An Open Question in Orange
On a spring day in 2015, a miniature country fair sprang up in the parking lot of an old bank in the center of Orange, Massachusetts. There were farmers selling seedlings, gardeners from a local youth program serving up salad, volunteers offering tastes of local cheese and pickles. A magician with a long red beard made balloon animals. There was live music and a parade with big stars on sticks, borrowed from the committee that organized the town’s annual New Year’s celebration. It was earnest and homegrown and hopeful in all the ways that a lot of small-town festivals are.
At Quabbin Harvest’s May 2015 grand opening event, Mount Grace’s Farm Conservation Program Manager Jamie Pottern (right) celebrated with Deb Habib of Seeds of Solidarity Farm, the first farm whose land was protected by the land trust.
This one was celebrating the opening of a new food co-op in the old bank. Formed as a seasonal buying club five years earlier, the North Quabbin Community Co-operative had been incubating in a tiny volunteer-run store in one of Orange’s many old factory buildings. It was now emerging from that cocoon as a full-time storefront operation under its new name, Quabbin Harvest. And its launch represented something more complex and challenging than was immediately apparent from the party in the parking lot.
This January 2020 image shows the North Main Street neighborhood around the co-op, as well as the newly-installed solar panels added by Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust. © Atlantic Image Creations.
The co-op’s move was possible because of a partnership with Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, a regional nonprofit land trust, which had recently purchased the bank. Part of the same network of regional conversations and projects that From the Ground Up highlights, Mount Grace covers a 23-town territory in rural north-central Massachusetts and has been a leader and partner in many landscape-scale projects both within and beyond its immediate area. Like most other land trusts, Mount Grace protects farmland as well as natural lands, recognizing the roles that agricultural landscapes can play in fostering many forms of environmental resilience and community character. So, although it was surprising in some ways for a land trust to become a landlord for a grocery store, it was in other ways a logical next step toward the goals of rebuilding viable local and regional food systems. Mount Grace wanted to help expand the market for local food while protecting the land where that food was grown.
In August 2023, participants in the Summer Senior Farmshare program gathered for a lunch at the Farm School in Athol. The Farm School’s land is protected by Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust; the summer farmshare program is funded by Greenfield-based Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) and based at Quabbin Harvest; the Farm School supplies all of the produce for the annual program. © Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture
This was also part of a longer history of collaborations between for-profit food businesses—usually though not exclusively farms—and some kind of partner providing subsidy in the form of land, or capital, or both. Such alliances have generally been prompted by concerns about the economic viability of the for-profit partner. Often, they’ve been designed to modernize the businesses and help them compete in a food economy that has become steadily more industrialized and dominated by larger and larger entities over the past two centuries.
I became familiar with this history from the nonprofit side while researching and consulting at historic sites. I also co-authored a book (Public History and the Food Movement: Adding the Missing Ingredient, published by Routledge in 2018) that set out a rationale for how and why history institutions could further their own civic and educational missions by partnering with businesses that are actively engaged in the real-world food economy. My co-author and I found many interesting models for this kind of partnership emerging in the present. There were national parks offering long-term land leases to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms, living history villages promoting heritage plant and animal species, and conservation areas hosting food hubs or farmers markets. Many of these reflect the contemporary wave of enthusiasm for more local eating and food production.
“Although it was surprising in some ways for a land trust to become a landlord for a grocery store, it was in other ways a logical next step toward the goals of rebuilding viable local and regional food systems.”
It was equally intriguing to discover how many present-day historic farm sites had been created or reshaped during earlier moments of reform and revitalization. The Shaker villages scattered around New England and New York were created by a nineteenth-century sect that managed—for a time—to stay competitive within the agricultural economy while also rejecting the mainstream values and aspirations of the society around them. The magnificent stone barns at The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and Shelburne Farms in Vermont, were both built by wealthy “gentleman farmers” in the Progressive Era around the turn of the twentieth century as part of model agricultural estates.
In most of these older and newer projects, I could discern a kind of fundamental ambivalence about the effects of markets on the food system, as well as a deep unwillingness to challenge market logic too directly, or to try to create some kind of alternative economic model. Both the subsidized and subsidizing partners were hoping that the business side of the arrangement would reach financial viability, seeming to assume that with enough ingenuity and seed funding, it would thrive. Yet the need for subsidy itself, at least in the short term, was a kind of tacit admission of how difficult—maybe even impossible—this might be.
So, when I became involved with the leadership of Quabbin Harvest a couple of years after the launch, I recognized the co-op’s relationship with Mount Grace as the same kind of alignment. A better-resourced nonprofit partner had stepped up to enable the creation of the new local market, based on a lease agreement that assumed the fledgling co-op would work steadily toward profitability, and therefore be in a position to buy the building after 10 years.
