Four refrigerators hummed in unison inside the North Plain Farm store in Great Barrington, a town in Berkshire County surrounded by dense forest, where the roads are sinuous and a boarded-up Denny’s greets drivers coming off the MassPike.
In early September, the election loomed large in this corner of Massachusetts. Someone had outfitted the entire perimeter of their home in Donald Trump lawn signs. On a wooden fence, two American flags flanked an enormous banner that read “Save America, vote Harris.” Yet, some of the most ubiquitous signs in town are farm signs. Across the street from North Plain Farm, there’s a big one advertising Farm Girl Farm; a little further down the road, there’s Hokaheh; then, there’s Maiden Flower.
Behind the store, expertly evading cow dung like landmines, farmer Sean Stanton approached an empty pasture and gestured to where his cows typically graze.
Stanton grows tomatoes in a greenhouse but, for the most part, the soil here is “too gravelly” for cultivation, he said. He reached down and cleared an overgrown thicket of twigs to reveal undulations in the dirt where previous farmers had attempted to cultivate corn, managing only to dredge up pebbles and rocks.
For decades, this land has been in agricultural production. Stanton, whose family moved to Great Barrington in the ‘80s when he was a child, remembers hauling hay bales and picking up odd jobs around the farm. When the owners at the time were ready to retire, they couldn’t find successors and sold the property to a nonprofit. Stanton purchased the land in 2016.
Stanton’s land can never be developed for any purpose other than agriculture. The farm is part of the state’s Agricultural Preservation Restriction program, or APR, and it has been since before Stanton purchased it.
If a farmer is looking to buy land and conserve it — or protect land they already own from future development — the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture, or MDAR, will pay the farmer the difference between the land’s market value and its developable value. From then on, the state owns an easement on the land, meaning it can dictate the terms of any future land sale and use, ensuring that land remains in agricultural production forever.
Since its establishment in 1977, the APR program has conserved more than 950 parcels of farmland across the state. Because of APR, 115 acres of Stanton’s land and more than 70,000 acres held in other Massachusetts farms are protected from development. For reference, one acre of land is approximately the size of a football field from end-zone to end-zone. These deed-restricted acres will be farmland forever — but elsewhere, farmland is vanishing.
The latest data from the US Agricultural Census show more than 100,000 out of almost 600,000 acres of farmland in Massachusetts have been lost since 1997. Almost a quarter was lost in just the last five years recorded. That comes down to just under 15 acres of farmland a day, more than double the rate of farmland loss nationwide.
Alarmingly, The American Farmland Trust estimates that, without stronger protections, Massachusetts stands to lose between 50,000 and 90,000 acres of farmland by 2040.
Some farmers sell their land because there is no one to take over the family business — in Massachusetts, there are three times as many farmers over the age of 65 as under the age of 35. Others, because the cost of farming has become too burdensome and they can make more money selling to solar or housing developers.
But it’s more than a way of life at stake as, acre by acre, farmland continues to disappear. The loss pushes the state backward in its fight for food sovereignty and against climate change.
When farmland vanishes, so does food.
At the Community Harvest Project two hours east of North Plain Farm, Tori Buerschaper trailed behind a cohort of volunteers weaving through rows of apple trees. She later watched as volunteers sorted first grade apples from those that were blemished or bruised, bagging good ones by the dozen and setting aside those that looked gnarled or stunted to send to the cider mill.
Buerschaper, the nonprofit’s executive director, said this workflow was designed to bridge the disconnect between consumers and the food system — and to illuminate the realities of hunger in Massachusetts. So far, the model they built has been a success. In 2023 alone, CHP hosted more than six thousand volunteers at its orchard in Harvard and at its 15-acre farm in Grafton. Together the two locations yearly yield 300,000 pounds of apples, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash and other produce that’s sold to 26 partner agencies committed to combating food insecurity.
“We luckily live in one of the most prosperous states in the US, where it's easy to think there isn't hunger,” Buerschaper said. “We also live in a place with a very high cost of living, and when people have limited income they're forced to pick and choose. The thing you kind of get to last, or that you can more easily cut out, is food.”
But the nonprofit’s operation wasn’t always this expansive. In 2014, CHP was farming on leased land when donors gifted the nonprofit 75 acres of orchard and rolling hills in Harvard after more than 50 years of private ownership.
