Bookworm's Turn; Interview with Pat Sackrey and Ellen LaRiviere on the New England Small Farmers Project

Come on. Welcome to the bookworms time produced by WFC are in cooperation with the Jones library of Amherst. Good evening this is Dan Turner from the Jones library. My guest this evening are Pat sat sacré who is the director of the New England small farmer project and Ellen law review here. I said it just right I think who is a VISTA volunteer assigned to organizing work for the project in Connecticut She's also a hog farmer in Andover Connecticut and she's wearing a T-shirt right now which says pigs are precious. And it has a picture of two very precious looking pigs on it. The sponsor of the T-shirt is the American Diabetes Association. Now I have to ask before we go any further with the American Diabetes Association has to do with pigs that's a common question everybody else said it's because the insulin for diabetics is made from the pancreas of a pig. No kidding. No really really all right. Does your family raise pigs for die for diabetes

insulin preparation. No we raise pigs for consumption to put on the dinner table. I see. I think we might come back to your farm and how you suddenly felt were not so suddenly found yourself an organizer for the New England small farmers project but first I'd like to ask Pat if she could describe the project can its servers alter that kind of a long process so maybe I'll start back a ways. Massachusetts in New England generally is very dependent on other parts of the country for food. Eighty five percent are actually it looks like more than that now of our food is coming in from other parts of the country you know other parts of the world. We've got a lot of farmland left. Fortunately some of it's under trees. Agriculture does include forestry as well we like to think. But some of us many of us really a growing number I think over the last years have felt like since we do have natural resources here and we do have people who

still have farming skills and other people with a lot of energy who like to learn them that we could perhaps become more reliant upon ourselves for our food. Well that's a kind of a big issue to begin addressing for a bunch of citizens and and gradually a growing number of professionals I think in the field of agriculture have become committed to helping this region become self-reliant. It's a difficult set of issues it's not just a matter of deciding to do it because we've been losing so much of our farmland to a whole lot of things development of various kinds. And because for a long time it was it was really a lot cheaper to grow food in the Midwest and ship it in. Now it isn't. Now we have a lot of problems with with labor with energy. There are other kinds of things that have declined with the decline of our own

agriculture in this region over the last well since the Second World War really was when we began our our enormous decline. Some of those include ways of distributing food. Actually just the railroads that used to take food around on grain have declined. But also holding places warehouses for food that we could grow and then store over winter root cellars. Commercial size that used to exist and allowed us to keep food during our long cold period. Other kinds of things like processing plants freezing facilities canneries slaughterhouses have all but disappeared and much of our six state area. So when you start talking about trying to become more self-reliant in food you're talking about trying to start at a lot of different places at once. It sounds to me as though. We're almost faced with a problem that starting over.

Well almost in some ways although fortunately we still have a lot of people who used to farm you know a lot. We have people who are still farming dairy of course has been the largest kind of farming in New England generally. But there are other kinds of farming orchard. We do quite well in fruit since and sell fruits things that are grown well here and hard to shipping in. But like peaches you have to give it their eggs. I mean raspberry strawberries for example holly berries are things that don't ship well that you can get a good price for. And they grow well in New England. Acid soils and you don't need a great huge flat places to grow them and so on. And of course apples and other tree fruits do pretty well but other kinds of things like corn for for grain for people. Other in the Champlain Valley or Vermont it's possible to grow a lot of grains in some parts of Massachusetts along the the river valley areas some are beings it looks like might be something we could start growing more of and

I think that's certainly true in Connecticut. But the farmers there have continued to farm have mostly been dairy when you when you look across the board and mostly have had to get bigger or get out. Now that was that's for a lot of reasons part of the reason is because of policy at the government level. When we had another secretary of agriculture named Earl Butz that was actually his motto get big or get out. And there were a lot of things that mitigated against small farmers. It was very hard to make a living it's enormously difficult work you have to do it I was talking with a dairy farmer the other night who's just retired who did not take one day off in 17 years. But we feel that same with dairy farmers by the way. I with I want I want to just point this out because I'm very conscious of it whenever I think I can be milked twice a day seven days a week. Yeah. And you either milk him yourself or you have to hire somebody to milk you. Yeah. Which means you will come yourself if you're a small farmer. And

so you don't take any time off right. Unless you have some several people maybe in the family and share them. But at any rate we we have begun to see that there are a lot of different kinds of farming that will work here and that there are policy kinds of changes that need to happen in order to help small farmers small and part time farmers come back in any kind of numbers at all and begin using our farmland well again and diversifying our food the availability of our food locally that we feel like that's a good place to start. There are a lot of issues that have to be resolved in that about a year ago. U.S. Department of Agriculture Community Services Administration which was the old Office of Economic Opportunity and action which does the Peace Corps and Vista. For this country got together and decided that they would fund regional conferences around the United States that would

deal with the issues of small and part time farming. What is it. Where is it. What would it take to bring it back again. And in the Northeast we are at the Center for Rural Communities which is an extension sponsored organization in part coordinated the conference which was held up in Poland Spring Maine. We had eight small farm delegates from each of the 12 northeastern states come together and Ireland every year. And her husband who were farmers in Connecticut were delegates to that conference. We decided on the basis of what they identified as their problems and how they felt they could be solved. Which one by any means what government could do for them. But a lot of it what it could stop doing to them and others what they could do for themselves by organizing by beginning to build a base by knowing what their issues were and feeling part of a community of people who could work on their own behalf.

