I am delighted to present CISA’s first Legislative Hero Award to Representative Steve Kulik. Steve has represented Massachusetts’ First Franklin District since 1993—he’s celebrating his 25th year, just like CISA! The district encompasses 19 towns in three counties, and Steve has been a frequent and welcome presence in town halls, meeting rooms, businesses, and events in all of those towns for a quarter century!

Steve has taken a keen interest in the day-to-day details that make rural towns work, probably because he started off as a member of the Select Board in the rural town of Worthington. He’s paid attention to issues like education, transportation, energy, communication, and economic development, and he recognized from the beginning that agriculture and food were a critical part of the health of these communities. Steve has had an essential role in many of the long-standing state programs that support local agriculture: the Agricultural Preservation and Restriction Program, the Community Preservation Act, the Dairy Farm Tax Credit. Steve introduced the legislation that created the Massachusetts Food Policy Council, and that led to the Massachusetts Local Food Action Plan. Steve has been critical in getting expanded state funding for the Healthy Incentives Program into the budget.

Just in this legislative session, Steve has introduced six agriculture-related bills. I can’t tell you about all of them, but reading them makes clear how well Steve understands the many factors that impact farm businesses. I’ll give you just two examples—one bill gives farmers more flexibility for taking farm vehicles for short distances on the road, and one makes sure that farmers have input when town boards of health write regulations that effect farms. Just reading the bills is a reminder of how much we will miss Steve’s understanding of agriculture.

I also want to recognize the quality of Steve’s staff. For several years, Steve’s western Massachusetts office was in CISA’s building in South Deerfield. This meant we saw Steve occasionally, but more than that, it meant that we had the pleasure of interacting with his long-term staffer, Paul Dunphy, every day. I want to make sure to note that Steve’s hard work, attention to detail, and care for his constituents and their concerns was reflected by his staff.

When I asked a couple of CISA staff members what stood out for them about Steve, our Program Director Kelly Coleman said, “Steve taught us how to advocate at the state level.” She mentioned that once, long ago, in the early days of our Senior FarmShare program, we missed a deadline in the process of getting the funding for the program was included in the budget. We called Steve in a panic, and he was able to get the money in the budget, but he called us back and said: “Don’t ever ask me to do that again. These are the steps that you need to take, and this is when you take them.”

We will miss Steve at lots of different times in the coming years—during Monte’s march, and during budget season, and when a farmer calls us with a problem that we know Steve’s staff can help solve. But more importantly, all of us—farmers and residents in Steve’s district and across the whole Commonwealth—are better off because of his 25 years of dedicated service. Thank you, Steve.

Richie Davis has been reporting on Franklin County and the surrounding region for over 40 years, but it’s not just longevity that makes him stand out: his deep care for local farmers and farms and his dedication to clear communication about complex issues are what make him a Local Hero.

Richie grew up on Long Island, 20 miles from New York City, and his interest in farming stretches back to his youth. He says, “When I was really young, there were farms there – I remember visiting them as a little kid. Then they turned into houses, and so there weren’t any more farms. We’d go visit the vestiges of the old farms that were within bicycling distance of my house to take pictures. They were interesting because there’s nothing else like them in the suburbs.”

College in upstate New York introduced him to big apple and dairy operations, and when he took a job as editor of a local weekly paper after graduation he started writing about agricultural issues in that area.

In 1975, Richie came across a “Farm and Ranch Vacation Guide,” which led his young family to vacation in Lancaster County, PA, and then brought them to an old dairy farm in Shelburne. “We fell in love with Franklin County because of that dairy farm,” says Richie. “We came back a couple of times within the next year, and knew we wanted to move here.”

By 1976, Richie had taken a job at The Recorder, where he has filled a number of roles over time, but his personal interest in local agriculture has made farming a primary theme in his more than four decades of work. His feature articles, long-form pieces, and in-depth series have explored the stories, challenges, and hopes of local farmers and their businesses.

As it turns out, The Recorder has been the ideal home for this work: “The Recorder has always, like Franklin County itself, been a special place that ‘gets it.’ They’ve given me the creative space to come up with my little (or big) ‘discovery projects’ that aim to convey why this place is so special.”