Land is in high demand in Harvard, a town in central Massachusetts, and Buerschaper explained that her nonprofit “could have made the decision to sell it to the highest bidder.”
“It’s very likely that would have been a developer over a farmer,” she said.
Across the state over the past three decades, this has been the fate of numerous farms. In Northbridge, a housing development carved a cul-de-sac out of Szerlag Farm, deeding the remainder of the land to the Metacomet Land Trust, which took it out of agricultural production and has conserved it as open space since 2019.
In Leominster, more than 50 acres of Derby Home Farm were transmuted into a strip mall that’s come to house big-name stores like Target, Kohl’s and Best Buy.
Two years ago in Carver, a solar development was built over what was once Carver Middleboro Cranberry, a bog near the town line. Satellite images from the mid 1990s through the early 2000s show these changes.
For its part, the Community Harvest Project’s orchard can never be sold or developed. The nonprofit closed on its APR last year with a local match funded by the Sudbury Valley Trustees, the Harvard Conservation Trust and the town of Harvard in addition to a private donation of $350,000. The APR totalled almost $3 million, money that CHP’s board of trustees chose to invest. Buerschaper said the nonprofit plans to withdraw $80,000 from its investment portfolio per year.
She also noted that, during the four years it took for the APR to close on CHP’s orchard, the initial appraisal of the orchard’s developable value rose. “We, in essence, could have said ‘never mind’ and gone and sold it. But that was not our intent,” Buerschaper said.
The APR came with some red tape — for example, the orchard needed to apply for a special permit with MDAR to host its annual 5K run, since the event doesn’t have a direct agricultural purpose — but Buerschaper said the funds have helped ease financial fears about “the growing pains [that] never really stopped.” CHP has already ripped up three acres of orchard trees in order to create denser rows and to broaden the apple harvest season by replanting a greater variety of trees.
Still, there’s more to plant, more cold storage to purchase and more to plan — especially as the food insecurity crisis intensifies and the demand for fresh produce grows. One in three adults in Massachusetts reported living in a food insecure household in 2023, and a study by the Greater Boston Food Bank showed that three-quarters of people who depend on two or more food assistance programs, like SNAP, still reported struggling with food insecurity.
Representative Paul Schmid of Westport, who chairs the state legislature’s joint committee on agriculture, believes these considerations are urgent for New England. “There’s great pressure to build more housing, and at the same time we’ve outsourced the production of our food to other parts of the country,” Schmid said. “We read increasingly about the drying up of the aquifer in the midwest, where a lot of wheat is grown, and we all know about the drought out in California. It just seems as though we ought to be trying to feed ourselves better.”
In 2019, a group of seven food system planning organizations proposed an initiative for increasing regional food production in alignment with this imperative. Their plan, New England Feeding New England, laid out an ambitious vision for the region with one banner goal: for 30% of the food consumed in New England to be produced in New England by 2030.
At the Massachusetts Food Systems Collaborative, the organization representing the Bay State in this coalition, executive director Kristina Pechulis said NEFNE is currently planning its approach to meeting this goal.
On the state level, the Collaborative was one of three partners in developing the Mass. Farmland Action Plan, which outlines the state’s farm strategy until 2050. The organization also has eight priority bills before the legislature related to strengthening the local food system, but Pechulis said that without public push behind a bill or a single focusing event — like a drought — the legislature is known to work at a glacial pace.
“If you have a hurricane, it moves anything that's related to hurricanes up in importance,” said Pechulis, who is a lawyer by training and taught food policy at Simmons University for ten years. “We have a housing crisis too, but we're going to have a food crisis if we keep selling a lot of our land.”
When cities step in
In July 2001, Dean Mazzarella stood on Pleasant St., where the road bends and slices across Sholan Farm in Leominster, and accepted a check from the state for $2.6 million and another for $1.58 million to purchase the farm and to conserve it as farmland in perpetuity.
Mazzarella has been mayor of Leominster for more than thirty years, and by 2001 he had already seen numerous farms in and around the city succumb to a fate that Sholan Farm only narrowly escaped. Over time, Sholan’s owners had aged and stopped farming the land. Their children had no interest in taking over the family business and, when the land entered the real estate market in 1999, developers drafted a plan to convert the farm’s 167 acres into houses.
