Farming’s in the family

9th generation tends Hatfield’s Bardwell Farm

By E LIZABETH L AFOND C OPPEZ Special to The Republican

Harrison Bardwell isn’t your typical 26-year-old, working various jobs to find his path. He found his passion at age 10 and today he’s making significant impacts both regionally and globally, one vegetable at a time.

Bardwell is owner and ninth-generation family farmer of Bardwell Farm in Hatfield. He farms over 30 acres and produces more than 100 varieties of crops in some of the most nutrient dense soil of the Connecticut River valley.

Bardwell Farm offers a roadside stand, a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm share program, sells produce at regional farmer’s markets and offers wholesale distribution services.

“Being in the soil and watching the plants grow and develop, and eating this fresh, delicious produce out of your backyard, is an experience like no other,” Bardwell said.

Bardwell recalls that when he was 12 or 13 years old he was bored with his usual fun playing in the dirt. “My grandparents showed me how to pick veggies, what plants looked like and gave me my first physical experience working and being with produce and agriculture,” Bardwell said. “I instantly loved it.”

The next summer, Bardwell continued his apprenticeship.

“My grandparents taught me the fundamentals of planting a seed, establishing the care and maintenance between planting and harvest and I was intrigued more and more,” he said.

By the end of that season, Bardwell had helped to produce a large abundance of vegetables.

“I recall seeing my grandfather sitting at the back porch, and I had brought a large bucket of cucumbers,” he

The new year is an opportunity to reflect on the challenges, lessons and growth of the past year, and to prepare ourselves for and dream about what’s to come. For local farmers, that’s doubly true: Most of them have put their fields to rest and they are budgeting, hiring, and making the crop plans for the growing season to come.

And at Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), it’s triply true: We’re heading into our 30th anniversary year of supporting local farms and building connections between local farmers and their communities. This landmark year is an opportunity for reflection, dreaming and action on a vast, long-term scale.

Local farms, like many small businesses, have been on a roller coaster for the last three years, and 2023 brings many of the same uncertainties. While COVID is still a serious issue, especially for high-risk folks, the urgent response demanded of businesses in the early days of the pandemic has receded. But the many social and financial harms stemming from the pandemic continue to stress businesses of all sorts.

The most visible of these harms, to many of us, is inflation. Farms — along with restaurants, grocery stores and all the other businesses that make up our local food system — are dealing with a massive surge in input costs. For farmers, this is complicated by the seasonal nature of their businesses, where many expenses accrue in the winter months and aren’t recouped until the harvest begins in the summer.

Then, because most of their products are highly perishable, they need to compete on price with products from around the globe with very different economics. This makes it extremely difficult to plan, to set prices, and to enter into contracts with any sense of comfort.

The difficulties of the current inflation cycle are connected to and compounded by the supply chain issues and labor shortages that have dogged businesses for the last year or more.

Climate change, and the increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather it brings, is another huge challenge for local farms. While farmers in the Northeast are accustomed to variable weather, climate scientists predict a range of interconnected changes to come to the Northeast. This includes rising temperatures, including more heatwaves, which stress humans, livestock, and many crops. We’ll see more precipitation, including more extreme rainfall events, resulting in fields that can’t be worked, more localized flooding, more pests, more weed pressure, and more plant disease and rot. The last two years have brought first record-setting rains and then months of drought. As one farmer shared with us, after 40 years of farming, “I now have no idea what I will plant, how much, or where, with the changing weather.”

This picture looks dire, and indeed the last several years have been uniquely challenging. Many small-business owners are just exhausted, and we know that the years to come will bring new and serious difficulties. And still, 30 years into working to build a stronger local food system, we at CISA can see that this is not the whole story.

The first piece of good news is that local farmers