Welcome to the Greenfield Community Farm, a project of Just Roots
The Greenfield Community Farm is an inclusive and joyful place for our whole community: a diverse vegetable farm and education center, a community garden, and a center for engagement and deepening understanding for where our food comes from and how it is grown. The farm was started in 2012 by Just Roots. Our mission is to increase access to healthy local food by connecting people, resources, land, and know-how. We are located in the northern part of Greenfield, MA, about 3.5 miles north of the city center. Greenfield is located in Western Massachusetts, at the northern end of the Pioneer Valley, a significant agricultural region with a diverse community of vegetable, fruit, and livestock farms.
2024 marks our twelfth growing season. We will grow for our CSA members, the Saturday Greenfield Farmer’s Market, for a small variety of local restaurants, and for weekly donations to the Stone Soup Café and other local pantries.
This season we will be back at it with a variety of educational workshops, hosted both on and off the farm, for our community to enjoy! We also love getting YOU out into the fields. We offer weekly drop-in volunteer times, for all to come get dirty with us! We also host school, company and group volunteer days, if you are looking for an educational, inspiring day at the farm.
The Land we farm is owned by the city of Greenfield. The 61 acre property was once the heart of the town’s “poor farm” and for decades since has been growing primarily hay and cow corn. The property consists of two crop fields, a pasture and woodland including a beautiful brook and the nearby Green River.
A bit more history: In 2012, we seeded our fields to cover crops and helped bring our soil back into health. In 2013, we moved our Community Garden to the main section of the farm; on just over an acre we opened over 50 plots for individual gardeners and organizations to grow their own food. We have since expanded to more than 60 plots. We invested in infrastructure, building a propagation greenhouse and a high tunnel. We launched our first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Farm Share Program in 2013. Our CSA was redesigned to bring the benefits of locally grown food to low income residents of Franklin County. We offered 50 shares, paid for by matching member dollars with community dollars; a 60/40 split. Further, we allowed shares to be paid for over time. The program was first made possible through a $10,000 gift from The Franklin Community Co-op, and supported over the years by Baystate Health, Project Bread, Franklin Community Action, United Way of Franklin County, the Salvation Army, Wormtown Trading Company, Big Y, and local individual donors. In 2022 we grew to 600 CSA members with over 70% food insecure families referred by healthcare partners. Two-thirds of our home CSA membership utilized our sliding-scale payment option; one-third paying at the lowest tier using SNAP funds.
We grow over 50 different types of fruit, vegetables and herbs on roughly 7 acres for distribution through local farmers markets, community support agriculture (CSA), and wholesale. Learn more about how we grow and where our food goes including CSA farm shares as well as our local pantries. Come out to the farm for a visit. We look forward to seeing you soon. For more information contact info@justroots.org.
The Historic Poor Farm
The current Greenfield Community Farm on Leyden Road served as the Greenfield Town Poor Farm from 1849 until the 1950s. Poor farms were common throughout the United States from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1940s and 50s. Social Security, which began in 1935, ultimately replaced the role of the poor farm in American society.
The farm was sold to the Town of Greenfield on April 21, 1849 by Justin Root, the inspiration for our name Just Roots.
Since the 1950s, the Town has rented the land out to local farmers, mainly to grow feed corn. In 2009, a partnership between Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, the Town of Greenfield, Just Roots, the Pleasant Street Community Garden, and Greening Greenfield began the process of preserving the land through obtaining an Agricultural Preservation Restriction (APR) from the state. In 2011, Just Roots was awarded a fifteen-year lease on the 61-acre parcel, for the purpose of creating the Greenfield Community Farm.
For more information about the APR process, see this article by Mount Grace.
Scanned copies of the Greenfield Town Farm Reports, starting in 1881, are now available online. These are excerpted from the annual town reports that are kept in the “Greenfield Room” of the Greenfield Public Library.