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I teach sustainable food and farming at the University of Massachusetts and try to contribute to my local community without causing too much harm....
Food Policy and Advocacy

Agriculture’s Star Rises in Academia

Published on GazetteNET (http://www.gazettenet.com)

OPINION: Georgana M. Foster: Ag’s star rises in academia

When I read of the plan of Amherst College to follow Hampshire College in having a farm to grow veggies for the dining hall, and for the University of Massachusetts to activate its farm, I was fascinated.

When we arrived on the UMass campus 55 years ago, it was not far from the days of being Mass Aggie, a school which the college at the south end of town thought of as an Continue reading Agriculture’s Star Rises in Academia →

Farming

NYT – Celebrate the Farmer

August 21, 2012, 8:30 pm

Celebrate the Farmer!

By MARK BITTMAN

I was at a farm dinner in Maine the other night, a long table of 60 people eating corn, chicken, salad, a spectacular herb sorbet and other goodies. When one of the hosts arose to ask someone to describe the first course on the table – huge marrow bones from the farm’s cattle- she introduced not the chef but the farmers. Similarly, at a fund-raiser on Cape Cod a week or so earlier, the talk was all about the provenance of the produce and meat rather than the cooking technique. The most popular guy was the oyster grower.

This is a fine trend. With all due respect to my chef friends (many of whom will agree with this statement), most cooking is dead-easy and pretty quick: it takes 20 minutes to roast a marrow bone, and an ambitious fifth-grader can get it right on the first try. A more complicated dish, like the seared corn with chorizo that was served a bit later, might consume an hour and require a bit of skill.

But raising and butchering the cows and pigs that produced the marrow bones and meat for the chorizo? Growing the corn? These are tasks that take weeks, if not months, of daily activity and maintenance. Like anything else, you can get good at it, but the challenges that nature (ask the corn farmers of Kansas) and the market (ask Tyson Foods, whose profits just fell 61 percent) throw at you are never even close to being under control in the same way that a cook controls the kitchen.

What a cook doesn’t control is ingredients, and that’s where the debt to farmers comes in. In the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve seen the best New York chefs scouring the Greenmarket weekly and setting up exclusive relationships with farmers throughout the Northeast; that kind of behavior is nationwide. And even before that, Alice Waters hired people full-time to make sure the ingredients her people cooked with were the best.

Since late summer brings more real food to more people than other times, right now the rest of us can eat as well as if we had our own chef. Whether it’s a salad of raw tomatoes, peaches and basil, a dish of roasted eggplant with nothing more than soy sauce, a real chicken smeared with a paste of fresh herbs, it’s all right out there. In much of the country, even some conventional supermarkets purchase from nearby farms. On my recent trip through New England, I saw a bin of corn being filled from burlap sacks by a guy (a farmer, I presume) who’d driven up in a pickup; there was a similar scene involving cucumbers. Big deal, but it shows it can be done.

The cry will ring out: Not everyone can afford fresh fruits and vegetables, especially from farm stands! And, sadly, it’s true. But this is precisely why we need to support a herd of actions that will make it possible for more people to have access to real food:

  • We need to reduce unemployment and increase the minimum wage (including that for farm and restaurant workers). This (obviously) goes beyond the realm of food, but it’s key to improving the quality of life for many if not most Americans. (Here’s a strong argument for that.)
  • We need to not cut but raise the amount of support we give to recipients of food stamps. A good example is New York City’s Health Bucks program, where food stamps are worth more at farmers’ markets (which don’t, as a rule, sell sugar-sweetened beverages!).
  • We need not only to attack the nonsensical and wasteful system that pays for corn and soybeans to be grown to create junk food and ethanol, but to support local and national legislation that encourages the birth of new small-and-medium farms. We need to encourage both new and established farms to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables, to raise animals in sensible ways and, using a combination of modern and time-tested techniques, treat those animals well and use their products sensibly.