That’s when the possibility arose for the city to buy the land instead. Mazzarella found an ally in Joanne DiNardo, a retired corporate Verizon manager who remembered when financial headwinds pushed her grandfather to sell his orchard and dairy farm.
“Too many farms have been let go,” DiNardo said, flipping through binders of maps, documents and business plans mere feet away from where city and state officials inaugurated Sholan’s new ownership in 2001. “I always feel like I should have been able to save them, somebody should have been able to save them.”
DiNardo, who is now the president of Sholan, would learn that rescuing a farm requires more than just elbow grease. Although Sholan is city-owned, a crew of 75 volunteers — including DiNardo — operates and manages the farm. When they started, parts of the orchard had not been pruned or maintained in any way for decades. In 2003, the farmhouse burned to the ground as the result of arson. Twenty years later, each season brings new hurdles. This April, a late freeze contributed to the loss of 60% of Sholan’s apple crop.
The APR closed on Sholan Farm in 2001 totaled $4.5 million, a lump sum DiNardo said “helped us save the farm.” But in order for Sholan to meet its long term viability goals — to expand its offerings, to stay open 12 months out of the year, to build a pavilion and other infrastructure that could attract more customers — DiNardo said a “one and done” investment isn’t enough.
Unlike privately-owned farms enrolled in the APR program, city-owned farms like Sholan aren’t eligible for so-called improvement grants. In an economy where buying a 165-acre farm isn’t always as financially feasible for individual farmers as it might be for a municipality with deeper coffers, Mazzarella thinks this roadblock is counterproductive to efforts to preserve farmland. “Maybe more cities would buy orchards, you know, farms, and maybe get schools to run them or volunteers, like we do. But after you buy the land, you're on your own,” Mazzarella said. “So what's the incentive?”
As Jared Freedman knows, municipalities already lose out on property taxes from welcoming farms larger than five acres, which are eligible for a tax break in Massachusetts. Freedman, the chief of staff for state senator Jo Comerford, who represents parts of Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester counties, said one solution would be for the state to create financial incentives for municipalities to prioritize preserving farmland.
This model already exists for state-owned lands through the PILOT, or Payment in Lieu of Taxes, program — Freedman suggested it could be expanded to aid the state’s efforts to work with cities and towns to prevent farmland loss.
“These municipalities are struggling to pay for their schools, to pay for their fire, to pay for their EMS, to repave their roads,” Freedman said. “If you're gonna try to protect forests and farmlands, the municipalities can't suffer.”
Resolutions for a new approach to farmland protection
For more than a year, a coalition of legislators and state agricultural leaders has heard testimony from food and farming policy advocates on the future of the Commonwealth’s agricultural sector. Next month, that group, the 21st Century Agriculture Commission, is expected to recommend a slate of reforms aimed at tackling climate change’s impact on farms and the dearth of educational and technical assistance for farmers.
Their recommendations, previewed at a public hearing in July, also address the state’s farmland freefall and the financial obstacles facing farmers, which have been documented and quantified with decades of census data.
An acre of farmland costs $14,300 in Massachusetts — third most expensive nationally after New Jersey and Rhode Island. Since 1997, the cost of farming itself has nearly doubled.
More than half of the state’s farmers do not list farming as their primary occupation. Some others are still scoping out back-up gigs, like Stanton, who is currently enrolled in a social work master’s program at Westfield State. On his farm in Great Barrington, Stanton teased a joke about how farmers make money. “This is so depressing,” he warned.
“How do you make a million dollars farming? Start with two.”
Schmid, who represents the 8th Bristol district, is one commission member arguing that the state should be doing more to at least monitor farmland loss on a yearly basis. “You can't manage what you can't measure, so we ought to start measuring,” he said. The national Census of Agriculture surveys farmers every five years, and doesn’t identify why farmland is sold and for what purposes converted farmland is developed.
The commission is poised to recommend including farms smaller than five acres in the state’s existing agricultural tax exemption, a change that could only be accomplished by amending the constitution.