We took that information and developed the New England small farm small farmer project which he used to do exactly what they said we ought to be doing at home which is to develop an informed effective small farmer constituency in the six New England states. What I don't know how many how much you know about Massachusetts but one of the things I'd be curious about would be first of all on which poll problems in particular you identified in Connecticut turns and did they turn out when you got together with other New England farmers to be basically the same. Yeah it was very interesting to find out that the farmer whether he was in Maine or whether he was down in West Virginia that his problems were the same. You know are all farmers mean you know it's I that must be my husband's influence on me. But. It was it really was interesting to know that the guy up in Maine and the guy in West Virginia you know we're all having marketing problems.

Yes we can't ship some of our products to adjoining states because their health regulations are different from ours. If the New England states if somehow we can get all the New England states to have the same health regulations it would make life a lot easier for the small farmer as well as the big farmer. There aren't enough outlets for the small farmer to get rid of his produce. We have farmers markets but these are. Basically widespread in Connecticut we have of course the regional market which basically takes in the bigger farmer. Who puts more crocs in then the smaller part time guy. We've started developing some local farmer's markets in two of the counties and hopefully we'll have one in every county so the growth of farmer's market seems to be getting a lot of attention in the press lately.

I think maybe it would be helpful if one of you could distinguish between a quote small farm you talk about small farmers project I suppose you've heard all the jokes about are you talking about a two inch high farm or not so we won't have to go into that distinguish between a small farm and a family farm. Well. There are big family farms. There are very few small farms which are not family farms in other words you can be a family farm without being small but you probably can't be small without being a family farm in our definition. I don't mean married in you know a traditional family necessarily but primarily what we mean is owned and worked by the same people. It's not a corporation coming in and buying up farmland and then her own people to do the work there that would not be a family farm and it probably wouldn't be small. I think that one of the examples perhaps of the difference there might be not too long ago I went on the Massachusetts farm tour and one of the places we visited was a tobacco farmers in the Connecticut River Valley the farm we were visiting in particular

was called the Decker farm but in fact it was owned by consolidated cigar whatever the CCC consolidated cigar corporation I think. And it seemed to me that the people who had been hired to manage that farm and others like it for Consolidated cigar were the people who had perhaps originally grown up on those farms and had farmed them themselves but had lost the farms were sold to consolidate it's gone. Is that a pattern that that is that the kind of pattern of declining small farms that you're talking about. Well that's happened in some commodities I think tobacco is probably the major one that that's happened in. Some great local area perhaps you know in New England we were just talking about New England it's happened widely in the Midwest you've got whole colonies really it's like colonization with out of state corporations owning the resources and the local people working there as well as non

owners as labor pretty much. Very often managers but not not managing owners. We're talking primarily in our project and this doesn't mean that we aren't working with with other people but we're primarily talking about family units which may have other income off the farm. But where the combined family income is not over the median for that state. Now in Massachusetts that's about fifteen thousand four hundred dollars which is you know a good middle income pretty roller used to pay maybe by tomorrow it won't be. And where all of the work or at least the majority of it is done by the by the members of the household that the farming household there. And most of the people we're working with are ones who claim it is. If they are part time farmers at this point really to become more full time

they are they are committed to farming not as a hobby not as a tax dodge but as a real way of life and a way of earning their livelihood at the same time. I would say that that's what we mean by small family farms. Now there are certainly a large family farms in this state which we would support to our dying breath that are very central. We see them in extremely supportive of one another small and part time and full time and large family farming which we hope is going to be the heartbeat of bringing back agriculture and a greater self-reliance you know. When you talk about part time farming do you mean the people who Farmall day and then work a night job somewhere buy versus vice versa vice versa. I know in our particular instance for seven years my husband worked full time off the farm and I worked full time on the farm and he worked part

