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Date: 3/29/2021
MONTAGUE/GRANBY – Despite a more than year-long global pandemic, Red Fire Farm has continued their work planting and growing crops to be able to provide the community with food.
Ryan Voiland, who owns the farm with his wife Sarah, said they were “successfully able to keep going last year” despite restrictions surrounding COVID-19 and drought conditions. He said immediate changes to the way the farm in Montague and the way the store in Granby operated were made including social distancing, changes to workspaces and cleaning procedures.
In addition to changing the way work is structured, Voiland said another way they have been working to reduce the risk of virus transmission is by working to get their staff vaccinated. “Everyone that works for the farm are essential workers and almost everyone has at least started the vaccination process. Everyone has had at least one, some of us are getting our second,” he said. This, Voiland said, had given them “a little more confidence” as the “risk goes down somewhat once the rest of the farm is vaccinated.”
Another change the farm was forced to make in light of the pandemic last year was transitioning from a farmer’s market style pickup of their community supported agriculture (CSA) shares to a boxed pickup. Voiland said this was due to “concerns about possible transmission and to get them in and out quickly.” While he said “people were understanding” they preferred to give people more options.
“We would like to give people more choices. Conditions allowing, if they loosen restrictions we plan to go back to that,” he said.
Despite having to transition to boxed pickups, Voiland said they saw an increase in the purchase of CSA shares. “Because of the pandemic and how people started thinking about food, they put more value on local farms and local food. I think people really got scared when supermarkets ran out of stuff,” he said. “So people started thinking a lot about where food should come from, we saw a positive response in terms of CSA.” In total, Voiland said the farm saw a 20 to 25 percent increase in CSA membership, which they hoped to maintain this year.
Additionally, Voiland said last year they received guidance from the Department of Agriculture how to safely facilitate their pick your own service that allows for people to pick their own strawberries along with other vegetables. He said despite people needing to social distance in the fields, wear masks and not being able to ‘sample’ strawberries in the field, people still wanted to pick their own. “We had a great turnout, people came out. We were able to offer that last year, [and we’re] going to do it again this year, we’ll see how it goes,” he said.
The two large events that the farm usually hosts, their Strawberry Soiree and their Tomato Festival, Voiland said took place virtually. While they were still waiting to see if restrictions would allow for those events to take place in the future, Voiland said they were able to host a couple in-person events. Such events included growing a sunflower spiral and a popcorn maze that they plan to do again in the upcoming year. He said they put guidelines in place for only allowing one group in the maze and spiral at a time and ensuring everyone was socially distanced. “That worked out, we’re going to do that again for sure,” he said.
New to their Granby location last year, Voiland said, was a greenhouse for plants and flowers for customers to purchase. He said while they sold plants to gardeners for a long time, they didn’t have a place to store the plants for sale. “Last year was the first year we had the retail greenhouse open. Prior to that, we didn’t have a greenhouse in the front we could put those plants in when they’re being sold,” he said. “We figured out how to build it, it was the first season we had plants in that. I think this year it’ll be even better.”
He added that stairs had been added so the greenhouse can be accessed from the rest of the Granby location and plant sales would begin the week of April 1. “Other years we haven’t started until May because we didn’t have the greenhouse,” he said.
Another change, he said, was that the Granby location stayed open all winter, which isn’t usually the case. At the time of press, he said the Granby location hours were 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week, but in early April the store would likely begin to open a little earlier.
At the moment, Voiland said the farm was gearing up for the summer season and transplanting the first big crops of the season. “The first big transplanting project is transplanting four acres of onions in early spring,” he said.
This, Voiland said, was the “time to think about signing up for CSA shares” for the summer, something he said typically sells out quickly. In addition to offering vegetable shares, the farm also offers mushroom shares, cut flowers and even egg shares. More information on pricing, shares and hours can be found on the Red Fire Farm Facebook page and their website https://www.redfirefarm.com.