photo by Lara Herscovitch
First, thank you for taking the time in the heart and heat of the summer farming season – I know it’s a busy time of year!
Well I’ll start by saying that we have a great team here, so I’m not ever doing this alone. And also — I’m not going to lie — it’s nice to be inside in some air conditioning for a minute!
As someone who enjoys tending a small container garden, I can’t imagine full-time and full-farm growing – I’m sending so much respect to you and the team for all that you do.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Do you come from a farming background?
It’s funny, when people meet me at Massaro Farm, many assume I am a Massaro myself. I’m proud to manage the farm, but it’s not my family name, I didn’t grow up on this land. The Massaro property is actually owned by the Town of Woodbridge and is leased to our non-profit — so I also won’t be leaving it to my children someday, in the way that farming and farmland is often handed down the generations.
Where did you grow up?
Long Island, in the suburbs close to New York City. There were no farms in my neighborhood, and I can’t think of anyone I knew growing up who had a vegetable garden. Only trees, shrubbery and ornamentals around my house and the houses in the neighborhood.
But I did love food! Still do. I remember my first trip to an all-you-can-eat buffet — Bob’s Big Boy — I wanted to try everything… and I still have that problem. [laughing]
But I never put a thought to where my food came from. It just came from the fridge, or the supermarket, the local pizzeria, bagel shop, chocolate shop, fish store.
And the freezer, most of it in plastic.
Yes. What I knew and thought about related to farms was — cows, chickens, pigs, horses, tractors, maybe corn… I don’t know if I ever made a thoughtful, conscious connection between food and farms.
And becoming a farmer? That is something that I never put a thought to. If someone asked me during my youth, the chances of my becoming a farmer — the answer would’ve been close to zero.
Same with my classmates. Most of our parents were professionals of some sort, working in the city. We were expected to grow up and wear suits to work. My high school didn’t have an Ag department. We had a business department, computer and photography classes, classes in law, and a mock trial team, which I was on.
Was there a moment that – sorry for the accidental pun – planted a seed for you in considering gardening or farming?
Overall I think it was my love of playing sports combined with my environmentalist leanings and my love of food. But for a seed that was planted, I remember in my high school health class, my health teacher, a former athlete himself, told us about how eating right could help our performance. At the time, I had a two-Pepsi-a-day habit, plus a bottle of Snapple Iced Tea. I cut them from my diet and started to eat better.
Then in college I started making more of my own food choices. I had discussions about where our food comes from, how far food travels to get to us, and about conventional versus organics.
I was studying Music and Religion, and I was still very far from any idea of actually farming. But when graduation neared, I thought about the gaps in my education, and what I still wanted to learn. After going through 20 years of schooling, none of my classes — at any level from kindergarten on — offered anything to do with growing or procuring my own food, something so essential to everyone’s existence.
Absolutely. I didn’t start really learning about it until probably my late 20s. What type of work did you move into after graduation?
I knew I wanted to work outside, and I had helped run the Outing Club in school, so I started in environmental education and hands-on field science. I worked with school groups of all ages, led summer trips in the wilderness. We taught wilderness skills, natural history, ecology, geology; I kept finding myself talking about the connections between “wild lands” and farm lands, mountain snows and fertile soils, protecting the rivers, protecting our food sources.
I gardened in my free time, joined a CSA, helped out a local farmer… until those things were dominating my time and my thoughts, and I applied to a farmer-trainer program at UC Santa Cruz, where I lived, worked, and studied on the campus farm for the six-month program.
I didn’t know for certain what I would do when I finished, but I knew I wanted to learn more.
I appreciate that following or trusting your curiosity. What did you do after the program ended?
Happily, I got hired to stay on the farm there for a year and help teach the next cohort. After that I came back east for a job with the Food Project in Lincoln, Massachusetts, outside of Boston.
At the end of 2009, I caught word of an opportunity outside of New Haven, to start up a new community farm. The community wanted to grow organically, have a CSA, donate produce to hunger relief agencies and offer farm education programs. This was exactly the work I was doing, and it was an opportunity for me to start something from the beginning — help build it from the ground up.
The original caretakers of the land were the Paugusset and Wappinger tribes. The Massaro family had a small dairy farm here over two generations, but it had been out of production since the 1990s. The hope was to protect the farmland and create a farm that would be a true community resource. It could have easily been changed into baseball fields, with the word “recreation” in the conservation easement, but the farm idea won and I was brought in to get the farm up and running.
