Shewatuck Farm Incubator
On 91 Acres in North Kingstown, a New Way of Farming
If you want to challenge and change current conventional agricultural practices to ones that are more equitable for workers, produce healthier food, benefit and protect the land being farmed, bring the community closer together and grow fresh food for people in need, you must be intellectually and financially adventurous.
Those qualities led retired publisher Rick Pace and former publisher and business colleague Peter Gengler to seek, along with the help of David DeFrancesco and Christian Roberge, a $2.9 million community facility low-interest loan from USDA Rural Development to start the Rhode Island Farm Incubator in 2017–18. The 91-acre plot of land in North Kingstown (previously a tree nursery) was purchased from the Schartner family in 2017. DeFrancesco and Roberge were friends and colleagues from working several years at Schartner Farms, a 102-year-old family enterprise whose berries and pies made it an institution for generations of tourists headed to the beach.
Both DeFrancesco and Roberge, who brought their contacts, experience and knowledge to the incubator project, are co-founders and co-administrators of Shewatuck Farm, a GAP-certified organic vegetable, herb, mushroom and flower farm established in 2019. Over the last three years, they’ve used 20 acres, but only farm eight to 10 acres each year.
Shewatuck is named after a Narragansett village, meaning “between two streams,” and DeFrancesco says, “It gives us a sense of belonging to something that was here before us and will be here after us. We are taking the knowledge of people in the past and applying it to our current set of resources.”
Though DeFrancesco and Roberge oversee all operations on the farm, they are also considered among the group of eight Fellows at Shewatuck. Roberge has the title of marketing and sales director, but he is also the resident plant expert, specializing in seasonal crops of elderberry, turmeric and ginger, and he puts in a lot of tractor time. DeFrancesco is farm and property manager, spurring an agro-ecological restoration plan for Shewatuck and also looking for value-added products to make it financially successful.
Such products include honey, elderberry syrups and adding pick-your-own options for flower bouquets, sunflowers and pumpkins.
Other current Fellows are Sarra Sundstrom, who works to bring people onto the farm— volunteers, workshop attendees—and is developing a farm-to-table dining program. Jo Anna Cassino utilizes Shewatuck herbs for a line of hair and skin care products, herbal teas and tinctures.
Artist and farmer Violet Anderson uses farm experience she gained at Big Train Farm and now grows at Shewatuck. Liam Dillon pays close attention to bare-ground growing and cultivation—to minimize the use of plastic and promote agro-ecological practices. And Charlotte Uwimpuhwe incorporates the farming methods of her native Rwanda and the United States to grow New England vegetables and herbs for her own enterprise at farmers markets and for other farmers.
Uwimpuhwe was already a farmer when she came to Shewatuck (she also farms at Urban Edge Farm, in Cranston), and she had things to teach DeFrancesco and Roberge, according to them. But several of the other Fellows, notes DeFrancesco, “needed a good amount of hands-on experiential training, such as getting used to the equipment.”
The crux of the incubator idea for Pace (treasurer and self-described “ethicist”) and his co-administrators is to encourage and teach regenerative farming practices to people who want to learn to farm as a business: to understand, from the ground up, the economics, the ecology, the energy and enthusiasm it takes to make a farm a success.
The incubator project is not currently planning to subsidize land purchases, but it does provide compensation to Fellows through things such as equipment, fertilizer, preparation of the soil, partnership in tasks such as cleaning and packaging vegetables, staffing the farm stand, etc. Shewatuck is intended to be run as collaboratively as possible and in close contact with the community surrounding the large corner they inhabit.
It is on the edge of that corner where the summer-through-fall Friday-afternoon farm-stand (3 pm to dusk) will be open (in lieu of attending farmers markets around the state). An extra draw for the farmstand are food trucks—ranging from pizza to empanadas to barbecue.
In addition to their own products, Shewatuck will offer Pat’s Pastured eggs and frozen meats; Cassino’s teas, tinctures and body products; Uwimpuhwe’s herbs and veggies; and specialties from neighboring farms or artisans. They also have a monthly and weekly CSA (with online signups and no seasonal cut-off).
In the wider Rhode Island community, Shewatuck sells fresh produce to restaurants in Newport such as Yagi Noodle, and Duck Press (Wakefield), Back 40 (North Kingstown) and Celestial Café (Exeter). For reaching out to those in need, Shewatuck has a wholesale contract with Hope’s Harvest, a hunger relief organization, for 10,000 pounds of food. Shewatuck also supplies the North Kingstown Food Bank, The Jonny-cake Center and the Exeter Food Pantry.
“We’re trying to build a big community, centered around quality food and working together and being stewards to the land,” Roberge stresses.
“Having a diverse vegetable farm, you need a diverse community to support it,” he says. “Chefs to purchase, volunteers to work events, CSA members, the everyday person to buy vegetables, the larger grocer to buy your bumper crop, your blogger to get the word out, and increased financial support for this nonprofit. It takes a whole community to support it.” MaeGammino.com
Johnette Rodriguez is a food, travel and arts writer published in Yankee, Saveur, the Boston Globe, SO Rhode Island and the Westerly Sun.
Shewatuck Farm
140 Exeter Rd., North Kingstown
401.294.3907; RIFarmIncubator.org
(The farmstand is located just down the road, east of the farm entrance. Open F, 3 pm to dusk, summer through fall.)
