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Date: 9/29/2021
AMHERST – State legislators and officials recently traveled to Western Massachusetts to tour four Connecticut River Valley farms and learn about their importance to the local community.
State Sen. Jo Comerford and state Reps. Natalie Blais, Dan Carey, and Mindy Domb hosted the four-stop farm tour to learn about issues these farms face, and what the officials and legislators can do at the state level to assist them.
The four farms they visited throughout the day included Simple Gifts Farm in Amherst, Reed Farm in Sunderland, Barstow’s Dairy Farm & Store in Hadley, and Joe Czajikowski Farm in Hadley. Other constituents from various agriculture organizations and other state officials also attended and spoke.
Reminder Publishing was able to attend the Simple Gifts Farm tour and hear from the farmers and learn about some of the statewide work currently in action. “Food from these local farms are essential to our community,” Comerford told Reminder Publishing. “We wanted to bring everyone together and hear from our farmers about food security.”
Simple Gifts Farm is operated under Jeremy Barker Plotkin and Dave Tepfer since 2006. They grow organic vegetables and raise livestock for meat and eggs. They also sell all of their products through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and a farm store, as well as some pick-your-own crops.
The farm also currently participates in the Healthy Incentives Program (HIP), which was discussed a few times throughout the tour. The HIP program allows customers who visit these types of farm stands to put money back on their EBT card when they use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to buy healthy local fruits and vegetables from these vendors.
The 40-acre farm is owned by the North Amherst Community Farm Project, a non-profit established to protect one of the last farms in North Amherst. According to Tepfer, the farm is currently focusing on creating “an ecosystem in the soil” by using less fertilizer, less irrigation and more carbon equestrian. They have dealt, and continue to deal with, problems of water erosion and the ongoing threat of climate change.
“We started a real aggressive soil improvement program to cover crops, while producing more and more vegetables all the time to feed people,” said Tepfer. After realizing that many people near their farm would not want to become CSA members and trudge through the mud, the farm added the farm store in 2017 which has helped them reached a large segment of the community.
“It put us in a really good place during the COVID shutdown,” said Tepfer, regarding the farm store. “We were able to pivot very quickly and get a lot of food in here and feed our neighbors.”
The farm was doing great, but Tepfer said that they realized they were plateauing and tilling too much of the soil micro-community they were creating. After a wet 2018, the farm decided to conduct less tilling in 2019, some more in 2020, and even more in 2021 after receiving some new equipment.
Despite many positives, Plotkin noted the issues of climate change and how the changes in weather have affected organic farming. The whole point of organic farming is to get as much carbon into the soil as possible from the atmosphere. “We’ve gone even further here by organic standards,” said Plotkin. The farmers are transitioning to organic no-tills, which uses hoes and rakes rather than synthetic inputs to till land, but it has been a learning curve.
According to Plotkin, the pandemic has been a roller coaster ride for them. The farm did six times more sales in April 2020 than they did in 2019 because people wanted to come into a smaller and store and use online services. With the increase in sales, Plotkin said it has been difficult to know how much staff they need in stores and hard to figure out other online orders.
“The fact that we’re open year-round helps a lot of people though, especially in the HIP program,” said Plotkin.
The farm continues to donate produce to the Amherst Survival Center, which serves free food and health clinics to more than 6,000 people each year. The center’s goals during the pandemic have been to increase access, address storage issues, and handle the day-to-day ebbs and flows, especially as food insecurity increased during the last year. With the help of places like Simple Gifts, they were able to serve more than a million meals to 7,000 local residents facing food insecurity during the past year.
As the importance of a farm like Simple Gifts continues to increase, especially with many people still dealing with food insecurity, there are some issues that the state wants to address. According to Winton Pitcoff, the director of the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative, farmers still only make $0.96 for every dollar they sell.
Currently, the state is working on a bill that would relieve tax liability concerns for farmers, according to Pitcoff. Beyond that, Comerford and Blais are working on a policy opportunity that establishes $3 million to support new farmers with training and education, as well as an equity bill that would help socially disadvantaged farmers to address racial and other disparities in agriculture, among other bills from other legislators. According to the Mass.gov website, farmers and fisherman have to pay at least two-thirds, rather than 80 percent, of their annual income tax liability before the year’s return is filed.
In the meantime, farms similar to Simple Gifts will continue to create and sell produce in energy-efficient ways that will help stretch beyond the community they have already cultivated.
“We’ve had so much help from a lot of agencies,” said Tepfer. “Fifteen years of it … it sort of feels like we’re at the end of the beginning here.”