That’s an inspiring community decision to hear about.
It really is. And it’s particularly special because land use choices often limit farming opportunities, but this is one of the ways to keep farms in communities.
I imagine there must have been a new learning curve around creating a community farm?
Definitely. There wasn’t an existing farm operation in place to build off of, but there were lots of ideas and visions from the community about what could happen here. It couldn’t all happen at once of course, but I understood that people would need to see some level of transformation and success fairly quickly.
As a first-generation farmer moving to a new place, I didn’t have a local network of farmers to lean on or draw from, and this isn’t an area with a great density of farmers or agricultural infrastructure. I knew that I would need lots of help for this to be successful — mentors, allies, connections, supporters — and that building community of all kinds would be critical.
NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, was one of the resources I looked to first; I went to their farming conferences in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. That helped me to keep learning and meeting people. Eventually I joined the board of CT NOFA, where the mission is to support the growth and viability of organic agriculture, organic food, and organic land care here in Connecticut.
I also connected with new and young growers throughout the state, other first-generation farmers, who were dealing with the challenges that are common for young farmers to face across the country: access to land and capital, climate change, managing pests and diseases, finding scale-appropriate equipment, identifying local resources and service providers, balancing immediate needs with long-term needs. This led to the creation of the New CT Farmer Alliance.
So I ended up being involved with multiple groups of people who wanted to see farms and farmers be successful, and who wanted that success to be rooted in ecologically, socially and economically just principles.
So much of our society feels so – again with an accidental farming pun – siloed right now, it’s inspiring and refreshing to hear about a holistic vision that includes the ecology around all of us. Is there a local New Haven farming network as well?
Yes. There is a great community of farmers, gardeners and food supporters in the New Haven area, and I think it has grown a lot over the years. I want to give a particular shout out to CitySeed, which has been central to the local farm and food scene here. Going to the CitySeed markets each week to meet and talk to people and being a vendor there was really important for me personally, and has played a role in the growth and success we’ve had at Massaro.
Looking at the hazy, smoke-filled sky today, I’m reminded of how profound our environmental challenges are. I imagine you’ve seen alot of change in the time you’ve been there?
Yes — this is my seventeenth year. And a lot has happened over that time. Wildfires affecting the air like it is today, hurricanes, blizzards, droughts, heat waves, heavy storms.
Do you remember the top-five core values exercise from Cohort 30? I wonder how your own personal core values intersect with the vision or values of organic farming.
We did do that — it was a powerful exercise. I’m not sure if I remember all of the ones that I wrote, but I remember my number one: kindness. Because I think without kindness, everything else is pretty difficult.
Community is one of the values that’s really core as well. And it’s the kindness in the community, I think, that makes the community work, or that makes it feel welcoming, inclusive.
Honesty was one as well; I try my best to be both direct and kind — telling tough truths or dealing with difficult things, but trying to do it in a kind way. Also, not dealing directly with truths can be a sort of un-kindness, I think. Authenticity was there too, which is close to honesty, but I think of them as two different things — being honest yourself, versus how you relate with others and the world.
As someone who works with the earth and grows food, in addition to other people, I’m assuming you include the larger ecosystem in your core value of kindness?
Absolutely. The way I look at it with managing an ecosystem and stewarding this land, is really about care. It’s a sort of care for the space and care for a community. In a community, it includes the people who work it, the people who eat the food we grow, and the groups or spaces we are a part of.
And it also extends beyond humans, to the land and ecology. This is the space that cares for us; our ecosystem is what keeps us alive. We don’t exist separate from the Earth and the atmosphere. We’re here because of it and within it, and we need to care for it, and kindness is in that care.
Truly sustainable agriculture respects the local, natural ecology, the social ecology, and the uniqueness of our particular place — farms are interconnected with community and society.
It’s a perspective I think more people are coming around to as we’re being faced with more serious ecological threats. Thank you for sharing and for taking the time, I look forward to continuing our conversation next week!
Interview with The Circle’s Creative Director & Editor, Lara Herscovitch (Cohort 10). To reach Lara directly: thecircle@clpnewhaven.org or Lara@LaraHerscovitch.com
Learn more about Massaro Community Farm, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut, the New Connecticut Farmer Alliance, and CitySeed
Connect with Steve directly at Facebook or steve@massarofarmcsa.org