later use. Ramps and fiddleheads are soon to follow. Keep an alert eye out in local markets—or in the woods—and you may be lucky enough to enjoy some of these traditional spring treats.
Hilltown Families ran a recent story about foraging with kids here.
There’s not much need to worry about over-harvesting nettles, but ramps and fiddleheads are another story. Here is information about taking care when harvesting ramps, including recipes for ramp pesto and cornbread and fiddleheads which you can find here.
Irish Nettle Soup from Just Roots community farm in Greenfied.
The 2014 Haas Entrepreneur of the Year Award has gone to Craig White and Bob Lindner, founders and owners of Hillside Pizza, which is based in Deerfield.
They have helped groups raise over $315,000 since 2001, opened three restaurants, in Deerfield, Bernardston and Hadley, and also have a catering business.
“Hillside Pizza was nominated by members of the community and selected because they are an outstanding example of a sustainable business that gives back to the community,” said Amy Shapiro of the Franklin County Community Development Corp., which announced the award Thursday.
The public is being invited to a Celebrating Entrepreneur Event on May 15 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls.
Hillside Pizza began with White looking to sell pizzas as an environmentally friendly and health-conscious fundraising product. Lindner was a social worker with a green thumb and “green” ideals and was looking for a place to sell his organic produce.
In 2001, Hillside Pizza officially began as a fundraising operation at the Western Mass. Food Processing Center, a community kitchen run by the CDC in Greenfield.
As Hillside Pizza continues to grow and change the owners say, “We are proud of our efforts and accomplishments and so thankful to share our success with our restaurant patrons, fundraising partners, wholesale and fundraising customers, and catering clients.”
The Haas Entrepreneur of the Year award is named after Dick Haas, founder of Sugarhill Containers and owner of Hillside Plastics in Montague. Dick and Janet Haas believed in family, hard work and community and their values are reflected in their business, according to John Waite, executive director of the CDC, who announced the award at Thursday’s Franklin County Chamber of Commerce breakfast.
MassLive, April 24, 2014. By Kate Royals.
This story is the third of several focusing on locally raised meat and small farms in Western Massachusetts. Previous stories looked at the “farm to plate” path of meat in Western Massachusetts and the challenges restaurants face when sourcing local beef.
As long as more money is coming in to the bank than is leaving, Carolyn Wheeler, owner of a small beef cattle farm in Shelburne, is happy. Wheeler, who owns Wheel-View Farm with her husband John, says if you look at the hours they work, the couple isn’t “getting very much per hour.”
Small farmers in Massachusetts face several financial challenges that result in higher product prices and lower profit margins. The costs of animal feed, labor, farm maintenance, and processing all add up for small operations like Wheeler’s.
“The two across-the-board biggest expenses we have are feed and slaughter and processing,” said Pete Solis, owner of Mockingbird Farm in Easthampton, who buys organic feed for the cows, pigs and chickens on his farm. He just started purchasing feed in bulk, which has saved him about 20 to 30 percent in costs.
Because the cattle at Wheel-View are grass-fed during the summer and eat hay from the fields during the winter, Wheeler avoids the cost of buying corn or soy feed. However, the farm racks up costs and time associated with fencing and mowing, along with bailing and buying the plastic wrapping for the hay the animals eat during the winter months.
While some farms can avoid buying feed by raising animals only on grass and hay, one expense can’t be avoided: slaughtering and processing. Costs of processing at the nearest USDA-inspected slaughterhouse — Adams Farm in Athol, Mass. — run at a $65 processing fee per cow, plus anywhere from $.68 to $.83 per pound for packaging. For a typical cow with a hanging weight of 500 lbs., processing costs would range from $405 to $480.
Transportation costs to and from the slaughterhouse can put a dent in farmers’ budgets as well. Wheeler, who sends about six cows per month to Adams, minimizes some of these expenses by paying to use a nearby farm’s cattle trailer and freezer truck and transporting the two farms’ cattle together to the slaughterhouse.
Solis estimates that feed and slaughter costs account for about 85 to 90 percent of what it takes to raise one of his chickens and bring it to sale.
