We caught up with Berkshire Agricultural Ventures to find out more about their mission and offerings for food producers across the region. Read on to learn all about what makes BAV such a crucial support for the community’s farmers and the local food system as a whole.
How was Berkshire Agricultural Ventures founded?
Berkshire Agricultural Ventures was launched as a community nonprofit in 2017. Our co-founders – Neil Chrisman and Joel Millonzi – were passionate about helping farmers and protecting farmland in the Berkshire-Taconic region. In the early years, they drove around our region talking with farmers about their needs, figuring out what the gaps were and how to fill them. From these conversations, BAV developed core services to support farmers and food producers in order to build a thriving local food economy. We continue this vital mission today.
Tell us a little bit about BAV’s mission, values, and goals as an organization.
Our fundamental mission is to serve farmers and food producers. Our clients are the small- and medium-scale farms that define our agricultural region. We provide services and support to help them solve business problems, access resources and relationships, increase their resilience, and grow sustainably. By valuing and supporting farmers, our work creates a stronger and more equitable local food system that builds farmer livelihoods, expands access to local food, and keeps local land in agriculture. Equity is an important value for BAV. We recognize the historical inequities and disparities in agriculture, and we energetically support farms led by farmers of color and other members of historically marginalized communities.
What is your regional reach and service area?
We work with farmers and food producers in Berkshire, Litchfield, Columbia, and Dutchess counties. Our organizational name is Berkshire Agricultural Ventures, but our service area has encompassed this wider region from the beginning. It’s important to us to work beyond the borders of any one county or state in order to effectively strengthen our regional food system.
What offerings, services, and resources do you provide? In other words, how do you help farms and food businesses in the local region thrive?
We offer several core tools – often in combination – to help farms and food businesses grow and thrive. These include one-on-one business assistance, flexible lending, and what we sometimes call “network weaving” – sharing resources and making connections across the local food system. BAV’s business assistance includes grant-writing services, business planning, marketing support, and other professional services that BAV helps clients access at a small fraction of their cost.
Our lending work encompasses flexible, low-cost loans that give our clients – typically small to mid-sized family farms – access to financing that they may not be able to obtain from traditional lenders. All our services are geared to meeting clients where they are and building strength and resilience into their businesses. We have many repeat clients and we love working with farmers as their businesses evolve!
Describe the kind of work that goes into organizing your programs and technical business assistance. Furthermore, what efforts contribute to the funding of your grants, loans, and other financing options?
BAV has several program managers who work directly with farmers and food producers using the core tools described above. Right now, we have three strategic program areas that address specific needs in our region – our Climate Smart Agriculture Program, Local Meat Processing Support Program, and our Market Match Fund. We bring expertise in these areas to our clients – for example, we might integrate business assistance and a low-cost loan to help a farm implement new strategies for climate resilience.
Underlying all our services is the support of individual donors, private foundations, and state and federal programs. We cannot do our work without the generosity of our community! As one example, we offer low-cost loans with a high impact to local farmers – and we can only do that because philanthropic support helps us cover costs.
How would you describe your impact in the local community on a practical level, as well as the relationships you’ve fostered with farmers and food producers in the area?
BAV helps farmers grow and thrive – that’s the heart of our impact. And when farmers thrive, our whole community is healthier and more resilient. Some of the story of our work can be found in metrics – for example, BAV has made $2.5 million in low-cost, flexible loans to farmers and food producers over the past eight years. Last year alone, we helped enable $1.4 million in federal and state grants for farmers through our grant-writing services.
BAV also plays a pivotal role in supporting SNAP matching at Berkshire-area farmers’ markets, with over $100,000 in grantmaking each year to partner farmers markets. In addition to these and other tangible impacts, we are proud of our work as a connector, convener, and collaborator within the local food system. We have helped foster stronger relationships that benefit all of us!
Why is it significant that groups like yours play an active role in supporting and promoting local farms and food businesses as they develop and grow?
Farmers feed us. It doesn’t get more fundamental than that! Farming is an extremely challenging business – and with federal funding shifts, local farmers are facing even greater hurdles. We feel lucky to be doing this work in a region that overall has a good awareness of the challenges and vital importance of local farmers. It is going to take dedication and effort from our communities to help local farmers and food businesses grow and thrive.
The significance of this work extends beyond individual farms and touches so many different aspects of our rural communities – job creation, economic growth, farmland preservation, expanding food access, and increasing the resilience and diversity of our farming community.
What do you find most rewarding about your work at BAV?
It is most rewarding to know that BAV makes a real difference to farmers. We recently conducted a stakeholder survey about the impact of our services. One farmer said, “I would not have the farm I have today if it wasn’t for BAV. They allow farms to grow and feed the community.” We hear similar feedback again and again, and it’s extremely heartening and inspiring to know that our work matters to individual farmers and the local food system.
Are there any future developments or plans going forward at BAV that you’d like to discuss?
Yes! We are working to open up new market opportunities for farmers, especially in the area of farm-to-institution relationships. These have the power to create new sales channels for farmers, incorporate more healthy food into local institutions such as K-12 schools and colleges, and keep food purchasing local – which in turn strengthens the local economy and reduces the environmental impacts of long-distance food transport. Farm-to-institution work can deliver so many multiplier effects – job creation, strengthening the tax base, and more. This area is a great example of how BAV is working on a systems level to have a positive community impact. •
BAV invites farmers and community members to connect with them. To learn more about their work and how they support local farmers, as well as sign up for their monthly newsletter, please visit berkshireagventures.org. BAV is located at 4 Castle Street, Suite 215 in Great Barrington, MA. You can contact them by sending an email to info@berkshireagventures.org or calling (413) 645-3594.
