Spensley Rickert helps a customer mash two bales of straw into the back of an economy-sized hatchback and turns to greet me.
“Top o’ the mornin’ to you,” Rickert says, spreading his arms as if to present me with the spectacular day it’s shaping up to be—the mountain ridgeline to the west of his farm ablaze in autumn color set against a deep blue sky. “Looks like its going to be a beauty.”
Rickert is the proprietor of Hatfield Feed & Seed, an agricultural supply store and farm located on a short swath of fertile land that lies between Interstate 91 and Routes 5&10 in North Hatfield. If you’ve driven along I-91 North between the Hatfield and South Deerfield exits, your eye likely has been drawn to Rickert’s place, a neatly organized layout of animal pens and farm buildings, gardens and compost piles.
Growing up in the Champlain Valley, Rickert started working on a dairy farm at age 12. He earned a degree in agriculture and engineering at Cornell University, where he met his wife, Colette Haag-Rickert, a Valley native who later did her ob-gyn residency at Baystate Medical Center. The two have lived in the Valley since, raising their four children in Hatfield.
Now in his late 40s, Rickert has witnessed during his lifetime the rise of the organic farming movement that has brought significant change not only in the way farmers produce food, but in how they and their customers think and talk about food production. As a kid, Rickert says, he didn’t hear people tossing around terms like organic, sustainable, or even local when talking about agriculture. Today, consumers are attuned to labels that indicate, in fairly specific terms, how various foodstuffs are produced—cage-free, pesticide-free, antibiotic-free, free-range, sustainably raised, humanely raised. In some cases, the terms used—certified organic and certified naturally grown, for example—carry the imprimatur of federal regulation.
Rickert says he embraces the organic movement and the attention it brings to the “big picture of food as one part of Mother Nature. We’re one animal on the planet, trying to get something to eat.” How we do that, he says, has far-reaching implications for the greater whole.
But Rickert also counts himself as one of many small, independent farmers who’ve adopted sustainable practices and try to live up to the spirit of organic farming without seeking the certification that allows farmers to charge significantly higher prices for organic products. His story is, in fact, representative of many small farms in the Pioneer Valley, where the force of the buy-local movement helps sustain small farms that might never have the resources to achieve organic certification.
As a farmer, “I’m 100 percent into sustainable agriculture,” Rickert tells me as we stand outside the network of barns and sheds that comprise Hatfield Feed & Seed. “I’m not 100 percent into red tape and paperwork.”
The cost of compliance, Rickert says, has become a barrier to organic certification for many small farms. For Rickert, the stringent record-keeping required by regulators represents a labor cost that would be nearly impossible to recoup during the considerable transitional period farms must go through en route to organic certification. Equally problematic, he says, are some of the rules governing poultry and livestock. Raising certified organic animals requires more space, for example, than it takes to raise animals conventionally.
As we talk, my eyes drift to a rafter of turkeys ranging almost freely in his fields, then to a flock of chickens. But for a bit of poultry fencing to keep them out of the neighbor’s yard and off I-91, the birds have lots of freedom, certainly plenty of legroom. I ask Rickert: assuming that he fattens the birds up with organic feed, wouldn’t those turkeys and chickens qualify as organic?
He smiles, shaking his head. “There’s a lot more to it than that, I’m afraid.”
Rickert says he feels no great hostility toward the policies behind organic certification. But he worries that the economics of organic farming are not only an obstacle to compliance, they also create disincentives for small farms that would otherwise move toward more sustainable agricultural practices. With certified organic produce fetching prices as much as four times higher than produce that isn’t certified, does it make sense for a farmer to take on the costs of adopting sustainable practices if he can’t go all the way to certification and charge more for his produce?
“Farming is already a marginal business. Unless you get more for the value added,” Rickert says, “you’re digging your own grave.”•