“The way the slaughterhouse is set up it doesn’t matter if you bring 50 chickens or 5,000 chickens — they’re charging you 5 dollars per bird to slaughter,” Solis said of the poultry slaughterhouse he uses in Westminster Station, Vt. The slaughterhouse is located about 70 miles from Easthampton, which results in higher transportation costs for Solis.
While larger meat processing companies like Tyson Foods, Inc., Hormel Foods, and Cargill drive down the cost of their meat through mass production and super-efficient work flow, small farms’ products remain expensive. These companies make up a large part of the market share of meat production in the country and contribute to meat’s relatively low prices.
Those in the industry say mass production of meat is beneficial to Americans, resulting in some of the most affordable food in the world.
“There are 315 million plus Americans and an estimated 95 percent make meat or poultry a regular part of their balanced diet. In order to satisfy that demand, we must produce large amounts of meat and make it affordable,” said Eric Mittenthal, Vice President of Public Affairs for the American Meat Institute, a national trade association that represents meat processing companies.
Mittenthal points out that larger companies are able to drive down costs because of their purchasing power and other efficiencies, like automation in food processing plants and housing systems of animals that are more inexpensive and require less labor, that small farms don’t have the resources to implement.
While larger grocery stores and butcher shops in the area do not typically offer much, if any, locally raised meat, some offer a small amount of certain cuts. Gary Golec, the manager of Serio’s Market in Northampton, buys top rounds that can be made into steaks or extra lean hamburger beef from River Rock Farm in Brimfield. He sells the beef for $9.99 per pound, a full $4.50 more per pound than the same cut made from Western beef.
Despite the higher price, he still makes less of a profit margin on the local meat, he said.
“I could get other (local) cuts, like strip steaks or rib eyes, but those would probably cost me almost $10 to $12 a pound. I would be retailing that for $18, $19, or even $21 a pound,” Golec said. “But my clientele — a lot of them would have a tough time taking out $21 a pound for steak.”
Arnold’s Meats, a butcher shop with stores in East Longmeadow and Chicopee, sells hamburger meat from Adams Farm, which also raises its own cattle. The store’s owner Larry Katz says it gets the local hamburger meat for $3.59 a pound. The hamburger meat he buys from from IBP Beef (owned by Tyson Foods, Inc., one of the world’s largest producers of meat and poultry) is priced at $2.95 a pound.
While high prices and a lack of supply contribute to the scarcity of locally raised meat, some are optimistic about its future. Converting some forests to pasture land, cooperative efforts among farmers to purchase necessities like feed in bulk, and experimenting with year-round forage crops for animals may help to drive down costs and scale up supply, says Margaret Christie, special projects director for CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture).
“There are some ways we could reduce costs over time that are not damaging to public health, the environment, and the animals themselves,” said Christie.
For now, however, dollars and cents often trump most consumers’ concerns about the environment and a desire to support local farmers.
Janet Ryan, a librarian in Amherst, said that while she’s “philosophically totally in favor of local meat,” her choice to buy non-local meat comes down to the price.
“If I felt it was something I could do, I would.”
CSA membership offers a concrete way to support local agriculture, know the people who grow your food, and add a seasonal rhythm to your table. On CISA’s CSA list, you’ll find a broad selection of vegetable CSAs, along with those offering meat, grain, fruit, milk, medicinals, and more—plus a handy guide to help you decide which one’s for you. Pioneer Valley CSAs offer choices in share size and content, pick-up location, and payment plans. Sign up now for good eating ahead!
The Recorder, April 16th.
Gauging from the reaction of farmers in western Massachusetts, the state Department of Agricultural Resources did more than step in manure when formulating its proposed plant nutrient application regulations. To put it mildly, the message from the people who raise our food is that what the state wants stinks.
And if the state wants to prove that Massachusetts farms are an invaluable resource for the commonwealth and not just quaint and rustic window dressing for tourists from the cities, then it should rethink its approach — radically.
We doubt that anyone will argue with what the agricultural department is trying to do: prevent nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous from finding their way into the state’s groundwater and waterways.
