Supporting Small Farms
Christiane Turnheim approached her colorful bee hives, buzzing gently with hundreds of honeybees in the late afternoon sun. She spoke over her shoulder, “Independent bee keepers in Massachusetts need more resources to help the bees survive. People tend not to think about how much we depend on our pollinators until we don’t have them anymore.”
Christiane owns Good Spirit Farm in Harvard, an eight and a half acre property planted with a huge range of vegetables, flowers, berries, and honey and well as being a haven for bees. Christine and her husband René call their farm a “Noah’s Ark” for conservation. Their ultimate goal is to preserve and enrich the land while providing a refuge for an enormous diversity of plants and the bees that depend on them. Christiane says, “It’s all about the bees.”
Christiane is not only a farmer. She also serves as a member of the Harvard Agricultural Commission, so she’s got a good vantage point for seeing the difficulties that small farms face in Harvard and around our state. While small farms are scattered across the state, Worcester County, where Harvard is located, is home to about 20 percent of them. And another three adjacent counties, Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin, which bisect the state north to south, together host another 25 percent. Thus just four of the state’s fourteen counties have about half of all farms in the commonwealth.
Massachusetts small farms were already in trouble by the 1980s, when farmers began selling out to developers. There were many reasons: the struggle to manage and profit from a farming operation, farmers’ children who no longer wanted the hard life of a farmer, and new options for making a better living. But these problems were compounded when, at about the same time, the state began to experience more severe and more frequent storms, floods, wind damage, road washouts, widespread power outages, contamination of drinking water supplies, and new frightening illnesses such as West Nile Disease. As a result of this perfect storm of problems, the small farm sector is flirting with extinction despite the enormous popularity of farmers markets, home-harvested honey, and funky urban rooftop “farms.”
How will small farms survive?
Christiane Turnheim knows that the state’s remaining seven thousand or so small farms won’t survive longterm without broader and more robust support. Most of these farms are very small indeed, as farms are usually thought of; a full two-thirds have fewer than fifty acres. Contrast this to the 445 acres of an average-size US farm producing corn or soy or milk, where the vast majority of the production takes place. About two-thirds of Massachusetts’ farms make less than $10,000 a year. A Starbucks barista makes about $26,000. But the barista doesn’t have to buy all the coffee beans, plant and maintain them, harvest and roast them, store and market them. Small farmers, though, must do all this and a lot more, for a much smaller economic reward, when they get any at all. And small farms, critical though they are to rural character, diversity of healthy landscape, variety of food, and hedge against climate change, often have trouble getting attention for their needs. No wonder so many sell out to developers.
Covering land with diverse, natural plants provides a bulwark against the rapidly growing impacts of climate change across Massachusetts. Every time an orchard is turned into housing, the diverse plant life that bees and other pollinators need is destroyed. Honeybees, hundreds of other insect species, birds, and other pollinators disappear. Roads are laid down, more municipal services are brought in (gas, electric, fiber optic, water/sewage lines), and houses are built.
According to Eric Broadbent, a former member of Harvard’s Energy Advisory Community and main contributor to the town’s first MVP grant, “Cutting down so many trees and removing natural landscaping, adding roads, hard structures, machinery, and permanent addition of gas, electricity, and human contributes to climate change on a much bigger scale than when a farm occupied the space.”
Eric is a big supporter of more MVP funding like this, pointing out: “The residential sector is the biggest problem in dealing with climate change in many towns. The balance of residential and services impacts is rarely considered, and projects like ours provide a way to think about development and its costs—economic, environmental, and social. All municipalities can take something away from that.”
Climate Change: Record snowfall, severe drought
Harvard is a beautiful small community beyond the hubbub of Boston, and has long been known for its farms. You might think with all its advantages, Harvard would be better protected from the havoc that climate change is wreaking on our state. But in fact it is suffering some pretty severe climate-related woes that are landing especially hard on the already struggling small farms that make Harvard such a quintessential “New England” town.
Climate change is affecting our state right here and right now[5]. Massachusetts has experienced increasingly more frequent and severe weather events over the past few years: record-breaking snowfall in 2015, a widespread and severe drought in 2016, the warmest year on record in 2017, and the next year four Nor’easters in one month and the most annual precipitation since 1890.
Then 2022 brought a sustained state-wide drought—not a condition that the Northeast has much experience with, and one that makes farming especially precarious. According to Jill Kaufman of New England Public Media, who interviewed many small farmers going through the drought, summer crop harvests in Massachusetts were expected to be smaller in 2022, while the cost of fuel, other supplies, and labor was climbing rapidly.
A lot of media attention has been paid in the past few years to the precipitous, ominous decline of the honey bee. Beekeepers often need experts to help identify and treat bee diseases before they destroy a colony. When the summer weather has been too cold, too hot, too rainy, or too dry, the bees may not be able to get enough food and risk entering winter underfed and more vulnerable to pathogens and starvation. The same goes for habitat destruction for development. Bees need a lot of diverse wild plant life to ensure they get a healthy diet, and that means land that has not been turned into condos and lawns and roads.
MVP Funds: Protecting Pollinators and farms
Bees are critical to maintaining most of the foods we humans eat. About a third of the food Americans eat comes from crops pollinated by honey bees, including apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds. The US Food and Agriculture Organization says, “Honey bees are like flying dollar bills buzzing over U.S. crops.”[6]
Yet, even with all the excellent reasons to support small farms, small towns like Harvard have a constant tug to convert open space into more residential housing, because it provides the vast majority of their income.
MVP funding for small-scale beekeepers could include bringing in more bee experts to provide free help when and where they need it. It could mean buying shared equipment such as hive scales, which are essential to maintaining healthy bee colonies but are beyond the budget of most very small beekeeping operations. Perhaps it could mean a shared farm stand with refrigeration, storage space, refrigeration, and a staffer, so farmers like Christiane and René would be able to focus on farming while still having an outlet for their products.
In the long run, keeping Massachusetts’ small farms viable helps with local food security and climate resilience, which gains more importance with every passing day.