In short, we need more real farmers, not businessmen riding on half-million-dollar combines. And if you haven’t seen a real farmer, go visit a one- or two-acre intensive garden; it’s a mind-blowing thing, how much can be grown in a relatively small space. Then imagine thousands of 10-, 20- and 100-acre farms planted similarly: the vegetables sold regionally, the pigs fed from scraps, the compost fertilizing the soil, the cattle at pasture, the milk making cheese .

The naysayers will yell, “this mode of farming will not produce enough corn and soy to feed our junk food and cheeseburger habit,” and that’s exactly the point. It would produce enough food so that we can all eat well. It’d produce enough food so we can slow the hysteria about our inability to feed the expected 9 billion earthlings. After all, we’re not doing such a great job of feeding the current 7 billion. Why? Largely because too many resources go into producing junk food and animal products.

The Northeast, where everything but dairy farming was left for dead a decade ago, and where many dairy farmers hold on for dear life, was once its own breadbasket; sometimes it feels as if it can become that again. Local food grown by local farmers is a wonderful thing; more food grown by farmers who sell regionally brings a level of practicality to the system. Boats and trains from all over the Northeast once supplied New York City (obviously incapable of producing much in the way of truly “local” food, unless you envision re-converting Westchester, Nassau, Bergen and Fairfield counties to farmland) with food that was picked during the day, shipped at night, and sold the next day. By comparison, the parsley sitting in your supermarket right now is at least a week old and probably older, barring some incredible good fortune.

Real farmers, like gardeners, take pride in every tomato. And while agribusiness continues to try to find a way to produce a decent-tasting tomato (there’s a new scheme now; it won’t work), anyone who wants to can buy tomatoes and other fantastic produce until Thanksgiving, and – in much of the country and without much effort – well into the early winter. The thrill of seasonality – not only real tomatoes but firm eggplants and cucumbers with super flavor and minimal seeds, arugula that demonstrates why it was once called rocket, peaches with loads of fuzz and so on – reminds me why I don’t often buy those things out of season.

But to get these beautiful veggies, we need real farmers who grow real food, and the will to reform a broken food system. And for that, we need not only to celebrate farmers, but also to advocate for them.

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Food Policy and Advocacy

Helping Students Eat Healthy; an editorial

UMass Graduate, Emily French, and Stockbridge School of Agriculture Instructor, Catherine Sands, recently published this editorial in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

WILLIAMSBURG – There’s a lot of talk about school food these days, thanks in part to Michele Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign, and to the people chipping away at a top-heavy system that doesn’t stress fresh healthy food and the educational opportunities that abound when students learn how their food is grown and how to find it close to home.

The Farm to School movement is growing faster than we can count. Steps to provide healthy, fresh food at school meals and to build purchasing relationships between farms and institutions abound.

Fertile Ground, a grassroots farm to school initiative, recently produced a School Food and Community Forum at the Jackson Street and Williamsburg elementary schools. Funding from Cooley Dickinson Hospital and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts provided us with the means to facilitate two afternoons of conversation and resource sharing among teachers, food service staff, school administrators, nurses and families. Over 80 people from 20 schools attended.

These conversations now ripple out into our communities.

Here’s some of what we heard: We know that farm-to-school programs are in over 10,000 schools in all 50 states. In Massachusetts alone, over 300 public school districts, private schools and colleges are directly purchasing locally grown food from more than 110 farms.

School gardens enhance classroom learning and cafeteria choices with the hands-on experience that comes from growing our own food. We are making curriculum connections in math, science, language arts, history and economics – to teach the story of what we eat and why.

In Williamsburg, a collaboration with the local Grange brings town elders into the classroom to make jam. Students visit a neighboring sugar shack. These experiences teach children about food as a system – the whole path from farm to fork, as author Michael Pollan puts it. Snacking on kale, tomatoes, sorrel and raspberries in their school garden helps expand their palettes.

At the two forum events, we addressed new USDA regulations requiring schools to serve more fresh produce, whole grains and other healthy foods. We heard that public school food service departments are in the process of implementing new USDA food regulations. These include hefty servings of leafy greens and orange/red vegetables like squash, carrots, and beets. This is a great opportunity for our region, as our farms grow an abundance of these kinds of vegetables.