time on the farm. But just recently the tables have turned. We're now full time farming except that you work in this project and working and so now I'm the one who's working off the farm. Well I was going to ask you how you got into this when you were into being this organizer when you went to the small farms conference in Poland Springs Maine or you had done this before. No no. And how long are you going to be working on this when you get to go back to the farm full time. Well right now the project is funded for a year. Hopefully it'll be funded her a couple more years because we really feel that it's going to take more than a year to reach all the goals that we've set up for. How what would you regard as a satisfactory rate of progress in developing a food self-sufficiency for New England 50 percent. We now rely on 85 percent of our food is imported. Right. So suppose we get it down to 50 percent in 10 years I mean is that the scale or do you not have

those kinds of goals or at this point my short run goal is just to try to get it turned around it all. It's still going the other way it is. You know the latest figures have shown that we're at least in Massachusetts that we're up over 90 percent imports and that's with a lot of people working and a lot of ways. So if we could just began to get those percentages to decline over the next five years I would I would feel like we've done something because. If everything is going against people farming still people are going out of business the large large businesses find it very profitable to build a good fire well drawing on rocky best farming so all that we have and. The some of the supermarket chains have started being very corporate too trying to buy from. People within their state or at least within the region. But a lot of others haven't.

There are very large ones have still said we've got to buy in from outside the region because we can get a reliable supplier from California you know regardless of the general tomatoes terrible to me. So you've got to you've got to build a tomato to come 3000 miles it may not be able to cut it with most you've got a really sharp knife. So actually one of the people last summer on the nest is farming to her Mrs. Warner of the Warner farm the Warners raised vegetables in Sunderland Massachusetts at Sunderland. She was telling me that the bottom had basically fallen out of the tomato market because she thought everyone was growing their own tomatoes now in their backyard gardens. I felt immediately guilty because the Warners spit tomatoes it wasn't economic for them to bring him out of the fields anymore. Of course the conventional wisdom is economies of scale that the bigger something is the more efficient it is to run. And so I have to ask you know why it is that you think that small farms are necessarily you know economic in the long run.

Well most Aggy economist and agricultural economist would agree that when you talk about efficiency you're talking about labor not talking about land yield. It is not efficient to farm in very large ways with huge equipment. If you're talking about yield per acre if you're talking about yield per person hour it's quite efficient but it's labor that's always the cost on everything. OK that's right and you can understand why things have gone there by the hand. However that's because you just measure things in dollar terms. We're talking about trying to change things in such a way that people can actually continue to live in this region in ways that are as an exploitive of one another as possible. We have small pieces of land in New England for another thing another reason small farming is very appropriate for us here is that we have hilly rocky land that doesn't lend itself well to great big equipment or even great big holdings our river bottom I guess.

But we don't hear much of that. But the whole business of it. What can happen in farming communities when the farms are doing well versus what has happened in our rural communities where farming has been going out where we've lost our economic base where it continues to decline where families are having to split up and commute 20 miles to work to a job just to stay in the community where perhaps they were born or they've moved because they love it where we don't have a base that is built on the natural resources our land and our and our forests. Right now. So that when you begin to talk about efficiency you also need to talk about effectiveness and integration was what's going on people's values what they want to see happen. Nobody wants to be vulnerable. I am hoarding all our food banks is terribly vulnerable to outside influences problems blizzards strikes gas shortages. It

also means that we've eroded a lot of what we what we were built on originally. So it's a it's an argument that can go on forever depending upon how you want to define your terms. But if you're talking about agriculture as part of the culture which many riders hand and our way of life and our way of earning a living needing to be better brought together. That's been a problem for many people. Then you start thinking of small farms and the New England landscape as being things which may go together well will bring in dollars. Will began to help make our area more healthy and a whole lot of ways and maybe just looking at theoretical dollar returns and cost benefits which don't take into consideration anything but just strictly care might become more attractive to people all over the place including agricultural

economy. Ellen I want to ask you some questions about pigs me precious at least about your yours and your husband's hog farm. How many pieces do you have. Well right now we've got 30 I d say pigs or hogs whatever happens to come to mind at the particular moment all right. Thirty five hogs Yorkshires. OK. Before we began taping us said and they're really very nice the pigs they're very interesting women they're very smart animals. They Well we never saw you know that because we had to. What what color are they. You actually has happened to be white. There were I can OK that's what I was saying. Yeah and the kind they are. So you have 35. But how many do you really need to operate and make a decent income from pigs to make a fairly decent income for a family of five. You'd have to have at least 40 cells producing approximately

figuring that a low average four hundred piglets a year. I see and they yeah. And you sell them they produce the piglets in the spring. Want to Seems nice a year twice a year twice a year to literacy a year and when do you sell them or does it depend on the kind of peculiar reason for well actually asked about what do you raise them for. OK we raise both feeder pigs which are eight week old piglets that you sell to a feeder operation. They race them out and usually our spring piglets go for feeder pigs because the price of feeder pigs is high in the spring. Our fall piglets we race out for market hogs because it's nice a market hog is between 200 and 240 pounds ready for slaughter. It's six months old it becomes big. Right right right. We keep the fall piglets for market hogs because the price feeder pigs is lower in the fall. Where do you sell them. Right now we've been able to custom

