Food, Farms, and Factories

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Crossroads: Change in Rural America
Food, Farms, and Factories

By Dr. Leo Hwang
Assistant Academic Dean UMASS/ Amherst

Take a walk in the woods surrounding any of our towns and villages and you are treading on hallowed ground. Whether you step carefully around an indigenous sacred stone structure, the traditional fishing grounds of our first peoples, or the colonial walls that once corralled grazing animals into clear-cut hills and farm fields, or whether you are wading around the vestigial remains of a sawmill, tannery, or broom factory, the sacred trinity of Franklin County, food, farms, and factories, are embedded in our communal heritage, and continue to evolve and change to this very day.

Just as the overgrown foundations and stone walls stand as testament to a past history, some of our empty or repurposed buildings recall the industry of a less distant era that fueled automation, that were settings on our dining room tables, that were integral to our tool boxes, and found in the hands of fly fishers all across the country. The products made in our region are, even now, sought after as hallmarks of craft and quality. 

Today, industry continues in small and large scales, where companies produce wire, plastics, candles, and all manner of other goods that supply people all over the country and beyond with car parts, miso, and barramundi fish. 

Farming has never left the valley, blessed with a heritage of rich soil, cursed with an abundance of glacial till, our farms have both specialized and diversified so that we share the roads and highways with tractors pulling trailers filled with their seasonal bounty, and smaller harvests with everything from mushrooms to Chinese mustard greens. Community supported agriculture has led to a resurgence in the recognition of how important farming is to our sense of identity, to the incredible variety of food we have at our fingertips. 

Sometimes, it is only when you leave a place that you discover how lucky you truly are. When someone leaves the valley and encounters food deserts, or the lack of restaurants that utilize fresh produce and locally raised meats. To live in the valley is to live in a place of bounty, a place where the leftovers can be gleaned, where the neighbors share their eggs, and where the free dinners share some of the same ingredients as the fancy restaurants.

In Franklin County, food, farms, and factories have become intertwined, not only in their history, but in how their economies are interdependent. They are our past, our present, and our future. As farming becomes more automated, as produce and products are shipped in a greater variety of destinations, as our palates adapt to different kinds of spices and flavors, so does our community grow and become more interesting, resilient, and dynamic. We are patrons of the small farm stand, the local coop grocery store, the supermarket. We are each backyard or community garden farmers, patrons of farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and other local farms. We are industrious in our garages and workshops, making everything from handcrafted bamboo fly rods, to fine cabinetry, and in our larger factories, produce everything from specialty beer to industrial duty equipment cases.

Our land is too rich to name everything that is grown, made, or consumed here, but each of us have our own favorite restaurant, our favorite seasonal dish, we have all eaten the one thing that will never be surpassed anywhere else in this world. In our rural America, in Franklin County, in our towns and villages, food, farms, and factories are not mere artifacts, restaurants, or places of employment. They are our sanctuaries, our places of worship, our visions for the future. They are the greatest part of our identity that feed our art, our economy, our sense of place, and give our existence meaning. 

One can stand beside a train track, press one’s ear onto the rail and hear the vibration of an approaching locomotive. That is our past, that is our present, and that is the future, still an eyesight’s distance away.