Food service directors are trying all sorts of strategies. They are buying from the local apple orchard, collaborating on purchasing among school districts, entering into non-binding agreements with local farms for produce, processing and storing food during the summer and much more.

The ingenuity we’re seeing among food service staff is inspiring.

As a member of Farm to Institution in New England (FINE), the Mass. Farm to School Project is participating in a regional project that may result in New England dairy and beef cattle being processed into local ground beef for institutional markets.

We heard a food service director note that people unfairly blame that sector for the child obesity crisis.

Talk shifted to the topic of equipment needs – for instance, not having enough refrigeration space for fresh produce, inadequate stoves and a lack of steamers. We discussed a Franklin County food processing center’s flash-freezing pilot program, an effort to provide affordable, locally grown produce to schools and institutions during the agricultural off-season, thereby extending the season for local food in schools.

One Williamsburg teacher described how her students will taste anything in the school garden: raw garlic, cucumber, sorrel and arugula, collards and kale, broccoli, you name it. They invent and prepare new recipes from the produce they have grown for an annual harvest feast. But they hesitate to taste new recipes (often using the same ingredients) in the lunchroom.

How do we change this?

In response, a parent, asked the food service director whether she would share the recipe with parents, either by sending home recipe cards or publishing recipes in the school newsletter.

It takes multiple tasting of a new food for our kids to eat it, so encouraging parents to prepare the same new healthy dishes at home might make a difference in whether the kids will eat it at school.

Together they are building a plan.

Catherine Sands directs Fertile Ground, a grassroots farm-to-school initiative and teaches Community Food Systems and Food Justice and Policy at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Emily French is the Farm to Cafeteria Director for the Mass. Farm to School Project.

Farming

Willie Crosby – Intern at Simple Gifts Farm

This may come as a surprise, but when Willie Crosby was in high school, he had a pretty clear idea that he wanted to work as a greenskeeper at a golf course. Growing up in Boxborough, Massachusetts, he played golf with his family, and worked mowing lawns every summer. The neat lines and fresh smell of a just-mowed lawn were really pleasing to him. So, it actually was no surprise that he enrolled at University of Massachusetts as a Turfgrass major and spent two summers tending the turf at a golf course.
However, as he continued his studies and work, he became less sure about his path. Keeping up turf takes a huge effort and heavy inputs, and Willie wanted to put that effort into work that he felt had a deeper value. At the same time, he began to keep a small garden, and became friends with some of the Sustainable Food and Farming students studying in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture Program. Growing food pulled him in. Soon he was involved in the UMass Student Farm, a two-acre student-run farm that offers a fall CSA. He also spent some time volunteering at Simple Gifts Farm, and joined the crew as an apprentice this season.
Willie loves digging in the soil and appreciating the amazing food that comes from the good earth. Eating the produce is his very favorite part of working at the farm – especially all the melons right now. He also likes working with the animals. In fact, he and a friend started their own small flock of laying hens and ducks, and he has enjoyed raising them up from little chicks. Although some farm tasks are difficult – moving wet Remay (floating row cover fabric that protects crops from frost and insects) comes to mind – he mindfully takes the challenges in stride.

In any spare time, you can often find Willie outdoors. Swimming is a favorite way to relax and burn off any extra energy, and he also likes experimenting with growing culinary mushrooms and gathering herbs. When I asked Willie if he still had secret plans for a manicured lawn in his future, he exclaimed, “No way!” – he envisions an overgrown meadow, forests and gardens. Growing and sharing food will definitely be part of his future, although not necessarily his profession. He plans to study to become a yoga teacher next year at Karuna Yoga in Northampton. We’re glad he’ll still be in the neighborhood, and greatly appreciate his calm, positive presence on the crew.

Reprinted from the Simple Gifts Farm Newsletter – August 7, 2012

Business

National Resource Helps More Americans Connect with Local Farmers

USDA Directory Records More Than 7,800 Farmers Markets
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3, 2012 – Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan today announced a 9.6 percent increase in National Farmers Market Directory listings as the kickoff to National Farmer’s Market Week. The U.S. Department of Agriculture‘s directory, a database published online at farmersmarkets.usda.gov, identifies 7,864 farmers markets operating throughout the United States. The information collected in the directory is self-reported data provided voluntarily by farmers market managers through an annual outreach effort. Last year, USDA’s directory listed 7,175 markets.

