Support Simple Gifts Farm in its transition year

We are asking for your help with keeping the doors open and the vegetables coming at Simple Gifts Farm.

We came to North Amherst 17 years ago, with a goal of creating a thriving community farm. We have largely succeeded in that goal, and it has been a magic time in our lives. The institution that we have built has been constructed with a generous dose of community support.

In all this time, we have been working without pay. As farmers, we are eternal optimists, and every season, we have come up with a budget that pays the bills and pays ourselves as well. Reality intervenes, and we are last on the list to get paid after buying supplies, paying our crew and keeping the lights on. We have been happy enough to keep doing the work, but the last several years have been particularly hard financially. We opened our farm store in 2017 to provide options for a broader cross-section of our community, and the first few years saw us struggle to meet our sales goals there. In the early pandemic days of 2020, our sales sky-rocketed, with our April 2020 sales on the order of 6 times what we sold in April 2019. But those sales came at a cost of increased staffing, and a constant struggle to keep up with details like changing online ordering platforms, when to open our doors again, and how to source carrots, gloves, and handwashing solution. Those sales levels were not sustainable over the long term; we have since settled to a higher level, but the roller coaster of that season was hard to take. Since 2020, we have also had weather extremes with a very wet 2021 and a dry 2022.

All of these financial and production swings have been a strong factor in causing us to seek someone else to take over the farm operation. We have been in negotiation with potential buyers since just before Christmas 2022, and have developed a high level of confidence that they can take up the torch and take our farm legacy to an even higher level. We often joke that we should have named our farm “Complicated Gifts Farm,” and it has become clear that any ownership transition will not be a simple transaction. We’ve been trying to come up with a scenario that would see this couple take over as your new farmers for the 2023 season, and it has become clear that the transaction is too complex to move forward on that kind of schedule.

We usually get CSA share payments in December and then again in the spring and use that money to fund our season start-up expenses, but we decided not to sell shares this season with all of the uncertainty around the transition. This leaves us in a position where we are short on money for starting up the season. We are planning a scaled-back farm production season, but the expenses for the season are still front-loaded at the beginning.

Thank you all for all of your support over the past 17 years; we are honored at the opportunity to be your farmers again for 2023, and can’t wait to see the changes that are in store for the future of this community farm.