March is all about agriculture. Each year, during the second week of March, the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation hosts “Ag Day at the State House” where farmers, fishermen, and growers from across the Commonwealth gather to share about their work, the challenges they face, and share a few treats. I’m pictured offering a welcome.
I was glad to join my colleagues, many constituents, and stellar students from Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School to celebrate the agricultural sector and all its stakeholders.
The forestry students and I are pictured on the Senate balcony. They brought a photo of their new (and very cool) classroom as a thank you for an earmark I secured for $275,000 to help with construction costs.
Also in March, I joined district farmers, Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, and colleagues at the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting to hear about priority policies and budget priorities farmers need.
Finally, for the second year in a row, my team partnered with Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) to shine a March spotlight on five farms in the Hampshire, Franklin, Worcester district that are doing critical work to fight hunger in our communities.
This year, we focused on the potential impact of a $5,000 food donation tax credit to help offset the costs farmers incur when they donate fresh food to hunger relief organizations. This is based on a bill I filed, which Governor Healey included in a supplemental budget pending before the legislature.
Check out the five profiles, expertly collected and crafted by CISA.
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At Next Barn Over Farm in Hadley, Ray Young and their crew steward 50 acres of prime farmland, growing vegetables for 500 CSA members and for sale to wholesale customers like River Valley Co-op, Whole Foods, Real Pickles, and more.
“For us, donating food is part of our mission and it always has been. We really believe in food equity—that everyone should have access to good healthy food,” says Ray. To that end, they have built regular donations into their season: Rachel’s Table regularly brings volunteers to the farm to glean crops for donation, they make twice-weekly deliveries to the Amherst Survival Center, and they make bulk donations to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts when there’s a bumper crop.
In many ways, this is built into their operation: in order to grow enough food to meet all their sales commitments, farmers have to plan in some extra. But, says Ray, making sure that extra doesn’t go to waste comes with costs. “There’s the cost to grow and harvest the produce, of storing it, coordinating the donations, and packaging – we’ll even buy special bins for the big deliveries to the Food Bank,” says Ray.
“It’s actually kind of shocking that we don’t already have a state tax incentive for farmers to donate food. For any single farm like mine, we’re already making tens of thousands of dollars in food donations, maybe $100,000. I think people understand that margins are really tight in farming, so little bits of support really help. If we were seeing any money back from donations, could we grow more, salvage more food, make sure we go the extra mile to harvest everything? One hundred percent. And there’s a lot of potential to bring in farmers who aren’t already doing this. So much of the infrastructure is already there – we don’t need to build a whole new food recovery system. We’re just talking about how to make it better.”
In any given year, Wally Czajkowski and his crew grow between 200-300 acres of vegetables in Hadley – making Plainville Farm one of the Valley’s larger growers, selling wholesale to distributors and grocery stores throughout the region. Grocers have extremely stringent cosmetic requirements for produce, so a big operation like Plainville Farm generates a lot of good food that they have limited options for selling.
“When you’re out in the field picking something it looks good, but then when we bring it in to grade it and pack it, it’s not quite perfect. Well, it’s not cosmetically perfect, but it’s perfectly edible, safe, and delicious,” says Wally. “In that case, we’ve already harvested it and sorted it, so we set it aside to donate it. And in the summer, everything’s growing so fast that sometimes we just pick more than we can sell anyway.”
So, Plainville Farm has ongoing relationships with Food Banks throughout the state, along with gleaning organizations like Rachel’s Table and Boston Area Gleaners, to donate hundreds of thousands of pounds of food in a good year. “All the Food Banks do amazing work,” says Wally. “I love the new ideas they have, like the mobile food bank so people can go and pick out what they want – they do an amazing job of getting people what they want to eat, and they feed so many people with so little money. Rachel’s Table has been dynamite, such efficient gleaners – you should see what quick work they made of a cabbage field last fall!”
“A tax credit would absolutely help to offset some of the labor we put into this food,” says Wally. “And we’re happy to give the food a good home. No one should ever go hungry in this country.”
