BOOK REVIEW: “A Quabbin Farm Album” by Cathy Stanton (Haley’s, 88 pages, $19.95) reviewed by Tinky Weisblat
“Food brings things — and people — together,” writes Cathy Stanton at the beginning of her “Quabbin Farm Album.” Those words speak to me, as I imagine they will to most readers in our area. Stanton is a Wendell resident who teaches anthropology at Tufts University.
Her book, illustrated with photographs by Oliver Scott Snure of Northampton as well as some archival images, profiles six farms in the Quabbin Region. It also talks about the agricultural past and future of this hilly area as a whole and shares a number of recipes from local farmers and businesses.
The book explores the different approaches to business and to the land taken by the farms. Stanton is ever conscious of the past as well as the present, pointing out that farming has never been an easy task in much of our area.
She reminds readers that Shays Rebellion protested a situation that will sound familiar to many farmers today: the difficulty of living off the land in an increasingly market- and capital-based economy.
The farmers in her book make a number of different products and adopt diverse strategies to deal with their economic situation and with the ecological and moral challenges of working the land.
For example, a young couple in Petersham has worked with sympathetic landowners and local officials to create the Neukirch-Anderson Farm, which tries to reimagine small-scale farming.
The female owners of the Adams Farm in Athol have transformed their family’s slaughterhouse (the largest in New England as of 2016) to be both efficient and humane.
Mark and Jeannette Fellows of Chase Hill Farm in Warwick have altered the way they feed their cows and changed from mostly wholesale to mostly retail sales in their dairy farm, in the process starting a cheesemaking operation that is gaining ground.
Not all of the farms Stanton profiles will necessarily last; John and Laura Moore get help from their children on an ad-hoc basis at Moore’s Maple Grove Farm in Orange, but those children are unlikely to take over full time when the Moores retire.
Not all of the farms are self-sustaining, either. Farmers in New England have traditionally often held outside jobs in addition to their agricultural work, and several of those surveyed in the book have continued along that path.
As a whole, Stanton’s book provides a picture of farmers who are working admirably to respond to the land, the community, and the market. The recipes at the book’s end provide a delicious coda to her work.
“A Quabbin Farm Album” is available at Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls, at Quabbin Harvest in Orange, at the Petersham Country Store, at the New Salem General Store, and at Haley’s in Athol, and at http://quabbinfarmalbum.com/.
Tinky Weisblat of Hawley is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” For more information about Tinky, visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com