“Farmers markets are a critical ingredient to our nation’s food system,” said Merrigan. “These outlets provide benefits not only to the farmers looking for important income opportunities, but also to the communities looking for fresh, healthy foods. The directory is an online tool that helps connect farmers and consumers, communities and businesses around the country.”

The top states, in terms of the number of markets reported in the directory, include California (827 markets), New York (647 markets), Massachusetts (313 markets), Michigan (311 markets), Wisconsin (298 markets), Illinois (292 markets), Ohio (264 markets), Pennsylvania (254 markets), Virginia and Iowa (tied with 227 markets) and North Carolina (202 markets). Together they account for nearly half (49 percent) of the farmers markets listed in the 2012 directory.

Geographic regions like the mid-Atlantic (Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia), the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont), and the Southeast (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee) saw large increases in their listings, reporting, 15.8, 14.4 and 13.1 percent more markets, respectively.

USDA has taken several steps to help small and mid-sized farmers as part of the department’s commitment to support local and regional food systems, and increase consumer access to fresh, healthy food in communities across the country. For example,

  • USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), is outfitting more farmers markets with the ability to accept SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps), announcing $4 million dollars in available funding to equip farmers’ markets with wireless point-of-sale equipment. Currently, over 2,500 farmers markets are using Electronic Benefit Transfer technology.
  • USDA recently released the 2.0 version of its KYF Compass, a digital guide to USDA resources related to local and regional food systems. The updated version includes new data sets to help consumers locate local food resources, such as farmers markets, and plot them on an interactive map.

Many markets will host fun activities to celebrate National Farmers Market Week including pie contests, festivals, cooking demonstrations, events for kids, raffle drawings and giveaways. USDA officials will visit markets around the country between Aug. 5 and Aug. 11, to honor growers and commemorate National Farmers Market Week.

The USDA National Farmers Market Directory is available at farmersmarkets.usda.gov. Users can search for markets based on location, available products, and types of payment accepted, including participation in federal nutrition programs. Directory features allow users to locate markets based on proximity to zip code, mapping directions and links to active farmers market websites. Customized datasets can also be created and exported for use by researchers and software application designers.

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Food Policy and Advocacy

New Agricultural Learning Center to Resurrect Farming at UMass

BEN STORROW Staff Writer  

July 24, 2012

AMHERST – In an effort to give its agriculture students practical experience, the University of Massachusetts announced Monday it is moving forward with plans to open a new Agriculture Learning Center at the former Wysocki Farm in 2014. In a nod to the university’s past and future, school officials said the new center would fulfill UMass’ founding mission as an agricultural land grant college and reflects the growing nationwide interest in agriculture. Approximately 200 students will grow every type of crop produced in Massachusetts, including cranberries, on the 40-acre property, they said.

The project involves moving two buildings to the North Pleasant Street farm – an 1894 horse barn and the Blaisdell House, formerly the original farm manager’s residence. No new construction is planned. Officials pegged the cost of moving the barn and converting it into classroom and office space at $5 million, while costs for moving and renovating the Blaisdell house are still being developed, they said.

Stephen Herbert, director of the Center for Agriculture, said UMass students today graduate with a good academic understanding of agriculture, but with little actual farming experience. “Looking isn’t the same as doing,” Herbert said, noting that the new center will provide students with an opportunity for hands-on learning. The Stockbridge School, the university’s long-standing school of agriculture, is geared toward agricultural research and thus does not provide the same opportunities as those to be offered at the new center, he said.

The barn, among the last remaining agricultural structures on campus, and the Blaisdell House now sit next to the physical plant on Commonwealth Avenue. Officials said the two buildings will be sited in the northwestern section of the Wysocki Farm along North Pleasant Street. Dennis Swinford, director of campus planning, said the project fulfilled several different needs for the university.