As state officials explain, “These statewide limitations on plant nutrient applications will enhance the ability of municipalities to maximize the credits provided in the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). The regulations further ensure that plant nutrients are applied to agricultural land in an effective manner to provide sufficient nutrients for plant growth while minimizing the impacts of the nutrients on water resources in order to protect human health and the environment.”
In ordinary English, the goal is to cut down on pollution.
But in its attempt to make this happen, the state is taking a broad brush approach that fails to take into account not just differences based upon such things as operations and locations, but just what their proposed requirements would actually mean.
Like paperwork.
Given the regulations that the state is now considering, farmers would be expected to provide detailed information on soil and manure tests, as well as putting together a nutrient management plan that would have to be updated every three years to mesh with University of Massachusetts Extension Service’s “best practices.”
As Tedd White, a West Hawley dairy farmer, said at a recent public hearing on the regulations in Springfield, “… Dairy farmers aren’t billion-dollar corporations. They can’t afford secretaries to handle the paperwork.”
Then there are the restrictions themselves, which have plenty of farmers asking just who state officials consulted in coming up with policy requirements.
Apparently it wasn’t the Extension Service — a logical choice for expert opinion — since the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation pointed out in its critique of the proposal, “… these regulations are not consistent with UMass published information, educational materials …” to the point where there is “outright conflict” between what the agricultural department is suggesting and what UMass has established for guidelines.
We’d like to think that state agriculture officials are smart enough to listen to these criticisms and flexible enough to make necessary changes. The deadline for comments has been extended for 60 days, which may be a chance for farmers and their supporters to help get the message across.
As proposed, these regulations are not a realistic fit. Written comments should be sent to Gregory C. Watson, Department of Agricultural Resources, 251 Causeway St., Suite 500 Boston, MA 02114.
Daily Hampshire Gazette, April 14th 2014, Rebecca Everett
HADLEY — Most farmers will tell you that cooperation is crucial to keeping a farm running like a well-oiled threshing machine.
But at Stone Soup Farm Cooperative in Hadley, cooperation is everything.
Four young farmers formed the worker-owned farm collective last fall and they have been working together to grow greenhouse vegetables and raise chickens since. Susanna Harro, 24, David DiLorenzo, 26, Amanda Barnett, 29, and Jarrett Man, 30, are owners as well as employees at the 81 Rocky Hill Road co-op.
Stone Soup Farm Cooperative is probably the first worker-owned farm co-op in the state, said Lynda Brushett, of the Shelburne Falls-based Cooperative Development Institute, who advises people in the agricultural, fisheries and food industries on starting cooperatives.
“It’s a beautiful model. You need more than one person to run a vegetable farm,” she said.
“We’re sharing the risk and the rewards,” DiLorenzo said while the four talked and munched on spinach leaves in one of their greenhouses Wednesday. “That’s just a good way to live.”
They decided to start the co-op for numerous reasons, including the lure of owning instead of just working on a farm and the dream of forming an equitable business with good friends.
After five years of working and managing area farms, Man bought the Rocky Hill Road farmland and started working it three years ago. He said the communal nature of farming is what drew him to it in the first place, and a co-op reinforces those values. He approached DiLorenzo and Barnett, who are married, and Harro last summer with the co-op idea.
“I thought it would be a more meaningful way of farming, and these are the people I felt best about farming with,” he said. “So I went to them and invited them to come research and implement a co-op together.” The group officially organized as a co-op in November and is selling community supported agriculture, or CSA, shares for the summer.
There have historically been many co-ops in the agricultural industry, mostly those made up of member farms that join forces to better market and sell their products — think Cabot Creamery or the Pioneer Valley Growers Association.
Brushett expects that more and more farmers, especially young ones, will be following the lead of Stone Soup and the few other worker-owned farms in Vermont, California and Quebec.
“Recently, young people that are wanting to farm, wanting to farm with each other, and wanting access to land are looking at the co-op model as a way to do that,” she said. “We’re definitely seeing that trend around our area.”
