Lanesborough’s Red Shirt Farm Is Looking to Become a Hub for Berkshire Local Foods

Originally aired on WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s Midday Magazine, March 27, 2023. Reported by Josh Landes.

A farm in Lanesborough, Massachusetts is undertaking a major expansion that will add a farm store and commercial kitchen to its property along Route 7.

Red Shirt Farm sits on 10 acres in the rolling hills of Berkshire County just south of the sprawling Mount Greylock State Reservation.

“We’re regenerative farm, which means that we work with nature, and everything we do is about supporting soil health and animal welfare, which isn’t always the case on a lot of farms,” said farmer Jim Schultz. “We produced two acres of intensive organic vegetables that we raise in a no-till way, which means that we’re not turning over the soil with all sorts of equipment. And we also raise pastured heritage chickens, turkeys, and pigs. And heritage breeds are breeds that have been around for hundreds of years prior to the factory farming revolution. So, there are animals that still have their basic genetics and can reproduce naturally and grow at a natural rate, unlike a lot of the animals that are in the conventional food system now.”

Schultz, who spent years working as an educator in the Pittsfield Public School system, has been working the land and participating in the local food economy with the rest of the Red Shirt team for over 20 years.

“Since we’ve been farming, there’s been a resurgence in local food production and people wanting local foods,” he told WAMC. “We’ve seen a growth in farmers markets. We’ve been at the North Adams market for going on seven years, I think. And when we started, there wasn’t nearly as much traffic as there is now. So I think there’s been a growth in that way. And then also, in recognition of CSAs — people wanting to know where their food is coming from and how it’s grown, and knowing the farmer that’s growing it, is really what a CSA is all about. And we’ve seen a growth in that trend as well.”

The decision to undertake a $700,000 project to add a farm store and commercial kitchen to the Red Shirt property is in line with that trend.

“It’s going to be hopefully a community resource — one for the food, it’s going to be a place where we market all the food that we grow,” said Schultz. “But more importantly, in my opinion, it’s a place that we’re going to be aggregating and being a hub for all the other farmers in Berkshire County who don’t have quite the luxury that we do of being directly on Route 7. We’ve got 5,000 cars that go by us every day, 7,000 in the summer. And so it’s a perfect spot for visibility.”

Schultz has big ambitions for how the commercial kitchen can impact the local food economy.

“If you have tomatoes that are blemished, customers don’t want them,” he said. “What do you do with them? Well, we feed them to our pigs. But it would be much better if we could value-add those into salsas and sauces and things like that, can them, jar them and have them available year-round to all of our customers. We are very adamant about food security and food access, that everybody should have access to the food that we’re growing. So we’re SNAP and HIP certified, we have free and reduced shares for our CSAs. But here at the store, we also want to have our food be accessible to the entire community.”

So far, Red Shirt has raised $350,000 for the project in grants and is carrying out a public fundraising campaign to help ease the burden of debt the farm will assume to cover the rest.

Benjamin Lamb, director of economic development at 1Berkshire, said having the store and kitchen located on a heavily trafficked road will be great for the other local farms who plan to work with Red Shirt Farm to sell their products.

“From our perspective, this meets a huge gap in the region in terms of getting local food to local people,” Lamb said. “Also supporting our agro-tourism industry, where folks that come here are looking to access those really tasty, locally grown components that we have plenty of here in Berkshire County.”

Schultz says that beyond bolstering the Berkshire farming economy, the Red Shirt farm store and kitchen plan comes after a stark reminder about the role of local food producers in a system still coming out of the pandemic emergency.

“We saw what happened with the supply chains during COVID, and how the store shelves quickly emptied,” Schultz told WAMC. “And that’s because we as a nation are dependent on a food system that is shipping food from 3,000 miles away, from California, from Florida, from South America. So the importance of small farms regaining a foothold in the community and being the core resource of that community, not only for its food security, but also for community building. And I hope that’s what this project will do for Lanesborough.”

Construction on Red Shirt Farm’s new store and kitchen was completed later that year, with a soft opening in December 2023 and a grand opening in early 2024.