Redshirting: The Schultz Family’s Long Road to Red Shirt Farm

Originally published in Edible Berkshires, Fall 2018. By Claudia Ricci.

Jim and Annie Schultz had only been farming full time for two years at Red Shirt Farm in Lanesborough when this piece ran, but Jim was already pushing the envelope on what it means to be an organic farmer: no pesticides or herbicides, even organic-approved ones, heritage breeds of chickens, pigs, and turkeys, and tillage kept to an absolute minimum. The couple’s 13-acre farm had been a long time coming, and thus the name. A “redshirt” in college sports is an athlete who sits out a year to get bigger and stronger before competing. Jim and Annie fell in love three decades earlier, when Jim worked briefly at Caretaker Farm, the 30-acre organic farm in Williamstown where Annie grew up. They married and in 2000 bought the Lanesborough land they still farm.

At the time, with two small children, Jim was teaching biology at Taconic High School in Pittsfield and transitioning into a technology coordinator role. Annie, trained as a dancer, was a stay-at-home mom giving dance and creative movement lessons. Over the years the gardens grew bigger, and about eight or nine years in they began raising chickens, pigs, and bees, later switching from commercial hatcheries to small breeders that specialize in heritage breeds. Their first CSA customers were a couple of friends; the numbers doubled and tripled every year after that, reaching 85 by the time of this article. But it wasn’t until Jim retired from Taconic, two years before this piece ran, that he began farming in earnest.

Like all farms, Red Shirt is a grueling seven-day-a-week enterprise. Jim was up at 4:30 every morning and working from 6:30 a.m. until dark. Annie, who went back to school in 2008 to become a nurse, worked full time as a clinical team leader in orthopedics at Berkshire Medical Center. “I feel I have a natural calling to be a nurse,” she said. “It’s a very satisfying career, I love it!” She holds a degree in social services from The Evergreen State College, a master’s in dance therapy from Lesley College, and a bachelor’s in nursing from Elms College. When Annie got home from the hospital, a full plate of farm chores waited for her: managing the CSA, teaching customers how to cook unfamiliar vegetables like kohlrabi, making elderberry syrup and fire cider, yogurt and kombucha, running the slaughter, evisceration, and packaging of chickens, doing the farm’s bookkeeping, and canning 40 jars a year of her “Bad Girl Salsa.” “Basically,” Annie said, “if we’re going to eat something, then we’re going to grow it. We have meals where absolutely every component of the entire meal is raised by our hands.”

Jim started dreaming about becoming a farmer back in high school, but after graduation he enrolled as a pre-med student at Williams College. He took a year off to study small-scale sustainable agriculture at Sterling Institute in Vermont, and eventually left Williams to apprentice on a variety of small New England farms. He studied renewable energy systems and sustainable agriculture with leading scientists at the New Alchemy Institute in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and completed his undergraduate degree at Evergreen, where Annie had also gone to school, helping run the student organic farm. Later, Jim earned a master’s in education at UMass Amherst, and then, with a young family and a big mortgage, launched into his 26-year teaching career, keeping the dream alive through workshops, reading, and research.

The farm the Schultzes built is a green, rolling parcel just off Route 7: a farmhouse surrounded by flowers, fields of vegetables, and pastures for chickens, seven charcoal-colored pigs, and turkeys roosting in a handmade wagon fashioned from an old hay wagon. Take the greenhouse they built the year before this piece ran. Jim had read about a Colorado grower at 10,000 feet who heats his greenhouse with a “climate battery,” or Ground to Air Heat Transfer (GAHT) system, sometimes called “a poor man’s geothermal”: warm, humid greenhouse air is funneled through underground pipes, storing summer heat in the soil for use through fall, winter, and spring. With it, Jim could hold the greenhouse at 40 degrees in cold weather, though starting tomatoes in March still needed supplemental heat, an engineering problem he was actively working through with grant-funded feasibility studies.

By the time of this article Jim had raised more than $100,000 in federal and state grants for projects on the farm, including a USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service grant for two high-tunnel greenhouses, a Berkshire Agricultural Ventures grant for the climate battery, an MDAR Food Safety Grant for vegetable wash areas and a walk-in cooler, and two grants for solar photovoltaic panels that provide all of the farm’s electricity. He works with the Bionutrient Food Association to test every plot yearly and balance key soil minerals. “Soil is alive,” Jim said. “Most plants spend 50% of their energy putting sugars into the soil to feed microorganisms. And then those microorganisms create a huge web that brings minerals back to the plants. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. By tilling, you break down the highway that brings those nutrients to the plants.” Red Shirt practices “organic no-till,” one of only a handful of Berkshire County farms doing so, and was invited to join a study of the practice by the Northeast Organic Farming Association.

Jim is a purist about heritage breeds, too, and about not using organic pesticides or fungicides at all. “If we are experiencing pest problems, it’s because of my management,” he said. “If I have pests, it means my plants aren’t healthy enough. Plants that are very healthy are able to ward off insects.” Red Shirt raises Buckeyes for meat and Black Australorps for eggs, birds that live one and a half to two years on pasture, versus the Cornish Cross that accounts for more than 99.9% of chickens sold commercially and is bred to be slaughtered at six or seven weeks. Jim and Annie have a term for industry advertising that portrays factory farming as bucolic: “greenwashing.” “Industry advertising uses environmental euphemisms that people want to hear,” Jim said. “They’re making it seem environmentally friendly when it isn’t.”

The hillside orchard, with apple, pear, Asian pear, peach, chestnut, mulberry, and cherry trees, uses a permaculture technique called hugelkultur, German for “hill-culture”: fallen trees and brush are cut into pieces and distributed around the trees so the soil becomes spongy and rich in fungus, while berms and swales cut into the hillside slow water draining downhill. “We’re catching every drop of water we can,” Jim said. Keeping up with it all takes help. At the time, Red Shirt employed three apprentices in their 20s who earned room, board, workers’ compensation, vacation days, and a biweekly stipend; two high school students worked part time through Berkshire Works, an organization that finds employment for young people with challenged backgrounds; and Roots Rising, an agriculture-based youth development program, sent a dozen students one day a week over the summer. “They were critical to our success this summer,” Jim said. “It would have taken me and an apprentice a week to harvest all that garlic. We love them and they love us, and I sure hope they will be back.”

The article didn’t gloss over the cost of that pace. “I love being on a farm. I love farming. But it’s not my passion,” Annie admitted. “If I had my fantasy, the farm would be smaller. There is not enough time to stop and sit.” A dancer, she would have loved more time at Jacob’s Pillow and the Berkshires’ other cultural offerings. “Our time together is spent working,” she said. “Our dates are doing chores. We have to strike a better balance.” Jim agreed, framing Red Shirt as a young start-up business making a big upfront investment of time now, with the idea that they could slow down later. He wasn’t ready to call the farm a dream come true. “It’s a dream in the making,” he said. “The challenge is finding a balance, how to make the farm economically viable while also making it work as a lifestyle.”