When Debbie Athearn’s father bought the 25 acres that started Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown, times were different.
"He paid $7 for it in 1943, because it was land of low value is what it was considered," she said.
It was low value because it was wooded and outside of town, Debbie says. So she and her husband Jim decided to clear it and try farming.
"You know we started out basically selling from our house and going to farmers market and then our neighbor across the West Tisbury Road over here let us set up a little stand there. So anyway, started out 100% everything organic. And only sold what we grew. We quickly learned that customers want, you know, they want tomatoes in June. They want other things, so we started buying in."
They brought in their friend’s cider and apples to sell and expanded from there. Debbie believes that listening to customers and giving them what they want has been key to staying in farming the past fifty years, and in this case it was pretty easy. Other choices have been harder.
"For, I don't know, five or more years, we struggled trying to grow organic corn," she explained. "Everybody wants corn. It's impossible. I mean, on the coast, the moths travel up and we might trap a thousand moths and just over the bridge they might trap 100. So, you know, we have huge pressure here."
The Athearns decided to separate their cornfields from the rest of the organic veggies and spray carefully and selectively. And as their operation grew, they got more and more requests for meat. So they added animals — at first cattle, which had to be shipped off island on the boat to be slaughtered, and then chickens after 2010 when the island got what’s called a mobile poultry processing unit — basically a tiny movable slaughterhouse.
"We're able to get them processed here on the island, which makes a huge difference because shipping your animals off island is very expensive, but to ship the chickens off would be insane, so it's the only way we can get that going."
Over the decades there have been plenty of other regulatory hurdles to contend with — for instance, having to upgrade veggie washing and packing stations to comply with more stringent USDA regulations — but ultimately, one of the biggest challenges to running a big farm on Martha’s Vineyard has been the same one almost every growing business around here eventually faces — finding affordable housing for employees.
"In the peak we'll have about 130 to 135 employees in all the different departments. We've now completed our third set of housing, which are some cabins up in West Tisbury at the flower farm."
I asked her to explain because I imagine when you start a roadside vegetable stand, you don't anticipate one day you're going to be working to secure housing.
"No, we didn't. We had a few people early on that camped in the woods, and that was basically it. What, porta potty? What's that? Why would you want a porta potty? Things have changed dramatically."
Housing first became a big issue for the farm in the late 1980s, Debbie said, and they’ve been working it into their plans for the land, the farm, and their ever-growing grocery market ever since. For CAI’s Local Food Report, I’m Elspeth Hay.
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Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown is one of roughly fifty farms on Martha’s Vineyard, which is a lot for a 100 square mile island. Here's a map of all the island’s farms.
And here's a link to learn more about Elspeth’s forthcoming book, Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food, which is due out this July.
