When the Advocate finally caught up with future Northampton farmers Jen Smith and Nate Frigard last week, they didn’t have long to talk. They had just gotten home from their day jobs and had half an hour before a meeting with a representative from Grow Food Northampton. It would be their first reading of the 99-year lease the couple is planning on signing at the end of January, 2011.
“It’s a big document,” Smith said. It’s some 36 pages, and she and her husband want to take the time to understand it so they’ll be ready when their big day comes.
While Grow Food Northampton is actively fundraising to acquire 117 acres of prime farmland for $670,500 by January 31, the group has already raised more than enough to buy the original 37-acre Bean Family farm—one of two adjacent farms that are for sale. On this ground, which has been farmed since Native American times, Smith and Frigard will begin operations this winter as Crimson and Clover Farm, offering shares as a CSA, leasing land from the newly established Northampton Community Farm. If the 80 extra acres that comprised much of the Allard Farm are acquired, Smith and Frigard will act as stewards until more permanent plans are made for its cultivation.
Selected through a rigorous search process supervised by a board of local farmers, the couple are exuberant about their good fortune. “This is the work of our lives. We’re delighted to be doing it,” Smith said.
Smith and Frigard met while working on Wheatlands Farm in Virginia. Nate had already chosen farming as his career, and Jen was a recent college graduate looking for summer work that got her hands dirty. Soon she shared his vision.
The two were trained at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California-Santa Cruz and have worked at other farms across the Northeast. Currently, Frigard manages the CSA at the Farm School in Orange and Smith works for the Mt. Grace Land Conservation Trust. They will move to the Northampton area from Wendell this winter. There is no housing on the land, so they plan to rent an apartment somewhere nearby at first but hope to buy a home eventually. Frigard will leave his current job to work the farm full-time, but Smith will keep hers “for a few years, until we get our footing.”
“Saving money to buy land and starting a farm has always been an uphill battle,” Frigard said. “But this option will work for us. We’ve begun talking to Florence Savings Bank about getting a loan for equipment and what we need to get started.”
“We’ve always wanted land near a community, but that’s always a more expensive proposition than somewhere more remote,” Smith said.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is to give new farmers a way to buy in,” said Lilly Lombard, president of Grow Food Northampton. “Starting a farm takes a huge outlay of capital and assuming debt. American farmers carry some of the higher debt than any other [businesspeople] in our economy—that’s just sad—whereas with Jen and Nate, we’re making it so they don’t have to walk into a situation of great debt. They’re always going to have an affordable lease—it’s a 99-year lease—and so they will know they can treat the farm as their own. Any structural improvements they make they will own. That will be their way of building equity.”
A study of local CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture farms) done by UMass reported that over the last 25 years, new farmers increasingly “see agriculture as a ‘calling,’ a means of production that educates the next generation to the wisdom lost in the previous one: food is seasonal, not global; better living is not through chemistry; land is not naturally renewable without careful stewardship. Thus, we must respect, not violate, ancient principles of husbandry.” This expresses the passion and devotion the Crimson and Clover farmers embrace.
While they would probably limit their first-year cultivation to a third of the available land on the former Bean Farm property, the remainder would be cover cropped. “We’ll be adding a compost and spreading out manure to build organic fertility,” Frigard said.
On the Grow Food Northampton website, Smith and Frigard have outlined the plan for their farm: “We plan to start a community-centered organic farm growing mixed vegetables, fruits and cut flowers. In the future, we also hope to bring laying hens, pigs and bees to the farm, plant a small fruit orchard, and plant raspberries and blueberries for our CSA members.
“While the core business of our farm will be growing mixed vegetables, our goal is to create a beautiful, productive and diverse family farm, with both annual and perennial crops, field crops alongside smaller hand-tilled perennial garden spaces, trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and animals.”
