No-Till Mentorship

Jeremy has been a vegetable farmer for 15 years, and a farmer at heart since childhood. When he was 10 years old, his parents followed their “back-to-the-land” leanings, moving him and his sister to a homestead in central New York state. Jeremy continued farm work after graduating with a B.A. in 1993, and interned at The Land Institute in Kansas the following year, where he studied ecological farming and land use, and met his current farming partner Dave.

Jeremy earned his M.S. in Plant and Soil Sciences from the University of Maine, then founded Simple Gifts Farm at the New England Small Farm Institute in Belchertown, in 1999. Over the next 7 years, he grew the farm tenfold, from ½ an acre to 5 acres. In 2006, he moved his operation to the 37.8-acre North Amherst Community Farm and brought Dave in to join him. Jeremy has won several USDA SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) grants for on-farm research projects. He works devotedly to manage the farm as an ecological system and still feels excited to witness how much his CSA members enjoy the farm’s wide variety of quality, organic produce.

Dave grew up on a family farm in Minnesota, raising crops, cows, and pigs with his 3 sisters, father, uncle, and 2 cousins. Dave earned a degree in Animal Science from South Dakota University in 1985, then worked for a series of large swine breeding operations with 50 to 100 sows. Without the personal touch and warmth of a small family farm, he found himself thinking of the animals as mere commodities and became disillusioned with livestock farming, so he quit his job and went back to school. The farm crisis of the 1980s was in full swing, with farms failing and farmer suicide rates mounting across the Midwest, so Dave studied agricultural economics at Colorado State University, seeking to comprehend the problems with conventional farming and to explore alternatives. 

Dave finally found his answers in the next place he tried, The Land Institute in Kansas. There, he learned to look at the farm as an ecosystem in which crops and animals work together symbiotically. Dave moved to Massachusetts in 1996 with his wife, Marci. While she became a vet, he drove a tractor at Verrill Farm and raised livestock at Brookfield Farm. In 2006, Dave happily accepted Jeremy’s invitation to farm together.