On a recent summer day Berkshire Grown hosted its annual farm tour for the Massachusetts Agriculture Commissioner Ashley Randle and staff from the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, as well as local and state government officials. During their visit to three Berkshire farms, the group saw firsthand how statewide agricultural challenges play out on the ground.
The day began at Gaetano’s Organic Farm in Becket, where over the chatter of hens behind her, Natalia Chihai described how her late husband Guy McKay “retired” to the Berkshires. A long-time farmer in the eastern part of the state, McKay had planned to continue his certified organic vegetable farm on a much smaller scale. After McKay’s death in 2022, Chihai has continued to renew the organic certification each year, despite the challenges it creates. “One of the problems with organic farming is weeds,” Chihai said. “You have a beautiful seedling, you work one month for the seedling to grow, and after you transplant it in the first two weeks, it’s doing great. Then the weeds start. It’s crazy the amount of work that you put in just to weed. After we started using plastic mulch technology, we started to be more efficient.”
Today, Chihai and farming partner Sergei Kim have expanded the farm to six acres in cultivation and six high tunnels. Kim holds a degree in Agronomy from St. Petersburg State University, and his training, combined with his careful use of machinery, have established efficient farming practices that enable them to run the entire production with just two people.
Tour participants marveled at the level of organization on display. Gaetano’s produces vegetables, eggs, chicken and rabbit meat, selling directly through its farm stand and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares, as well as at the Stockbridge Farmers Market. As they walked through the fields, visitors couldn’t resist tasting blueberries directly from the farm’s bushes, many of which were heavy with fruit. Kim was thrilled with this year’s blueberry harvest. “It’s been seven years since we planted these bushes, and this is our best year,” Kim said. “We’ve just been picking and picking.”
From Becket, the tour moved south to Woven Roots Farm in Tyringham, a very different operation built around a deliberately small-scale, hands-on approach. Jen and Pete Salinetti farm 2.5 acres of a 10-acre property in permanent beds, growing more than 70 different crops throughout the year. But describing Woven Roots simply as a vegetable farm misses much of what makes it distinctive. The farm offers a CSA, centered on a philosophy rooted in the relationship between land, food, culture, care and community.
With the steady hum of insects and barn swallows foraging overhead, a sense of abundance permeated the air. As she guided visitors through the fields, the new barn, and the recently-opened farm store, Jen Salinetti encouraged participants to taste ripe cherry tomatoes straight from the vine. With a staff of 11, the farm provides food for about 1,600 people every week. “One of the things you’ll notice here is that every single bed is equidistant with an aisle in between,” Salinetti said. “Over the years we determined the exact amount of space that crops need in order not just to survive, but thrive, and the crops themselves create the coverage to suppress the weeds.”
Salinetti also spoke passionately about her ambitions to make the farm a meeting place accessible to everyone, and her hopes of having Woven Roots be a fully bilingual space in their next phase of development. “As I think about our responsibility to the ancestors of this land, to my ancestors, to be in this place of giving and sharing, I know that mutual aid is something that will carry us through,” she said.
Salinetti sees the farm’s role extending far beyond food production. “I think farms have a unique opportunity and responsibility to amplify our spaces of community gathering,” Salinetti said. “People know us, people trust us. People come here and feel safe, they feel seen, they feel heard. I see that this land is so deeply meaningful to the people that come here. People say that it carries them through the week. People weep in the fields, and it’s not something that I take lightly…You’re seeing farms as a natural convening space and really seeing how food distribution becomes a model for other distributions of resources.”
Commissioner Randle was quick to agree with Salinetti. “I think the community aspect is what grounds me every day… [It is] how we can continue to make positive change in agriculture and the food system and our communities at large,” Randle said. “Two of the things I talk about all the time are leading in community and with compassion. Certainly Woven Roots embodies that every day.”
From Becket to Tyringham, the tour had already revealed two very different approaches to farming. At Lila’s Mountain Farm, the group encountered another: livestock, fiber and multigenerational stewardship of the land.
Mary Berle raises sheep across a 420-acre farm spanning Great Barrington, Alford and Egremont. The sheep are a dual-purpose flock, bred for both fiber and meat, and the farm produces all the grass and hay the flock consumes.
The flock itself carries decades of history. Berle’s mother, Lila, began the operation in the early 1970s with locally sourced sheep. It has remained a closed flock, meaning they do not bring in genetics from outside their flock but continue to selectively breed from within it, for more than 20 years. No herbicides or pesticides have been used on the farm since 1991. Berle took over management when her mother retired at 83. The resulting wool is both soft and strong, carrying with it the genetics, landscape and farming practices of one very particular place.
The view spoke for itself. Everyone on the tour agreed: Berle’s flock grazes on one of the most beautiful landscapes in the state. Goldfinches called, insects buzzed and wind rustled the leaves of the over 1,000 young trees Berle has planted to create shade for her flock. “We are finding that we need shade even in May, so I have planted a lot of different kinds of trees,” Berle said. “The problem is that if the sheep are stressed in heat, the wool breaks and you lose the crop. So, shade is really important. We have to be thoughtful about what pasture we go to and when. The sheep love it up here. I think they like the view. But if we stop here and it’s hot, they’re exposed. We lost about seven brown fleeces last year due to heat stress.”
As the tour wound down, participants shared slices of fresh watermelon and kicked up the scent of wild thyme beneath their feet. From Berle’s hilltop, the larger story came into view: Berkshire County agriculture is built farm by farm, relationship by relationship.
These three farms could hardly be more different: Gaetano’s uses machinery and intensive production to make the most of their six acres; Woven Roots cultivates just 2.5 acres as both a farm and a community haven; Lila’s Mountain Farm stewards hundreds of acres and a flock whose genetics stretch back decades. Yet all three confront the same fundamental challenges in building towards a better future. “People need capital,” said Jack Sisson-Manning, Commissioner Randle’s Chief of Staff. “Capital, land access, labor and climate are the major issues we see in agriculture throughout Massachusetts. But they’re not all as beautiful as this.”
What the tour made clear is that there is no single model for meeting those challenges. Berkshire agriculture is high tunnels and permanent beds, sheep and vegetables, farm stands and CSAs, wool and farmers markets. It is new infrastructure alongside old knowledge, machinery alongside hand cultivation, family farms alongside new businesses. Above all, it is people finding different ways to keep agriculture vibrant, resilient and rooted in place for the next generation.