“This is the last barn on our campus,” Swinford said. Moving it up to the 40 acres on Wysocki Farm “saves the barn, starts the agricultural learning center and uses a site near the middle of campus,” he said. Zoning out UMass does not require planning or zoning approval for the project because the school is maintaining the property’s agricultural use, Swinford said.

The plan will require the approval of the Conservation Commission to make sure it is compliant with wetland regulations, he said. North Amherst residents who enjoy walking on the property will continue to be able to do so, he said. All access to the property will be from North Pleasant Street, with a small 20-car parking lot situated next to the homestead and barn and a second access point next to an existing UMass parking lot on the property’s southwestern corner.

Swinford said the introduction of buildings to the Wysocki property, which is in use now as a hay field, should not alter neighbors’ views. Furthermore, there should be no discernible increase in smell or noise related to the farm operations, as livestock will be situated along the property’s southern edge next to a parcel of UMass-owned forest.

A public meeting to present the project to neighbors will be held at 6:30 tonight at the UMass police station. The new center’s operating costs will be paid out of the university budget, said UMass spokesman Edward Blaguszewski, while private fundraising is expected to cover the cost of renovations to both buildings, he said. Money to move the barn has already been secured in the form of a $500,000 pledge from the Massachusetts Farm Bureau, he said. No firm timeline has been set for moving either building, UMass officials said.

Herbert, who grew up on a dairy farm in New Zealand, said he has long thought about ways to make the university’s agricultural course offerings more hands-on. “I said a hay field so close to campus is not the best use of the field,” he said, noting that the plans for the new center have been in the works for around a year.

The center would serve as a recruiting tool for future students and a venue to hold public workshops on agriculture, he said. “I want it to be a showcase learning center,” Herbert said. “I want people to be proud of it.” The vast majority of the 40 acres will be divided among different agricultural uses, Herbert said. There will be pasture space for livestock, an orchard, a small golf green for turf management, as well as areas dedicated to permaculture, vegetable production and growing agronomic crops like wheat and barley.

“This will expose student to many different types of farming,” Herbert said. Food grown at the site will be sold, but where it is marketed will be determined by students and teachers, Herbert said. “Agriculture has become more important on campus,” Herbert said, noting that interest in agriculture courses has increased substantially in recent years. “This will be a great thing for students.”

The center’s projected opening date is 2014. But Herbert said he is hopeful that some aspects of the new center will be up and running by next year to coincide with the university’s 150th anniversary. That would be a fitting tribute to a school whose founding mission was, in part, to enhance agriculture in Massachusetts, he said. “It would be nice, from an agricultural point of view, to have the center started by next year to help celebrate that event,” Herbert said.

Copyright 2012, Daily Hampshire Gazette, All Rights Reserved.

For more information, see: UMass Agricultural Learning Center

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For information on the Sustainable Food and Farming Program in the UMass Stockbridge School of Agriculture, see:

  1. 15 credit Certificate Program
  2. Bachelor of Sciences Program
  3. What are our graduates doing now?
  4. Editorial: Return of Mass Aggie

The B.S. degree is quite flexible and you can focus on sustainable farming, permaculture, medicinal herbs, policy and advocacy, urban agriculture, farm-based education, etc.   For details, contact Professor John M. Gerber, Program Coordinator.

Its a good time to be an aggie!

Food Policy and Advocacy

Editorial: Farming’s key place in higher education

FROM: Amherst Bulletin – August 2, 2012

Two Amherst campuses are making major commitments to broaden student awareness of how food is produced. We applaud their timely support for agricultural education and for responding to the community’s interest in localizing the food supply.

The University of Massachusetts expects to open a new Agricultural Learning Center on North Pleasant Street in 2014. This will coincide with the university’s 150th anniversary and remind everyone of its founding as a farming-based institution once known as Mass Aggie.

Meanwhile, Amherst College is inviting proposals for starting and operating a campus farm to provide fresh produce for the dining hall and to connect students and faculty with local food and sustainable agriculture.

There has been a tenfold increase in the past seven years in the number of UMass students majoring in sustainable food and farming. Prof. John Gerber’s class on sustainable living, which drew 35 students seven years ago, now enrolls 300 and would have more if the classroom were bigger.

