Sowing seeds of progress

Red Shirt Farm to add store, kitchen

By Tony DoBrowolski

LANESBOROUGH — Motorists are often puzzled when they drive by Red Shirt Farm on Williamstown Road.

“This is what they see,” said the small family farm’s owner Jim Schultz. “You don’t have a farm store? We know there’s a need.”

Schultz is solving that problem by building a combination community commercial kitchen/farm store on the road in front of his small 10acre farm. But state legislators and local officials see this project as more than just a building. They see it as another way to tie the Berkshires into agri-tourism and the growing farm-to-table movement.

Plans call for the commercial kitchen to be available to other farmers, food pantries and local organizations interested in making their own products to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition.

Schultz expects the commercial kitchen/farm store to create two full-time jobs and have two seasonal employees.

Work on the almost $800,000 project has already begun and Schultz expects the 30-footby-40 foot structure to be open by December. He sees the facility as a year round aggregation and distribution hub for products produced by small farms across the Berkshires.

The commercial kitchen will be a licensed facility geared to extending the shelf life, diversity and consumer appeal of local food items.

Local food and agriculture are identified as an important job cluster in Berkshire Blueprint 2.0, 1Berkshire’s updated economic development plan for the county that was released in 2019.

“We don’t want to compete with the industrial farms of the Midwest. That’s not who we are,” said state Sen. Paul Mark, D-Becket, in late March when the project was announced to the public for the first time. “What we want to do is diversify. We want to be special. We want to give peo-