If you want to see farmland, you need to support that.
Farmstone exists on their own.
My name is Andy Pollock, and I own Silverbrook Farm here in Dartmouth, Mass.
We cultivate about 40 acres of produce.
Eggplant, onions, tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes.
We use chickens as a source of fertilizer.
They're manure is great in the field.
We have turkeys that we're raising.
We are growing mushrooms, both shiitake and wine cap mushrooms.
Last year, we produced 10,000 jars of gems.
This year, we're trying mustards, and we have four varieties.
The farm's probably one of the oldest continually farmed piece of land in the Commonwealth.
John Howland fell off the Mayflower.
His brother arrived and converted to Quakerism, was kicked out of the colony
for it and started this farm here.
My parents bought it in the 1950s and had it as a horse farm.
And that's where I grew up.
My father died 20 years ago, and my mother struggled through Alzheimer's.
So in 2000, moved back to the farm when she went into a assisted living facility.
And had been about 15 years of what I call Yankee maintenance, which is things
were just kind of left to themselves.
It was years of starting an infrastructure basically from scratch.
So we went from a small greenhouse to two to three to six to seven.
Currently, we have a wind turbine that produces about a third of the energy that we need.
We use organic techniques that protect the soil, the watershed, and the employees
from dangerous or harmful chemicals.
We chose to put the land in an agricultural restriction, so this old farm will always be a farm.
We can't produce everything.
We don't want to produce everything.
And there's other farms that are good at producing certain things.
We take about 40% of one farmer's corn crop.
If we can be the conduit for other farmers so that we can bring a larger package of goods
to market to a CSA, we're doing well.
The CSA is a consumer-supported agriculture where people buy shares of the farm.
It's almost like opening a Christmas package every day.
We try to have a top quality and a variety.
We also send out recipes, lists of what they're going to get, and pictures of the farm so
they feel more connected to what they're purchasing and to the whole idea of supporting
local agriculture.
We're able to, with the CSA, bring product into an area where there is no food choices.
They call them urban food deserts.
So we're looking to see if there are more opportunities for us to partner with other
organizations so that we can bring food into areas like that.
Farms exist by people spending a few dollars a week in purchasing a little bit of food
when it's seasonal.
That step creates enough demand that keeps farms in business, keeps them from being
developed and provides a beautiful landscape for us all to enjoy.