This increasing desire by students to learn about food may be motivated by concern over pesticides used in industrial agriculture, worry over climate change or interest in local food. Students tend to find that working on farms can give meaning and purpose to their lives, as well as create products that are useful to people. Graduates of Gerber’s program are managing farms, teaching and marketing food products.

The new center will enable UMass students to easily apply what they’ve learned in a classroom to the cultivation of crops within walking distance of their dormitories. The university has also shown support for agricultural education by recently restructuring the Stockbridge School so that it now offers four-year and graduate programs and incorporates fields such as plant and soil science, entomology and animal programs.

The new Agriculture Learning Center will harken back to Levi Stockbridge’s pioneering work 140 years ago in combining classroom lectures with practical agriculture experience at a time when small farms dotted the landscape in Massachusetts and helped define the social and economic order.

Elsewhere in town, Hampshire College has had a farm center for many years and now Amherst College is planning one on four acres near the campus. Other small colleges in New England, such as Bowdoin, Middlebury and Colby, have done the same.

Amherst plans not just to grow fresh food for students to consume, but to create a partnership among the farm’s operator, students, faculty and staff. It wants to provide them with an opportunity to interact not only with books but with soil.

Amherst College owns hundreds of acres of open farmland. Some of these fields are leased to farmers for crops like hay, but none is used for sustainable agriculture. The college plans to lease four acres, and possibly up to seven more, to the farmer who is selected and will guarantee the purchase of produce for its dining hall. The goal is that by the third year of operation, the farm will be financially self-sustaining. The college will even provide the farmer with a tractor.

Amherst’s town seal displays both a book and a plow. Its campuses are putting that emblem into practice by elevating agriculture to the central role it plays in all our lives.

Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2011 All rights reserved

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For information on the Sustainable Food and Farming Program in the UMass Stockbridge School of Agriculture, see:

  1. 15 credit Certificate Program
  2. Bachelor of Sciences Program
  3. What are our graduates doing now?
  4. Introducing the new Ag Learning Center

The B.S. degree is quite flexible and you can focus on sustainable farming, permaculture, medicinal herbs, policy and advocacy, urban agriculture, farm-based education, etc.   For details, contact Professor John M. Gerber, Program Coordinator.

Its a good time to be an aggie!

Food Policy and Advocacy

Amherst to organize mass harvesting to feed the hungry

Published: Monday, July 30, 2012, 10:57 PM

AMHERST – A group of people interested in growing more food in town is looking for some volunteers to help plan and implement a community-wide gleaning event this harvest to help feed the hungry here.

On Tuesday, members will be holding a planning meeting at 7 p.m. in the Bangs Community Center.

This gleaning – which is a gathering of crops that would be left in the field – is part of a larger resident-led initiative to grow more local food, said Stephanie Ciccarello, the town’s sustainability coordinator.

The town is offering help by providing meeting space “and getting information out there to get people more connected with the food they eat.”

This all started with a meeting that involved Ciccarello, W. David Ziomek, director of conservation and development, and John Gerber, a University of Massachusetts professor involved in a variety of local food endeavors.

The gleaning initiative is called Feed our Neighbors and the plan is to stage a gleaning at the end of the harvest at a few town farms to collect what’s not harvested by farmers. Then the food would be given to the Survival Center and other groups and families, she said.

“The reality is there are people that need food. This is a way to have the community get it out to them,” Ciccarello said.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2010, more than 34 million tons of food waste was generated, more than any other material category but paper.

The gleaning, though, “It’s a part of something bigger.” Called Growing Food in Community, the group is “looking beyond the community garden (model) to grow more food in town,” Ciccarello said.

She said there are just two community gardens and they have accessibility and water issues.

The group wants to create a website where they can pair people looking to farm or garden with people who might have land or need help farming or gardening. They would be able to use the website to find a match. The helper would be able to keep some of what is grown and the farmer would be able to cut down on waste.

For more information, contact Ciccarello at (413) 259-3149 or by email at ciccarellos@amherstma.gov.