sell we sell directly to the consumer they buy the pig live and then we bring it to the slaughter house and they pick it up there but hopefully slaughter OK in our area there are there are several in Connecticut the one that we use is in southern tip. Well what I really was after was how how far away is already five miles 45. So you must have how many trucks that you have to ship to man or do they come and get them. Oh no no we ship them because it's more economical. Do you have your own trucks or do you contract with some you know we have our own. So we raised them out so that you don't ship more than 10 at a time because we only have a small truck. I see what I have of course was trying to also get at was the amount of equipment that you have even with have to have even with hogs. Which you don't think of as you know like you don't need a big harvesting machine or is it with hawks but you've got to have trucks you've gotta have this and that. The equipment is in this demanding for hogs as it is for other areas in the room. The actual space that the animal needs his

highness Larch which is one of the reasons that we went into pigs because we couldn't afford to buy the land to you know dairy farm. How many how many acres do you have. We have eight and a half that we own and then we lease about 100 more but that's mostly Haley and wood lot. I see and do you also do Hey thank you. Yeah. How would you do with the hay. We custom hay we sell hay. We are a small diversified farm we will do anything to turn a buck. What do you feel. Thanks. We feed our pigs grain. It's a swine ration. That's batched at the local grain greenery and it's corn and soy way and all the good things that pigs need do you see is that it is that grown locally or does that imported do it's shipped here. Do you think from from elsewhere in New Englanders I would say probably from the Midwest. So so it it sounds like it's not just that it's our food that we're importing it's also what we're

feeding our animals so that we can have food that seems a real pity I didn't I'm sorry. A lot of the the big hog farmers in Connecticut they are probably garbage fed operations. Now wait a minute what's a big hog farm. 75 or 80 sow's minimum you know and it's garbage in garbage out operations. Do you mean my coffee grounds and that kind of garbage you know literally literally you know there's a particular hog farmer that I know he has a dumpster service and he runs himself red orange so yes he has four or five dumpsters on the road and he picks up. Everybody's garbage. Personally I'd rather feed grain because you don't like the garbage. I wonder if you charges that people to pick up his cart because I was sure yeah that sounds like you know settling. Yeah but most of your smaller hog farmers are our grain fed because they don't have the land and it's not you know a

people a lot of people still haven't 1030 is attitude towards pigs and what does that mean. Well so many people that I've said Well I don't like pigs because I remember when I was a little girl the man next door to us had this pig in this big mud hole and that was look comfortable to me. Well it is very comfortable for the pig but it's not all that healthy either. But your smaller operations are usually confinement. They're either on concrete or they're in rotated patterns so that you can keep them cleaner and you can't feed them garbage because you don't have a large area. The garbage operations have are rather odiferous but it's not that it's not the pig that gives off the odor it's the garbage that he doesn't eat. I see. We could probably go on indefinitely on pay yes and many more we can't use I don't want to say something and when I was done yes I wanted to ask Ellen something Ellen and her

husband have been working with the state of Connecticut to become recipients of our beneficiaries of a new law which has been passed down there that is very much like Massachusetts agricultural preservation restriction. I wondered if you talk about that a little. And also I was wondering if you could spend a minute. You will stay small farmers. With all his work and effort and worry well the land preservation act in Connecticut I'm by no means an expert on it but we have been working on it. A friend of ours who has a hundred fifty acre dairy farm had asked us if the state would consider his farm as one to receive the development rights he wanted to offer us partnership in the farm. Because he's a single guy and has no one to give it to and we went to work and there were a hundred thirty two applications for the development rights in Connecticut and

10 farms are being purchased and his application number one. Maybe I should explain just a little bit about it. We don't really have enough time. OK. And I'm very sorry this development Rights Act basically compensates. Keep sacred cultural land you know agriculture rather than being so likelihoods in time are still owns the land farmers to Lansing just can't develop it. Yeah. Why do you stay small. I wouldn't want to be big. I want to know my animals I want to know what they're doing. I feel that you can run a more efficient operation on a small farm because you know them like I speak of animals. We're not into produce ourselves. And I like having the kids around having a house. I've been talking with people from the New England small farmer project Ellen la Riviere who's a small farmer in Connecticut and pet sacré who's the director of the New England small farmer Project thank you both very much for coming and I'm sorry

we've run out of time. The book worms turn is a production of the Jones library of Amherst which is a member of the Western Regional Public Library system. Our engineer this evening has been Sheldon Katzman. This is Ann Turner. Goodnight I want. The. Time is heard weekly at this time with the cooperation of the Jones library.