The commission is also expected to recommend that the state allow MDAR to buy, protect and sell land, an even more urgent initiative in the eyes of David Viale, who supervises the APR program at the agency. “It's unfortunate but it's often the case that applicants come to our program in a sort of desperation situation,” Viale explained. “Like ‘I need X amount of money to pay off my mortgage’ or ‘I'm going to lose the farm,’ like, ‘we need the money now’.”
But the APR program responsible for protecting North Plain Farm, the Community Harvest Project and hundreds of others across the state doesn’t work that way. It requires a long application process and can come with many strings attached. Once a farmer applies, staff at MDAR and a third-party appraiser assess the farm’s resource value and work with the landowner to come up with a funding plan. The state’s Agricultural Lands Preservation Committee then votes twice before giving the transaction final approval. Allowing the agency to buy farmland would bypass some of the procedures that prolong this process.
MDAR also encourages farmers to look for local partners who can commit to funding up to 50% of the farm’s developable value, like with CHP, and in some cases farmers can opt in to receive federal funding from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which comes with strict eligibility requirements and can extend the application process.
The goal is to have the state pay for half of the APR, but in some cases MDAR pays nearly the total amount of the farmland’s developable value. When Sean Stanton closed on an APR that allowed him to purchase a 75-acre property a quarter-mile down the road from North Plain Farm last year, the town of Great Barrington contributed $92,000 to the purchase. Meanwhile, MDAR awarded him $828,000. Even without opting into receiving federal funding, Stanton estimates the process of acquiring this APR took four years.
What concerns Viale and his colleague Winton Pitcoff most is that, while MDAR is bound to APR’s existing procedure, developers are not.
Pitcoff, the agency’s deputy commissioner, explained that “when a farm is looking to sell, often they want to do it very quickly, and a housing developer or Walmart is likely to have a drawer full of cash and can come in tomorrow and say ‘We’ll buy your farm from you’.”
Data from the American Farmland Trust shows that, in all but two counties, a larger portion of the state’s “lost” farmland was converted for natural uses — meaning the land was allowed to grow over into forest, shrubbery, grassland or wetland — than for development. Like in the case of Szerlag Farm in Northbridge, though, sometimes a section of farmland is converted to a natural use because an adjacent section of that farmland was developed into housing or solar. In both cases, the farmland is being taken out of agricultural production.
To complicate matters further, Pitcoff noted that “when farmland does get converted to housing, it tends to not get converted to affordable housing, which is what we need. It tends to get converted to McMansions and high-end housing and vacation houses.”
Other state agencies, including MassWildlife and the Department of Conservation and Recreation, are authorized to purchase land, and Pitcoff lamented that this authorization includes farmland. These agencies’ primary commitment is to preserve green space and not necessarily to keep farmland in production, Pitcoff noted, underscoring that the state’s “complicated web” of competing interests makes juggling different agencies’ priorities a delicate task.
“The state needs conservation land, and it needs solar production, and it needs housing,” Pitcoff said. At the same time, we’ve got food security goals and economic development goals — and farms do play a role in climate security.”
An initiative to allow MDAR to buy land already exists as an amendment to the $2.8 billion economic development bond bill the legislature failed to resolve before the end of the formal session in July. Becca Miller, policy director at MFSC, said the economic package is a “must-pass bill” that the legislature can still address in its informal session.
It’s possible that the authority change — accompanied by a line item appropriating money so that MDAR can actually buy land — will not make it into the final version of the bill. Miller, who is a registered lobbyist, and fellow agriculture advocates have a contingency plan: to include the authority change in the upcoming environmental development bond bill and in any subsequent legislation until the measure passes.
Most legislators agree, she said, that “there's no one policy that's a silver bullet. There's just so much that we need to be doing just to even slow the rate of farmland loss.”
Ultimately, Pitcoff hopes the recommendations of the 21st Century Agriculture Commission will jolt the state house into action but, at MDAR and beyond, a jaded impression of the legislature prevails.
“The state has continuously made statements about prioritizing farms and farmland,” Pitcoff bemoaned, nodding to an executive order signed by governor Edward King in 1981 acknowledging that preserving agricultural land for future generations is an essential undertaking. Freedman, Comerford’s aide, described this 40-year-old executive order as a “love poem” to farms.
Pitcoff isn’t convinced. He concluded: “Yet, we keep losing it.”
