At first glance, Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill is a straightforward operation. Co-owner Brian Donahue said, “we raise primarily grass-fed beef along with 10 pigs each year, grow a couple acres of pumpkins and winter squash, and we manage the timberland.” But below the surface, it’s 167 acres dedicated to conservation, experimentation and modeling of sustainable practices.
The farm is a partnership between two couples: Tom Chalmers and Joan Meyer and Brian Donahue and Faith Rand. Both couples lived and worked in Eastern Massachusetts, but harbored a shared interest in agriculture and conservation. From 1980 to 1992, Donahue helped found and then directed Lands Sake, a still-thriving nonprofit community farm in Weston, after which he became a professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, focusing his academic work on environmental history and sustainable farming and forestry.
In 2007, Donahue and Rand had been looking for farmland for a while when Donahue got a tip from a friend that a parcel in Gill was available. “Faith and I had been looking for a long time and suddenly this place popped up as needing a conservation buyer. Mount Grace Land Trust was working with the state to put it in APR (Agricultural Preservation Restriction — a farmland conservation program) when the owners decided that they needed to sell in the middle of that process, so it all happened very fast,” said Donahue. “Two weeks later, we were signed up. Tom and Joan were friends of ours in Weston, and we knew that they were also interested in doing this sort of thing, and we couldn’t do it on our own. I don’t believe in farming on your own. You need all the help you can get! So it was one of those lucky things where it all came together.”
In the early years, Chalmers lived on the farm while the others came out for long weekends, put in as much work as they could, and returned to their day jobs in eastern Mass. Now that the group is mostly retired, except for Chalmers who continues to work as an architect, they all live on the property.
“Tom and Joan bought the existing house on the farm, and Faith and I bought a lot next to it so we could build a house with timber from the property,” said Donahue, who wrote a book about this experience called “Slow Wood.”
Wood is classified as an agricultural product in Massachusetts, and forest management is both a commercial endeavor and a passion for the farmers at Bascom Hollow Farm. Donahue recently co-authored a paper, “Beyond the Illusion of Preservation,” which is an analysis of how much wood is produced and consumed in New England and explores how, with more careful forest stewardship, we could close that gap to produce more of our wood locally through ecological forestry.
“Most of our farms here are wooded, in terms of sheer acreage,” said Donahue. “It’s a very important element of land management.”
On Bascom Hollow Farm, careful management involves a Forest Stewardship Plan, developed by a consulting forester, and ongoing adaptation to conditions. “You have to harvest the wood for what the forest is telling you it needs,” said Donahue. “We’ve done lots of different things depending on what stage the forest is in, which varies across the farm: we’ve sent some pine to Maine, but we try to bring as much to local sawmills as possible. We’ve worked with Highland Community Lumber in Williamsburg, and Hall Tavern Farm in Charlemont. We had a bandmill on site to saw timbers for the house. We’ve used a diversity of differently scaled mills every time we’ve done a harvest.”
Most of us don’t buy wood products every week, so it’s not as foremost as food purchases. But, said Donahue, “we need to work to have more people choosing local wood. It makes good sense, and like local food, it benefits local economies because we’re harvesting the wood here and also processing it here. It makes a nice house too!”
The meat operation at Bascom Hollow is also tied to conservation. In 2014, Donahue co-authored “A New England Food Vision,” an analysis of how much food is produced in New England, how much could be produced, and since our land base can’t support growing all the food we need to feed our population, how farmers can get the most value out of their land.
“We have a limited amount of cropland, so the more we can shift it towards higher-value fruits and vegetables, it’s better for farmers,” said Donahue. “We also made an argument for moving meat and dairy production to grass-fed using land that is suited for that. So the way that ties in here is that we’re grass-fed beef producers and most of our open land is in hay and pasture.”
“But really, the most interesting part of that to me is bobolinks,” Donahue continues. Bobolinks are small ground-nesting birds — not always the first thought for a beef farmer. Donahue is working to change that. “Similar to how you can manage the forest in ways that produce all sorts of habitats for different animals, if you raise beef, you can harvest some of your hay lands late to support bobolink populations.”
Donahue has been working with staff from American Farmland Trust and Mass Audubon to research the conditions that allow for a late harvest of acceptable hay. “We have about 25 acres that we harvest after July 15,” said Donahue. “You need high soil pH to encourage legumes, so we add lots of lime and wood ash and the cows’ fall grazing spreads the clover. It’s decent quality for beef cows — they’re actually enjoying it right now, although they’re gazing at the pasture that is greening up just on the other side of the fence.”
Look for Bascom Hollow Farm burgers and pork chops (when available) on the menu at The Gill Tavern and other Franklin County restaurants. Eastern Mass. friends can find their meat and squash at Lands Sake Farm in Weston.
Claire Morenon, communications manager at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). To find local farms and local beef or forest products, visit buylocalfood.org.