Clarkdale Fruit Farms is a fourth-generation orchard in Deerfield, growing apples, peaches, pears, and more. Farmer Ben Clark reports that, in any good year, they do weekly donations of fruit to the Center for Self-Reliance in Greenfield, the Survival Center in Turners Falls, and the Montague Food Security Coalition. In years that the orchard produces enough extra fruit for a bulk donation, they donate to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.
“We do direct retail at our farmstand, primarily, so we rely on community support for our business, and we believe in giving back to the community,” Says Ben. ”We participate in SNAP and HIP so we can see from our own customers that there’s a lot of need, and we know that even with those programs not everyone has access to food. We focus on deliveries to local food pantries to help make sure our community is supplied with fresh, healthy food.”
Ben estimates that they donate $100-$200 worth of fruit to each of their partner organizations each week throughout the fall and winter months, plus the varying value of gleaning from the farm. “We don’t do the donations for income,” says Ben. “We do it because we have an excess crop and that means we can help others, but there are costs: gas for delivery, someone spending the time each week making the deliveries. A tax credit would be nice for us, and I hope it would get other growers who don’t already donate because of costs to consider it – it could be attractive as an entry point for more growers.”
Photo Credit: Carol Lollis, Daily Hampshire Gazette
Thanks to Kitchen Garden for this next profile.
“We grow food because we want people to eat it. It’s a bummer to grow something and have it languish in the field and not have it go to anyone,” says Lilly Israel, co-owner of Kitchen Garden Farm in Sunderland. “Sometimes we’re donating food that is perfect and picked at the height of ripeness because too many other farmers are producing a lot of the same thing and so it’s just not selling. Some vegetables have to be picked every two to three days so the plant will keep producing, like cucumbers and squash and tomatoes. It’s so sad to have that food not eaten by anyone.”
Lilly and her business partner, Max Traunstein, grow certified organic vegetables on 65 acres in Sunderland. During the growing season, they coordinate regular donations to the Amherst Survival Center and to Rachel’s Table, which also brings volunteers to the farm to glean produce that won’t otherwise be harvested. “We really have to pay attention to labor costs so we usually can’t send the crew out to harvest something if we know it’s not selling,” says Lilly. “We love having relationships with food recovery organizations and they’re awesome to work with, but it does take organization on our end to assess what we’ve got, connect with our partners, make sure we’ve got staff to load it up, plus any labor that went into harvesting anything that doesn’t get sold.”
“Like most farms, we operate on really slim margins, so any extra money, like from a tax credit for food donation, helps us keep farming, helps keep the farm afloat,” says Lilly. “We’re a ‘large small farm’ and we grow a lot of food. We want it to feed a lot of people!”
Photo credit: Paul Franz, Greenfield Recorder
We’re wrapping up Ag Week with Atlas Farm in Deerfield with a special shout out to the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, Commissioner Ashley Randle, and Deputy Commissioner Winton Pitcoff. We have MDAR and the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner to thank for vaulting the food donation tax credit as part of Governor Governor Maura Healey’s Anti Hunger Task Force.
Atlas Farm in Deerfield is one of the larger certified organic growers in our region, and owner Gideon Porth says that they donate between 100,000-200,000 pounds of produce each year to The Food Bank of Western Mass, to local food pantries and meal sites, and through gleaning with Rachel’s Table. Typically, these donations run from late June into March – in fact, the Food Bank is still picking up storage crops from last year!
“Americans shop with their eyes, so grading standards for our wholesale customers are very strict, and there’s not much of a market for seconds. Also, a difficult part of agriculture is that overproduction is part of the norm – we can’t fall short for our customers, and of course the weather is unpredictable, and sometimes we have a really good year and we can’t sell it all. So we have two streams of donations: seconds that we’re grading out and oversupply we can’t sell. That means we have all this food that is perfectly edible and nutritious, organically grown, and we just want to get it to someone,” says Gideon.
“We approach this as a mission-based thing. It’s a win-win that we’re feeding people and getting a big volume of food we can’t sell off our hands, and if we could derive an additional tax credit that would be the cherry on top. That would be pretty cool – it feels like it would be acknowledging the good that farms are doing, providing a lot of food to people.”
