Red Shirt Farm Expanding With Store/Commercial Kitchen Build

Originally published on iBerkshires.com, March 25, 2023. By Brittany Polito.

Red Shirt Farm has broken ground for a new farm store and education center on Williamstown Road in Lanesborough. Photo by iBerkshires.com.

Red Shirt Farm broke ground this spring on a new farm store and community commercial kitchen on Route 7, with a soft opening planned for December. On a site visit organized by 1Berkshire, state and local officials gathered at the 10-acre farm to hear Jim Schultz detail Red Shirt’s organic, regenerative practices and the food-access mission behind the build. “Our mission is very much values-driven,” he said. “It’s about growing good food, growing it well, and distributing it to our neighbors and our community.”

About a year and a half earlier, Schultz had joined Entrepreneurship for All’s one-year program for small businesses. People were already pulling into the farm looking for a store, so he spent that time working out how a commercial kitchen and learning space could fit the design. A survey of 100 local respondents found people willing to drive 15 to 30 minutes for local food. The 30-by-40-foot building will offer produce, meat, eggs and dairy from Red Shirt and other local farmers, plus dry and value-added goods, on a corridor that sees 5,000 to 7,000 cars a day. “What we want is to take these farms that have their little farm stands off the beaten path and give them a place where they can get visibility for what they do,” Schultz said.

The total cost is around $774,000 — roughly $675,000 for construction and $99,000 for equipment. Nearly $370,000 has been raised so far through the Farm Viability Enhancement Program, an FY22 Food Security Infrastructure Grant, a Healthy Food Financing Initiative Grant and an Agricultural Food Safety Improvement Grant, with a crowdfunding campaign and a pending FY24 Food Security Infrastructure Grant helping close the gap. The build will create two full-time and two part-time positions, and the kitchen will let the farm preserve, process and add value to its own products while opening the space to other farmers for workshops.

“Traditionally, agriculture is about killing things. It’s about herbicides and pesticides and fungicides, about tillage, about changing it to be how we want it to be but it does not necessarily grow good food,” Schultz said. “We’re about creating health in our soil, keeping our animals healthy, because all of that produces food that makes all of us healthy.” The farm offers an eight-month apprenticeship for four young people each season, works with Roots Rising, and takes part in grant-funded research on regenerative farming methods — using solar panels for a majority of its electricity and a climate battery to heat its greenhouses without fossil fuels. It also offers free and reduced-cost CSA shares to low-income families and accepts SNAP.