On the Job: Jim Schultz

Originally published in The Berkshire Eagle, March 18, 2023. By Tony Dobrowolski.

Jim Schultz spent 26 years as a teacher and administrator for the Pittsfield Public Schools before retiring, eight years before this interview, to farm full time. He’d been drawn to it since first coming to the Berkshires as a pre-med student at Williams College.

The path there wasn’t direct. In an environmental studies work-study course, he spent a winter living on a mountaintop in Vermont with no running water. A classmate had studied at Sterling College (then Sterling Institute), which taught draft-horse work, sheep raising, and other alternative skills. Schultz left Williams for a year to study agriculture there, then went back — and decided Williams wasn’t for him. He left for good and apprenticed for three years at a variety of operations, including Caretaker Farm in Williamstown.

Getting access to land is the big obstacle in agriculture, Schultz said, and he didn’t have family money or family land. So he went into education instead — to raise his kids, pay off a house, and buy land in Lanesborough, about 10 acres that would become Red Shirt Farm. “Then when I realized after working for 26 years that I could actually take an early retirement with a tiny pension and go back to doing what I love, which is farming, that’s when we had our land,” he said. “But now I could do what I wanted, which is farming.”

“A lot of farmers you’ll find are in the same vein that I’m in,” Schultz said. “We’re just so passionate about what we’re doing and the way that we’re farming. I don’t know if a big commercial farmer would feel the same way, but to get a piece of land, to see it develop, to see it grow really nutritious food that never had chemicals or pesticides on it, to share it with your community… in my mind there’s no higher achievement than that.”

Asked why he named the farm Red Shirt, Schultz didn’t hesitate. “You know what redshirting is right? Division 1 sports. A prospect comes in and they’re not quite ready so they sit them out for a year,” he said. “My redshirting was the 25 years I sat out while I was getting ready. Those were my redshirt years.”