Farming

Alissa Martin’s Small Farm stand taking root in Deerfield

By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Created 07/24/2012 – 5:00am

DEERFIELD – On a half-acre plot at 477 Greenfield Road, Alissa Martin has opened her first farm stand, called, appropriately enough, The Small Farm. Yet despite its name and size, The Small Farm grows and sells over 80 varieties of vegetables.

The vegetable farm springs from unexpected roots.

Martin had studied documentary film production at Emerson College in Boston when she landed her dream job working for the public broadcasting station WGBH in Boston.

But as she began her new job, she found herself wishing she could work outside. In 2008, Martin volunteered at a friend’s farm in Dover in exchange for vegetables. She fell in love.

Finding her new calling in the farming industry, Martin enrolled in the University of Massachusetts Amherst to receive her second bachelor’s degree in sustainable food and farming.

After reading about maple sugaring, Martin visited the Williams Farm Sugarhouse on Routes 5 and 10, where she met her fiancé, Chip Williams.

Martin then began growing vegetables in preparation for their September wedding.

“I worked on farms for the past four summers,” Martin said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of buying vegetables when that’s what I love to do. I got carried away and Chip encouraged me to have this little stand.”

Martin set up her stand beside the former Old Deerfield Landscaping and Garden Center in what used to be a bird seed shed.

Wanting to reflect simplicity, she chose the name The Small Farm, and feels it fit perfectly.

“Things keep falling into place,” Martin said.

It has been one month since Martin began her farming venture, but the Small Farm is already attracting new and repeat customers.

“Each week it’s getting better and better. It’s amazing,” Martin said. “Being out here, people will come by and chat. I’ve met a ton of new people in Deerfield.”

Part of the appeal, Martin said, is she grows the produce right beside the farm stand. If a customer wants an herb, berry or flower not yet on the stand, Martin can walk over and pick it.

The Small Farm grows many different types of vegetables, including Walla Walla sweet onions, Derby Day cabbage, Bright Lights Swiss chard, Red Ace beets and Super Red 80 cabbage. The farm offers three varieties of onions, two of carrots, three types of kale, five of peppers, 18 kinds of heirloom tomatoes and much more.

Martin follows organic practices, but the farm is not certified organic. Whether she will apply for the certification in the future, she said, depends on how this season fares.

“I’ll see how this summer goes. I’m taking it day by day,” Martin said.

The Small Farm is open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 2 to 6 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/thesmallfarm [1].

Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2011 All rights reserved

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While at UMass, Alissa studied sustainable farming by taking the Student Farming Enterprise  class, which plans, plants, grows and sells organic vegetables.  Students can earn up to 10 college credit and gain summer employment in this innovative course.

See Sustainable Food and Farming for more information on the UMass major.

Local Food

Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local

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Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

Radishes are among the many vegetables grown at Alm Hill gardens near Everson, Wash., where produce is sold locally.

By
Published: July 1, 2012

SEATTLE — The cultivated rusticity of a farmers’ market, where dirt-dusted beets are status symbols and earnest entrepreneurs preside over chunks of cheese, is a part of weekend life in cities across the nation as the high days of the summer harvest approach.

Customers strolled through the Ballard Farmer’s Market in Seattle.

But beyond the familiar mantras about nutrition or reduced fossil fuel use, the movement toward local food is creating a vibrant new economic laboratory for American agriculture. The result, with its growing army of small-scale local farmers, is as much about dollars as dinner: a reworking of old models about how food gets sold and farms get financed, and who gets dirt under their fingernails doing the work.

“The future is local,” said Narendra Varma, 43, a former manager at Microsoft who invested $2 million of his own money last year in a 58-acre project of small plots and new-farmer training near Portland, Ore. The first four farmers arrived this spring alongside Mr. Varma and his family, aiming to create an economy of scale — tiny players banded in collective organic clout. He had to interrupt a telephone interview to move some goats.

Economists and agriculture experts say the “slow money” movement that inspired Mr. Varma, a way of channeling money into small-scale and organic food operations, along with the aging of the farmer population and steep barriers for young farmers who cannot Continue reading Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local →