Growing the local food system: Grow Food Northampton continues to honor the land and the people who grow on it

It didn’t take long in my time volunteering with Grow Food Northampton to be struck by just how many ways they show up for our community. During early morning shifts, the Community Farm staff guided us in harvesting produce like radishes, kale, garlic, and tomatoes that would be sent to local food pantries and cooked into healthy meals. I watched Molly, the education manager, bring school kids into the strawberry patch for a botanical scavenger hunt, and witnessed the children’s delighted faces when they were each allowed to pick one juicy red fruit right off the vine, all of them asking for more. I signed up for free classes about permaculture and soil health and how to tend to our gardens in the time of climate change.

At the start of many of these educational offerings, as a group of folks gathered inside a greenhouse or out in a field, Piyush Labhsetwar, GFN’s farm and land stewardship manager, would invite us to close our eyes, take a breath, and think about the ground below our feet. He would suggest we recall a pleasant memory of when we connected to the earth, or a peaceful moment we’ve had in nature. He would invite us to touch the land, to acknowledge it, and if we felt so inclined, to thank it.

From its inception, Grow Food Northampton has been honoring the land. In 2010, grassroots organizers Lilly Lombard and Adele Franks, with the support of over 800 petition signers from around the area, lobbied to ensure that 121 acres up for sale in Florence would be protected and preserved to remain in perpetuity as farmland. This land held a long and vital history, as the home and farmland of the Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Nonotuck people for centuries, and a place of cultivation in the 1840s when abolitionists presented ways to produce harvests without enslaved labor. After more recent years of family farms growing on the land, its future was looking uncertain.

Lombard says that’s when they took the situation into their own hands. “We searched for existing nonprofits to help us safeguard the land for sustainable farmers and gardeners,” Lombard says. “None came forward, so we created our own, and the community rallied with support.”

With close to $700,000 raised to purchase the farmland, the mission was born and the work to bring the land back to the community quickly began. As Lombard puts it, “The first years of Grow Food Northampton were truly building the plane while in flight.”

Since then, the small nonprofit has grown into a multifaceted organization, offering programs and aid through all seasons and throughout the entire community. Spring brings the start of school field trips to the farms, teaching elementary students about healthy fresh foods and where they come from. In the summer, over 400 local gardeners can be found in their plots at the Community Garden where, for a minimal sliding scale fee, they can grow their own organic fruits and vegetables. The Community Farm offers leases for land with tenure between one and 99 years to organic farmers, prioritizing people of color and other communities that have been historically marginalized by the traditional food system.

GFN’s Free Mobile Farmers Market van makes weekly appearances at 11 low-income housing sites throughout Northampton where staff and volunteers deliver produce from nearby farms, and have started several community gardens to empower residents to grow their own harvests. Even in the colder months, you’ll find the year-round Tuesday Farmers Market has moved indoors to the Northampton Senior Center, where it doubles every SNAP purchase up to $10, and gives food-insecure families a credit back on their EBT card for purchasing local produce with the Massachusetts Healthy Incentives Program.

Ensuring equitable land and nutrition access in the local food and farming system of course comes with many challenges. Climate change in the Northeast region has been seen in the form of high winds and flash flooding, witnessed in July 2023, when the Mill River overflowed into the Community Farm and Community Garden, leading farmers to lose the majority of their harvests just before the height of summer sales. Financial support to crucial programs has also been in flux, with this year marking the highest slash in government funding for SNAP in the program’s history, putting affordable access to healthy food in jeopardy. With a quarter of the Tuesday Market sales coming from families using their SNAP funds, the threat to the local food system affects not only the people who need the food, but those who produce it.

It’s a lot for an organization to take on. And even still, Co-Executive Director Alisa Klein is looking forward to the future of Grow Food Northampton, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this fall. She hopes that with the help of the Community Roots Fund capital campaign launching this summer, Grow Food will be able to not only continue its current programming, but create more sustainable opportunities for community support.

Klein says, “Like so many other local nonprofits right now, GFN is losing a huge part of our budget to the termination of federal funding sources. But our commitment to ensuring access to local farm food for all members of our community, especially those who don’t have enough to eat, and creating the long-term foundation for a resilient and just local food system will not waver.”

An exciting nod to the future has been the recent addition of an eighth lessee on the Community Farm, and, with help from New England Farmers of Color Trust and a private donor, Grow Food Northampton is offering below-market rate housing to the new farmer and his family.

Klein notes, “A huge barrier to farming is many peoples’ inability to afford housing near their farmland. In being able to offer affordable housing along with prime land on the Community Farm, we are able to provide a farmer who otherwise could not farm in Northampton the ability to farm here and grow food for our community.”

As needs continue to grow in the local food system, so do the many ways Grow Food Northampton will continue to show up, ready to honor the land and the people who grow on it.

If you’d like to donate to the Community Roots Fund, go to growfoodnorthampton.org/community-roots

Laura Spencer is writer in residence at Grow Food Northampton.