Pioneering small farm saved from foreclosure

SHEFFIELD — In 1991, community supported agriculture (CSAs) in the Tri-state area was still more of a concept than a successful mode of farming. 

When Dominic Palumbo founded Moon in the Pond Farm in Sheffield, Mass., he was among the first to introduce the idea that small farms could produce high-quality produce and protein; and he was innovative in the ways that he found to market his products and to reach out to potential customers in the community. He was a constant presence at farm markets, and he was a friendly face that encouraged shoppers to follow the small-farm motto: “Know your farmer.” 

His presence not only helped sell his own produce, he was also one of the friendly farmers who made coming to a town’s weekly market fun. After two decades, it’s easier to count the towns without farm markets than it is to count those with them.

This year, however, Palumbo’s farm was on the brink of foreclosure. This reporter visited Palumbo at Moon in the Pond to try and understand what had happened.

“What’d you have for breakfast?” Palumbo asked this reporter immediately after arrival.

“… Cereal?”

“What kind?”

“Oats ‘n’ Honey.”

“Commercial?”

“Yes.”

“Eat this,” he said. He quickly provided an alternate source of sustenance in the form of freshly cooked eggs from his farm with an assortment of additional homegrown products, including  a spicy homemade green pepper sauce.

Sitting in a cozy kitchen from the 1700s with “real” food on the table, he shed light on the saga of Moon in the Pond Farm.

In 1991, he explained, local farms didn’t have sufficient consumer support.

“If you set up in Sheffield or in one of these other small towns, you never would have survived. You wouldn’t have sold anything,” he said.

For eight years, Palumbo sold his products in the green market at Union Square in New York City. Over the years, he became involved in the founding of farmers markets in Millerton and Great Barrington. Meanwhile, others began sprouting up as a movement toward supporting locally produced food began to rise.

Despite the cultural movement and the financial support it has brought, Palumbo said that it is still difficult to manage a fully operational farm.

“Local food production seems much more lucrative than it actually is,” he said.

 Most local farmers, he added, depend on one or two sources of income from outside the farm.

The reasons?

First, Palumbo said, small farms have higher costs than large industrial farms that are “massively” subsidized by the government.

An even bigger problem, though, is awareness. Although many people are now keen to know where their food has come from, the general public is still largely disconnected from food and its origins.

“Farming is a language, a complex language, and there are aspects to it that you learn from the time you are born into a farm family,” Palumbo said. “And this is what is so important to me in terms of what’s been lost. We’re now two generations away from that kind of learning.

“It’s not a job,” he said of farming. “It’s a life.

“It’s full of science and knowledge that we take for granted or we have no concept of. And if the general public has no concept of what farming is, they’re not going to support farms.”

For that reason, Palumbo found educating the public about farming to be paramount and transformed Moon in the Pond Farm into a center of immersive agricultural learning.

Roughly 10 years ago, he registered the farm as a nonprofit organization that allowed the public to participate in the farm’s mission through financial support.

To be a farmer, an educator and a fundraiser was a challenge, however.  And the slow economy in recent years took its toll, decreasing both sales and donations.

Harsh weather conditions in the winter of 2014-15 caused a spike in farm costs followed by a further decrease in revenue, overwhelming the farm’s resources.

On June 1, Palumbo began a fundraising campaign to avoid his bank’s threat of foreclosure.  He needed to raise $50,000 by Sunday, July 10.

Hipcamp, an online guide to public parks and private land that links farmers with campers, was one of many parties that helped promote the campaign. There were also a large number of local supporters who lent their names to the cause and helped with donations.

At the time of this interview, Palumbo didn’t know yet whether he would raise the money he would need, but his larger views remained consistent.   “Food and food production are responsible for the world’s health, the planet’s health,” he said. 

He attributed the global disconnect with food production to increases in diabetes, starvation, obesity and global warming.

“People talk about how being in nature changes their mood, their sense of well-being, their health. People who live on the land, who live on clean farms where they’re not being poisoned by toxins constantly, are living that life every day.

“I think that the closest we can get as human beings to a sense of creation is to participate in it the way a farmer does every single day. You are dealing with life and death every single day. You are either starting life, nurturing life or watching the conclusion of life every single day. And participating in it fully.

“Being part of that process, essentially, is the most profound and fundamental connection to our existence, and I can’t imagine anything being more spiritual than that.”

Shortly thereafter, the clock struck midday and it was time to get back to work.

On Monday, July 11, Palumbo told The Lakeville Journal that his fundraiser was a success, exceeding its $50,000 goal by about $10,000. To find his products, come to the farmers market in Millerton (for more information, go to www.millertonfarmersmarket.org).