Farms look to feed Valley year-round
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WHATELY - Area residents longing to stock pantries with local fruits and vegetables over the winter need yearn no longer. A growing number of area farms are expanding their operations to provide locally produced food to customers year-round.
And, the demand for local produce may prove a bulwark against a deteriorating economy, with some area farms looking to add to their full-time staffs.
"I'm actually hiring people and growing in a time when the news is not all that good," said Dave Jackson of Enterprise Farm in Whately.
Jackson is one of a number of Valley producers extending their operations into winter months, hoping to answer the call for food grown in the region.
In Enterprise Farm's case, customer requests sparked the farm to extend its Community Supported Agriculture program - which provides weekly deliveries of food for a monthly fee - into what Jackson called a year-round "farm-share program."
The program is designed to provide customers with fresh produce without any off season, extending its East Coast reach to offer fruits and vegetables grown from Whately to Prince Edward Island to Florida.
"We were trying to build on the momentum of the melancholy our customers were having," Jackson said, noting that many costumers became discouraged when the outside growing season ended and were looking for ways to buy local in the winter months. He said the farm's CSA program had run for seven months out of the year. The new farm-share program is designed to fill that five-month gap.
Growing trend
Margaret Christie, special projects manager at Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture in South Deerfield, said operations like Enterprise Farm were emblematic of a wider trend throughout the region.
"We see more and more people really wanting to extend the local eating they enjoy in the summer throughout the rest of the year," Christie said.
Consequently, more and more farms are attempting to provide their customers with year-round produce, she noted.
Christie pointed to Riverland Farm in Sunderland as an example of producers providing late fall CSA shares to their customers and Leaping Frog Farm in Shelburne Falls as an instance where CSA installments were being delivered to customers throughout the winter.
Events like Greenfield's annual winter market, Winter Fare, are emblematic of the demand for local food during the winter, Christie said. She said that many of the market's 30 vendors reported that the February event was their best ever-single market day.
Ryan Violand of Red Fire Farm in Granby was one such farmer.
"We had a phenomenal amount of sales," Violand said of Winter Fare. "We sold more at Winter Fare than on any other single market day before."
Such a feat is impressive, Violand said, as his farm frequents large farmers markets like Springfield's during the summer months.
That sort of demand has Violand thinking about providing a winter CSA next year in Granby. "We're trying to refine our growing systems so that we can reliably provide food during the winter months," Violand said, noting that his farm built several greenhouses last fall to supplement Red Fire's winter operations, which now produce a variety of salad greens for wholesale.
Whately venture
At Enterprise Farm in Whately, Jackson is relying not only on his greenhouses, but also on small producers in Florida and North Carolina to provide crops like oranges and potatoes.
Jackson referred to the collective of small farms growing organic produce as a "regional foodshed." Shipping food up the East Coast can reduce a typical food shopper's carbon footprint, Jackson argues, as produce is not forced to travel across the country from California and is instead shipped shorter distances.
"By joining with us you get to vote with your dollar and effect change in the food distribution system," Jackson said, "and you can get truly fresh produce."
That produce is fresher than one might find on a supermarket shelf, Jackson said. He said that the U.S. Department of Agriculture allows food picked within 12 days to be labeled "fresh."
"If they pick on Friday or Saturday," Jackson said of the other farmers in the foodshed, "you can pick up their food on Tuesday or Wednesday or at the Thursday market."
A small farm-share box at the Whately farm includes one pound of Carolina ruby sweet potatoes grown in North Carolina, five oranges grown in Florida, one head of cabbage and one pound of onions and carrots, among other items, all grown in Massachusetts, for $27.50 a week. A large box containing twice as much food costs $37.50 a week. The weekly payments are distributed among the participating farms, Jackson said.
"The people who invest in our farm-share program invest in the farm being able to do things that it wasn't able to do before," Jackson said.
The increasing demand for local food has enabled the Enterprise Farm to operate year-round and employ five full-time employees.
The farm-share program has 350 customers, Jackson estimated. He noted that nearly 70 clients live in the Valley. The remaining clients live in the Boston area and receive weekly food installments from the farm.
The farm makes deliveries to the Boston area Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Local selling
The long trips to Boston have not diminished the farm's loyalty to its Valley customers, however. Enterprise Farm sells its food in Northampton in season (early May through mid-November) at the Tuesday and Saturday farmers markets.
On Tuesdays, individuals and families participating in the farm-share program can pick up their boxes from 2 to 6 p.m. at the farm in Whately, while the public can stop by for the Thursday Winter Market, which is held from 1 to 6 p.m.
Jackson told the story of one farm-share customer who was sharing her monthly bill with a friend, but first had to convince the friend that the program she was supporting did nothing to take away from local agriculture.
"She said that she bought her salad greens from a local farm at the Northampton Farmers Market and that she didn't want to buy salad greens from anyone else. Her friend replied: ¿It's the same farm,'" Jackson recalled with a laugh.
It's that type of customer loyalty that Jackson is counting on to help buoy his family farm through the current economic climate. He believes local produce can be a spark for the economy at large.
He noted that Boston-area groceries receiving the farm's food were reporting their busiest days to be on Enterprise Farm delivery days. Business had been slow in the past.
Anyone interested joining Enterprise Farm's farm-share program can visit its Web site at www.enterpriseproduce.com or stop by the farmstead at 72 River Road in Whately.
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