Brushett is helping them get started. She worked with lead author Faith Gilbert to create a free guide to cooperative farming. It was downloaded over 1,000 times in the first two weeks after it was released Feb. 26 on TheGreenhorns.net, a nonprofit that supports young farmers.
All kinds of co-ops are on the rise now, Brushett said. The Cooperative Development Institute fields several calls per week from people interested in starting market and cafe co-ops, child care co-ops, arts co-ops and others.
She credited the trend to a growing interest in socially responsible business ownership and workers’ urge to be “more than just a cog” in a company.
“It might be a consequence of the big recession,” she said. “People were losing jobs and deciding to be more in control of their lives and wanting to create more democratic businesses.”
And when people have a stake in the business, they often make better workers, Brushett said.
“They’re invested and everyone’s equal. You have colleagues you can trust to close the gate before they leave for the day,” she said.
That’s how it is at the Hadley farm cooperative, DiLorenzo said — and why the four friends chose the name Stone Soup Farm, which Man had used for his previous farm business.
In the folk story “Stone Soup,” a stranger with nothing comes to a town and pretends to make soup from just water and a stone, and convinces residents to contribute vegetables and other ingredients until it is a real soup.
“We’re each bringing a little piece to this,” DiLorenzo said.
Building a co-op
The foursome started working together to build their co-op last summer, while simultaneously working out the formal structure of the co-op. They started an LLC, established an official path to membership for future worker-owners, and made the co-op the owner of equipment.
DiLorenzo said the co-op model and Man sharing his farmland has made it possible for himself, Barnett and Harro to own a farm. “The three of us wouldn’t be owners without this, and it’s allowed us to pool our resources and talent to make this possible,” he said.
They come from different places and backgrounds, but all their stories share a common thread: none of them studied agriculture at college, but started toiling on farms after graduation and fell in love with working the land.
Man, from central Massachusetts, came to the area to attend Hampshire College. He worked on several farms before buying the Rocky Hill Road property and starting his own small farm.
Barnett, from Sharon, said she was always interested in agriculture because her mother grew up on a farm. She met DiLorenzo, a University of Massaschusetts Amherst graduate from New Hampshire, while the two worked at local farms. He apprenticed at the Kitchen Garden Farm in Sunderland.
Harro, from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., came here to apprentice at the Kitchen Garden. “I didn’t think I’d stick around long,” she said. “I definitely never thought I’d be owning a farm.”
Of course, owning a farm is not all upside. “We’re sharing the benefits of the work and also the stress of owning a business,” Barnett said.
They have divided up management responsibilities and had countless meetings to make decisions collectively. “At all times, you’re trying to strike a balance between the efficiency of one person just making a decision and having a group decision with input from everyone,” DiLorenzo said.
Each person manages a specific part of the farm. Barnett is in charge of the harvest and what gets included in the CSA shares, as well as some aspects of crop production such as irrigation. DiLorenzo does the bookkeeping, office work, and creates daily and weekly plans to make sure production is on track. Harro oversees the greenhouse production and seeding, and Man takes care of the chickens, maintains the equipment and oversees the apprentices.
The four worker-owners, who all live in Hadley, receive equal monthly stipends as pay and if there are any profits at the end of the year, they will get dividends. They declined to say how much their stipends are.
Over the winter and spring, they produced vegetables for 170 CSA shares, plus eggs for people who want them. The cold spring has delayed planting about two weeks, Man said, but they are now plowing the 15 acres that they farm around Hadley and starting plants in their greenhouses in preparation for their summer CSA. They offer CSAs in Hadley, Amherst, Northampton and Boston, but do not have any plans to sell at farmers markets. They aim to sell between 300 and 400 CSA shares for the summer season.
“We go well beyond what’s required to be certified organic,” DiLorenzo said. They try to avoid spraying at all, he said, even organic sprays.
The farm usually has three paid apprentices, Man said, and they make up a big part of the farm’s work force and identity. While they imagine future apprentices could become member-owners as well, Man said the current scale of the farm cannot support more owners now.
“We would have to have more land and sell more shares,” he said. “But we would be happy to have more owners.”
For more information, visit www.stonesoupfarmcoop.com.