When I got involved with the co-op just two years after that upbeat opening celebration in the parking lot, the business was already on the verge of failing. It turned out that the initial projections had been over-optimistic. By late 2016, the store was facing the very real possibility of bankruptcy.
Despite the dire situation, some of Mount Grace’s leaders remained deeply committed to the initial vision. Others were more skeptical but worried that if they gave up too quickly on the partnership, the land trust would find itself stuck with an empty building in a mostly empty downtown. But there were also voices arguing that Mount Grace could no longer afford to support the program, even if it meant the co-op would fail more quickly. There was a sense of unease about why this for-profit enterprise seemed unable to turn an actual profit, even with help from its friends.
“I could discern a kind of fundamental ambivalence about the effects of markets on the food system, as well as a deep unwillingness to challenge market logic too directly.”
On the co-op side, we doubled down on encouraging our members to shop as much as possible, while also embarking on fundraising campaigns to offset the operating deficit. And we managed to keep the store going until COVID-19, which upended everything for Quabbin Harvest in a surprisingly positive way.
Our small size, shorter supply chains, healthy foods, and determined presence in the center of a downtown that had been struggling long before COVID all turned out to offer the kind of safety, transparency, and sense of community that more shoppers were looking for in the first months of the pandemic. From being a rather puzzling little store that walked like a business but quacked like a nonprofit, Quabbin Harvest suddenly became more widely appealing. People recognized that we had been building toward precisely the kind of future that had manifested out of the blue, with big structures proving unreliable and the many downsides of the industrialized food system on full display: the undervalued labor in fields and slaughterhouses and delivery services, the dumping of milk and euthanizing of pigs in supply chains too big and clumsy to adapt, and the often racialized links between preexisting health conditions and vulnerability to the virus.
For two hectic months the co-op was operating at a profit, hustling to fill curbside orders and nimbly tapping our network of available local and regional sources. Even after the lockdowns ended, the store stayed on a more sustainable footing, still in the red but better able to keep its head above water.
The co-op serves customers from its immediate neighborhood and around the North Quabbin. It aims to be a small-scale full-service grocery with an emphasis on locally- and regionally-sourced foods. © Cathy Stanton
Over the four years since the start of the pandemic, Mount Grace’s leadership has also reassessed its relationship with the co-op. The land trust has emerged with a renewed commitment to supporting the store as one among its roster of programs, perhaps less immediately intuitive than a hiking trail or a conservation easement but contributing equally to the goal of supporting ecological and community resilience in a fraught and urgent moment. There is a greater acceptance of the need for ongoing subsidy, and a clearer sense of how the partnership contributes to the land trust’s mission.
And yet the big underlying questions (“How much subsidy? For how long?”) have not really been answered. The store now covers the great majority of its operating costs through sales of food, but the annual fundraising goal is still substantial, and still puzzling or frustrating for many at the co-op and in the community around it. There is not yet a clear shared agreement on what actual financial sustainability would look like for the business, reflecting the gaps in most people’s awareness of what’s actually possible in the grocery sector, especially at a small scale and in a low-density, economically straitened area. In some quarters, the assumption still prevails that with enough determination and ingenuity, a small farm or grocery store should be able to succeed in the long term purely by growing or selling food—an assumption that doesn’t fully come to grips with the fact that it’s all but impossible to compete with the dominant system except at the largest of scales, in the most niche of ways, or in the most affluent of market areas.
“From being a rather puzzling little store that walked like a business but quacked like a nonprofit, Quabbin Harvest suddenly became more widely appealing.”
The challenging economics and demographics of the area around Quabbin Harvest make this collaborative experiment particularly venturesome. It also strikes me as a potentially significant bellwether in the larger context of efforts to rebuild and strengthen more regional networks of production and supply. Following another party in August 2024 that celebrated 10 years of partnership between the co-op and the land trust, the question of what it takes to sustain a viable alternative remains open. As long as the store is able to stay open, too, its trajectory may help illuminate the edges of what is currently possible and what is likely to happen as people working for change in the food system continue to push collectively at those edges.
Cathy Stanton calls herself a late-blooming scholar, born-again New Englander, and accidental grocer. Originally from Canada, she has lived in Massachusetts for many decades and is currently Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Tufts University. She authored the award-winning book The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City, and co-authored Public History and the Food Movement: Adding the Missing Ingredient. She has consulted with museums and historic sites about food and farm history. More recently, her efforts to save a small food co-op near her home are chronicled in Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer.