Farming in New England
BRIAN DONAHUE
Introduction
What place does food and farming have in an integrated vision for the future of conservation and community in New England? In this issue, From the Ground Up inaugurates a series of features addressing that question.
Today, farmland is a vanishingly small part of New England — about two million acres, or five percent. That farmland, along with the region’s fisheries, produces some 10–20 percent of our food, depending upon what one chooses to measure: weight, calories, dollars, USDA daily servings, or acreage footprint. Food, including its distribution, retailing, and preparation, remains an important part of the New England economy, because people still like to eat. Food production, however, is only a small slice.
Yet A New England Food Vision, which is part of the foundation of From the Ground Up, calls for increasing regional food production, and in turn, self-reliance, to at least 50 percent by 2060. More recently, New England Feeding New England has set an ambitious goal of reaching 30 percent by 2030. Achieving these bold visions would mean significant changes in the way we grow food and in the way we eat. Producing even 30 percent, let alone 50 percent of New England’s food within the region would also require clearing some of our precious recovered forest to re-create farmland. Such changes would have to overcome powerful social and economic forces that have long pushed in the other direction.
Why is local and regional food so important, becoming a lifelong passion for some of us? In the coming issues of From the Ground Up we will explore some of the social and environmental benefits of local food production that might justify such radical measures.
Benefits of Local Food Production
Resilience: The long global supply chains of the industrial food system are vulnerable to disruptions such as epidemics, wars, and climate change — challenges that may grow worse in the future. New England cannot reasonably produce all its own food, but it can grow much more — particularly fruits and vegetables. Rebuilding that capacity would be prudent. Therefore, citizens and policymakers in the southern New England states, where most of the people live, should care about what happens in northern New England, where most of the farmland is located.
Environmental Impact: Those supply chains that (so far) bring us food so cheaply depend on extractive practices that also spin off social and environmental consequences, including exploited farmers and farmworkers, polluted waterways, and large greenhouse gas emissions. By moving some of that production back to New England and encouraging (and rewarding) regenerative practices, such as building healthy soil, we can take responsibility for reducing the impact of the way we eat.
Beauty and Biodiversity: Agriculture can help maintain a diverse range of cherished landscapes, and, if practiced deliberately, can provide habitat for a suite of open-land species — grassland birds, native pollinators and other insects, and mammals — all while the land is being productively used. These have long been central values of the land conservation movement.
Community Empowerment: Growing a portion of our food locally can serve as a powerful vehicle for gaining access to community spaces, providing an opportunity for disenfranchised groups to regain democratic control of their neighborhoods, and rebuilding cultural identity. Regenerative farming, which requires more attention and thus more farmers, can also provide one solid block to rebuild local economies.
Food Justice: I have saved the most important value for last. Unless the other benefits of local food production are deliberately tied to full access to adequate, healthy food for everyone, their goodness is tainted. Or looked at the other way around, making food accessible to everyone can serve as a driving force for increasing sustainable local and regional production. What goes around, comes around.
It will take a new framework of political and economic support to realize these benefits, which may well become climate change survival necessities. Such a transformation cannot wait for market signals and catastrophic events to catalyze action. Right now, land in New England is too expensive, and industrialized food is too cheap, for a more just, sustainable food system to go much further than it already has.
Achieving this transformation is now the task of a new generation of farmers and food advocates, following up on what has been gained since the 1970s, when the long slide in New England farming was at least stabilized. In coming issues of From the Ground Up we will hear in depth from Sister Anna Gilbert-Muhammad on urban community farming; Jamie Pottern on equitable access to farmland; and Caro Roszell on soil health, forage quality, and biodiversity. Similar explorations of a wide variety of food and farming topics will follow.
For this issue, we asked Anna, Jamie, and Caro to introduce themselves — to tell us how they came to their chosen work, and why they find it so vital in such uncertain times.
SISTER ANNA GILBERT-MUHAMMAD
Food and Community
The Food Access Team of NOFA/Mass weaves tighter food security, food justice, soil health, and youth development into vibrant communities. The Food Access Team in Springfield is composed of Beth Ward, Food Access Coordinator; Amanda Iglesias, Food Access Coordinator; Marc Diaz, Community Garden Organizer; and Sister Anna Muhammad, Food Access Director. We have worked with local community agencies across the state of Massachusetts since 2016. But the garden that is closest to our hearts is Tapley Garden, in the Mason Square area of Springfield, Massachusetts.
The Food Access Team works mostly on projects that are in the same communities where we live. Several of the group live in the Old Hill/Bay Street Community where Tapley Garden is located. This gives the Food Access work a personal feel that really makes it a mission more than a job. As a group, the Team does not come naturally to agriculture. Our parents and grandparents did garden, but we, as their children, did not take it up immediately. Rather, it was seen as a chore, and the historical trauma of slavery, sharecropping, and harsh working conditions that migrant farmers faced was a constant reminder of our struggle as people of color in agriculture and the country in general. It was not a strong encouragement to get into farming.
Sister Anna Gilbert-Muhammad. Photo courtesy of Berkshire Resources for Integration of Diverse Groups through Education (BRIDGE)
However, living in neighborhoods that struggle with food insecurity and lack of viable grocery stores, gardening seemed to take on new meaning. Despite the difficult history of agriculture, the gardens that we steward have fed families that were in need during the pandemic; developed leadership skills for the youth that have been entrusted to our care; and helped to teach valuable skills and knowledge in soil science, cooking, and food preservation to young people and adults.
The Garden, located at the Tapley Court Apartments, has been operating since 2017. It serves as an experimental garden, soil health demonstration, garden store, and a community gathering place where people from the neighborhood can discuss food, their families, and the latest neighborhood news. The garden demonstrates how soil stewardship can change and improve soil and land conditions.
When the garden first opened, the main plant that could grow was grass, and a few dandelions. Fortunately, unlike other sites in the area, the Tapley front green space did not have issues with elevated lead levels. This was based on the results from UMass Amherst Soil and Plant Nutrient Testing Laboratory. Although containments were low or nonexistent, so was the nutrient level. Small insects, pollinators, and other animals were nowhere to be found. That is until the young people, guided by the Food Access Team, began cultivating and caring for the area.
In the first year, much of the work was spent establishing a garden that utilized no-till and biointensive growing. The garden began using processes such as mulching with leaves or aged wood chips. We focused on what is naturally sourced, so as not to pull too much from the local environment. The youth engaged with local experts on adding mushrooms, plant ferments (local weeds and plants fermented), indigenous microorganisms, and compost. Subsequent soil testing results show an increase in nutrients, and the taste of all the vegetables improved dramatically.
Over the next three years, with youth leaders facilitated by NOFA/Mass staff, the yields increased steadily. During the height of COVID, the harvest served as a local store for many families that could not get to the store or who were experiencing financial struggles due to loss of employment or delays in services. This past year, the garden saw its largest harvest of 2,700 lbs. The garden provided a habitat for butterflies, bees, and multiple other pollinators. None of this existed when the garden started.
Now, as the garden enters its sixth year, we look to add another component — growing for a value-added product. The Youth Leaders have chosen salsa for the value-added product. They have established a name, Mass-Remediation, for the salsa, and all of the growing practices will be used to develop a healthy, viable product for sale in 2025. It is so exciting to see their creative minds and activities come to fruition.
Being on this journey with Beth, Marc, and Amanda is a joyous experience — an experience that continues to unfold and present us with new challenges, wins, people, and opportunities. We look forward to every season with hope, anticipation, excitement, and faith that our collective work will continue to bring peace, influence a new group of youth, and grow community.
JAMIE POTTERN
How I Came to Farmland Conservation
One big reason I got into conservation was in reaction to where I grew up: in the D.C. suburbs, in earshot of the Capital Beltway.
My family’s house was tucked into a safe and comfortable neighborhood of modest houses built in the 1960s on former farm fields. If I braved heavily trafficked roads, I could navigate on foot or bicycle to most places I needed to go.
But all around me, rapid-fire sprawl continued, consuming whatever pockets of forests or fields remained. Streets, shopping centers, and housing developments were named after the very landscapes they displaced — Oak Grove, Linden Way, Silver Woods, Farm Acres.
How could such losses of natural and working spaces be allowed to happen, in just one or two generations, with only the street or business names left as signposts to mark what was lost?
I was a pensive kid, drawn to natural places, and I found the rural-landscape-turned-cityscape disorienting. I took refuge in parks and playgrounds, in a scraggly patch of woods behind a church, and in an improbably large field tucked away between two dead-end suburban streets and the highway.
The field was mown seasonally, not hayed. It was kept open but otherwise untamed. It smelled of honeysuckle and sweet grasses and hummed all summer with insects. At 75 acres, it was the only local, unobstructed landscape I knew that was vast enough to allow me to take in the whole sky. A narrow, well-trodden path lined its perimeter, just over a mile around. I’d go there to walk or run, sometimes barefoot, the ground cool and springy under my feet.
For most of my childhood and beyond, the threat of development loomed over this field. Signs would periodically go up, dissuading public use, though for 20 years a community of neighbors, dog walkers, runners, and those in need of both quiet and sky continued to frequent it.
This field, the largest undeveloped open parcel left in the area, finally succumbed to a 300-unit housing development.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of long drives with my family out into the countryside. I didn’t know anyone who was a farmer, and in fact, I couldn’t really picture what farmers looked like outside of storybooks. But on these drives, I saw and learned that they were real, that they were stewards of beauty, and I would feel somehow comforted, lighter, by those people and that expanse of farmland. The farm houses, barns, and silos we’d pass seemed to me defiant by their seemingly improbable existence in the midst of cookie-cutter housing developments.
My heart grieved the losses of open space, and cheered the defiance of the hold-outs. When we lose open spaces to development, we lose them irrevocably. And when we lose them, we lose the very things that give us both sanctuary and sustenance. I did not yet understand all the forces driving these changes — the tensions in planning decisions, balancing the need for open space with the need to increase density to slow sprawl out in the countryside.1 But a fire was lit in me to understand how we might protect open and working landscapes while also thoughtfully planning for needed development.
I found my way north by way of Brandeis University, where I went for my undergraduate studies. I was blessed to have teachers who helped me piece together a new understanding of place, and how I might be a more active participant in shaping the future of the world around me.
I was exposed to a range of New England landscapes that told a different story of place than the one I had known. Community farms, town forests, multi-generational dairy farms, old-growth forests, Indigenous stewarded lands, and properties permanently conserved as working or wild places. The landscapes and the tools to protect them existed, and the means to participate more fully in local decision-making existed, too.
Jamie Pottern. Photo © Dominic Perri
This was a balm for me as a young person coming to consciousness around the real-time impacts of climate change. I was filled with both despair and a deep sense of responsibility to do something. Perhaps it was not international bodies or nations that could act in time to save us, but local communities that had the greatest power to effect change where people live.
Through working on farms for a few seasons and then attending The Conway School’s Graduate Program in Sustainable Landscape Planning and Design, I found new tools for fostering change. Perhaps if we could strengthen local food systems, reconnect to the land and to each other, restore ecosystems to health, and make more deliberate decisions about integrated local land use, then we might have a better chance at a livable future.
For over a decade I have worked in the field of farmland conservation, primarily in Massachusetts, but also around New England, and in dialogue with conservation leaders from across the country.
The juggernaut of capitalism says the highest and best use of land is development. Permanent conservation is one powerful tool to disrupt that trend by restricting development rights and permanently limiting the use of that land to working farms and forests, habitat, recreation, and/or wild spaces. Critically, and increasingly, land must be rematriated to Indigenous communities who stewarded this landscape for thousands of years and from whom these lands were stolen.
But even with hundreds of land trusts and conservation organizations in New England alone, we are still among the top states in the country projected to lose some of the highest percentages of our farmland in the coming years. By 2040, we may lose nearly 74,000 acres of farmland in Massachusetts (nearly 15 percent), and 267,100 acres across New England.2
The juggernaut is real, and the impacts on our local food security, climate resilience, habitat, and communities will be enormous. We need to get this right: to work together as a region to increase the pace of farmland protection, to promote smart land use planning, and to facilitate the secure and affordable transition of farmland and housing to a new generation of farmers, especially those who have historically been denied access to land.
I am writing this in the heart of winter, on a day when it’s raining while it ought to be snowing. Water is seeping into basements and flooding New England coastal towns. I write this with a heart that is always a little broken with the pain of lost lands, stolen lands, climate grief, and the seemingly unstoppable economic forces that can disappear our farms and farmers in the blink of an eye.
I write this, too, with hope. Hope forged in awe of the most dedicated and hardworking people I’ve ever met — farmers, land conservationists, land stewards, policymakers, educators, and agricultural support providers — who are steeped in their love for the land, for place, and for community. Their efforts remain invisible to many, but I have the privilege of working with them and witnessing their contributions every day.
I can tell you that they are out there right now in the fields (regardless of the weather), at kitchen tables, in town halls and statehouses, working to keep our bodies fed and nourished and to protect this land so that it might continue to sustain us all well into the future.
1 In fact, Maryland ranks third highest in the nation in American Farmland Trust’s Farms Under Threat Agricultural Land Protection Score Card for its policy and program responses intended to protect and retain agricultural land. Freedgood, J., M. Hunter, J. Dempsey, and A. Sorensen. 2020. Farms Under Threat: The State of the States. American Farmland Trust.
2 Hunter, M., A. Sorensen, T. Nogeire-McRae, S. Beck, S. Shutts, and R. Murphy. 2022. Farms Under Threat 2040: Choosing an Abundant Future. American Farmland Trust.
CARO ROSZELL
Our Evolving Sense of Soil: Reflections from a Career in the Soil Health Movement
The summer before my senior year of college, I was demoralized. I had been searching for a rational code of ethics that might enable humanity to overcome cultural and religious divides, to halt the destruction of Earth’s life-sustaining systems. I was unsuccessful. If human morality is an irreconcilable Babel, I then reasoned, and we are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma that will see us all condemned to societal and ecological collapse, I should probably learn to grow my own food.
Growing food was a practical contingency plan, but in retrospect, I suspect myself of a subconscious spiritual motivation. The soil, empirically, is an interface between life and death. “After death, willing or not, the body serves, / entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song,” wrote Wendell Berry.1 And so I found myself on a hilltop on the crest of the misty Olympic Peninsula, interning at a three-acre market garden.
Kneeling on the wet grass one morning, palm deep in the black earth to untangle knuckles of quackgrass rhizomes from daintier scallion roots, a fellow volunteer said, “It must feel so good to be weeded.” The comment struck me as irrational, yet intuitively resonant. Earth had assumed a kind of underworld status in my cosmology, but I hadn’t yet considered it as a space in which organisms live in relationship with each other — as an ecosystem.
Many of us make this same mistake. The sky seems a ceiling, and the land, a floor. It is like looking out at the ocean and thinking only of the whitecaps, jutting rocks, and reflected sky — of never wondering about corals, kelps, and fishes. Ocean inhabitants and their ecologies — and their role in regulating the global climate — have been extensively studied, but the same could not be said of soil and its mostly invisible inhabitants — until recently.
Years passed before I first learned of the connection between soil and climate. At the 2011 Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Summer Conference, the keynote address was given by Eric Toensmeir, a well-known researcher and writer on carbon farming and perennial crops. Regenerative agriculture, he said, is one of those rare solutions that addresses multiple overlapping challenges — natural resource depletion, food insecurity, and climate change — all at once.2 Properly managed, he said, soils can actually draw down carbon from the atmosphere.3
Caro Roszell. Photo © Julie Fine
This was my “clicking into place” moment. Life is made of carbon compounds. The hidden realm of soils, like above-ground and ocean habitats, ranges from teeming to nearly lifeless, and more life in the soil means more soil carbon. Farming, my climate collapse contingency plan, was reframed as a remedy. The challenge, Toensmeier said, is not technical. The climate crisis is a social crisis, and without widespread adoption, regenerative agriculture goes nowhere. To be widely implemented, it needs a social movement.4
When I attended Toensmeier’s talk, I was working in Boston on community food security. Farming adjacent — but not farming. Within a year, I moved to western Massachusetts to apprentice on an organic farm. For the next decade, I farmed full time and moonlighted as an organizer with NOFA, becoming part of the team that advanced soil carbon sequestration as a climate solution. We made it our mission to bring farmers, academics, researchers, and the public together to learn how to implement soil health as a climate change solution.
Since then, the soil health movement has exploded. Mainstream media has picked up the story; presidential candidates have talked about it in debates. Excitement is high, but so is uncertainty. While the idea of soil as a living system would not surprise Indigenous and peasant farmers the world over, scientific agronomy was awakening from a mechanistic slumber that emphasized soil’s physical and chemical properties, while overlooking the life that animates those properties. To work within the living soil paradigm is to operate with significant unknowns. Within living soil are uncountable interactions and transactions between organisms, about most of which we know close to nothing. In fact, as research on the soil ecosystem progresses, we are learning more about how little we actually know. As soil scientist Dr. Kris Nichols commented at the 2019 NOFA Summer Conference, “when I started graduate school, we knew about 10 percent of the microbial species that live in soil. By the time I graduated, we knew 0.1 percent.”
But can we know every microbe in the soil, or build models that predict with precision the carbon fluxes of every practice in every type of soil? Perhaps the more pressing question is: Do we need to? The basic principles are well enough established, and are confirmed by agrarian wisdom older than Roundup and the moldboard plow — wisdom that persists amongst growers who have watched agronomic trends come and go. I must have visited at least a hundred farms over the past decade, walking the fields with farmers, conducting soil health assessments. Listen to farmers, and you learn that they see the land intimately. They know the soft, vulnerable spots where water stagnates, where it is dry and crusting, where it is gashed with rills, where its bones are exposed. A healthy land with healthy soil, they know, grows a thick fur of vegetation; its soil is heavy, dark, crumbly, and a little greasy with a faintly fungal smell, wriggling with life. It shrugs off wind and rain; water runs clear down its slopes.
The modern healthy soils movement gives a new vocabulary to farmers’ ancient language of tilth, and scientific evidence to the interconnectedness of land, water, air, and living things. The link to the global carbon cycle makes policymakers pay attention to soil in a way they haven’t since the Dust Bowl. This matters, because it unlocks funding to help farmers stanch the financial bleeding caused by perverse incentives, and to meet their own aspirations for land stewardship. But what matters even more is convening an ongoing conversation among farmers, scientists, conservationists, artists, policymakers, religious leaders — really, everyone — on the relationship between the way we care for the land and our future as a species.
“No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions,” wrote Aldo Leopold in his 1949 A Sand County Almanac, “and the proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it.”5 Well, philosophy and religion are hearing about soil conservation now, and the topic has engaged people around the world.
I began farming in a state of disillusionment over the inability of environmental ethics to overcome cultural divides. I thought this would be humanity’s downfall, and that farming might help me ride out the collapse. But through more than a decade in the soil health movement, I have learned that healthy progress is defined by the dynamic evolution of our ethics with our (agri) cultural practices, especially when scientific advances are brought into dialogue with the lived experience of practitioners. Ethics, praxis, and knowledge must coevolve. The healthy soils movement is a cultural response to climate change. It is a contemporary land ethic that encompasses the scientific, the moral, and even the spiritual dimensions of our relationship to soil. This is the social movement Eric Toensmeier called for, and the fact that it is spreading so quickly and so widely is heartening. Today, I no longer tend the land as a contingency plan, but as an act of hope.
1 Berry W. 1998. Enriching the Earth. In The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry / Wendell Berry. Counterpoint.
2 Eric Toensmeier. 2011. Carbon Farming 1: Overview. YouTube.
3 Eric Toensmeier. 2011. Carbon Farming 2: Potential Impact. YouTube.
4 Eric Toensmeier. 2011. Carbon Farming 7: Movement Building. YouTube.
5 Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
The Weeds. © Heidi Broner, acrylic on canvas, 28”x22”
Anna Gilbert-Muhammad serves as the Equity Director and Food Access/Webinar Coordinator for the Northeast Organic Farming Association, Massachusetts Chapter (NOFA/Mass). Anna graduated from NOFA/Mass’s Beginner Farmer Program in 2015 and began working with the organization in 2016. The programs that Anna works with in Springfield are the Youth Leader Organic Gardening/Cooking Program at Home City Housing and The Open Pantry Community Garden Project; she also works with smaller projects in the Boston and Springfield area. Anna and her husband Keith Muhammad live in Springfield, Massachusetts, and they are market gardeners in the Mason Square area of Springfield.
Jamie Pottern is the New England Program Manager at American Farmland Trust. She works across New England to support farmers, land trusts, and communities with farmland protection and land access efforts. She is the co-author of American Farmland Trust’s Farms Under Threat: A New England Perspective. Jamie grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and is also the fifth generation of her family living in western Massachusetts, which she calls home.
Caro Roszell farmed full time for 10 years while concurrently working for NOFA/Mass prior to stepping into her role with American Farmland Trust. She designs and implements programs that combine financial assistance, technical knowledge transfer, and peer learning models. Her efforts to expand support systems for farmers are guided by the understanding that farmers are the leaders of the soil health movement, the experts in their fields, and the frontline workers of climate change.
Brian Donahue is Professor Emeritus of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, and a farm and forest policy consultant. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a non-profit community farm in Weston, Massachusetts, and now co-owns and manages a farm in western Massachusetts. He sits on the boards of The Massachusetts Woodland Institute, The Friends of Spannocchia, and The Land Institute. Donahue is author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (1999), and The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004). He is co-author of Wildlands and Woodlands and A New England Food Vision.