Richie’s own words about his work sum up the reasons that his writing has made such a significant contribution to the public’s understanding of and investment in local farms. He says, “I think of my work as being part of the education realm. I’m trying to explain to readers why agriculture is important, even If they don’t always think it is. My feeling is that a lot of people don’t understand the pressures that farmers are under. By which I don’t mean that I have all the answers! I just ask the questions.

The bottom line is I want to get into the heart of what the farmers are dealing with, and why it matters, and why it is the way it is. I think what really moves the reader is to understand the depth of the issue for the people who are affected. Farming is so compelling because a lot of farmers can’t quite explain why they work so hard and why they do this work, except that they really love it, and they’re driven to do it. Getting a sense of that drive really gets to people. It’s that tug of emotion.”

For his fact-based reporting, dedication to nuanced communication, and beautiful, human-centered storytelling, CISA is proud to present Richie Davis with a 2018 Local Hero Award.

Bonita and Dan Conlon of Warm Colors Apiary in South Deerfield have set a high bar for local honey production, educated countless new beekeepers, and emerged as leaders and advocates in the beekeeping community.

Dan’s interest in bees started early, when he worked on a vegetable farm near his hometown in Southeastern Ohio. The farmer kept bees on the farm, as was the norm for fruit and vegetable farmers at the time, and noticed that they held special interest for Dan. He invited Dan to help out with the hives on weekends, helping to developing Dan’s nascent passion. “He was a good beekeeper,” Dan says today. “I still find myself quoting much of what he taught me.”

Over the decades—and alongside careers as a professional touring musician and in food service and administration at Northfield Mount Hermon School—Dan continued to keep bees, anywhere from two to 100 hives.

Dan leading a workshop at Warm Colors Apiary in Deerfield

In 2000, Dan and Bonita decided that it was time for Dan to pursue beekeeping full-time, and Warm Colors Apiary was born. Just six months later, Bonita was laid off from her job as a counselor, and the two of them worked quickly and hard to build Warm Colors into a business that could support them. “We got serious very quickly!” says Bonita.

Today, Warm Colors Apiary is established as one of the best-known and most highly-respected beekeeping and honey producing operations in the area. Their honey, honeycomb, beeswax products, and more are sold out of the small farm store on their property in South Deerfield, and directly to grocery stores, restaurants, and dining services including UMass Amherst and Mount Holyoke College.

Dan manages around 1,000 hives, several hundred of which are kept on the Warm Colors home site. The rest are sited around the region, sometimes to support the best honey production, and sometimes to provide pollination to other farmers. One hive of bees on an acre of cucumbers will increase production by up to 40%, so farmers will hire Dan to bring hives to their farms as different crops flower.

Another cornerstone of the business is supplying bees, hives, and equipment to beekeepers throughout the Northeast. Each year, Dan brings around 1,000 packages and nucs, which are starter bee kits, up from Georgia to fill local hives.

The final primary component of the Warm Colors Apiary business is education. Each year, 30 new beekeepers pass through Dan’s multi-session beekeeping class, and many more attend Dan’s one-off workshops and lectures. Dan says, “It’s part of our mission to educate people about beekeeping. It’s a thrill to get people who are kind of interested in beekeeping and then see how they’re awed once they start to learn about bees.”

Bees, along with other native pollinators, are famously under threat. This poses real risks to our food supply, and beekeepers have led the fight against this loss. Dan’s advocacy work, conducted through leadership roles in the Eastern Apicultural Society, NOFA/Mass, the Russian Honey Bee Breeders Association, and the Franklin County Beekeepers Association (to name just a few!), has focused on this issue from multiple fronts.

One of the main threats to bee populations are Varroa mites, which can decimate bee colonies, and which also introduce viruses. The most commonly kept honey bees, which are descended from Italian breeds introduced in the United States in the late 1800s, are highly susceptible to mites and disease. Warm Colors Apiary is part of the Russian Bee Program, which was developed by the USDA in the late 1980s to promote more resilient Russian bees to beekeepers, and to build genetic diversity and strengthen the stock.

Another goal of Dan and Bonita’s advocacy is focused on protecting habitat for bees and other native pollinators, including advocating for MA H. 2113 – An Act to Protect Massachusetts Pollinators. Says Dan, “It’s not just beekeeping for us: it’s being involved in nature, working with the educators and researchers, getting involved in the politics.”

Joanne Lennon, the Food Service Director at Chicopee Public Schools, has built a farm to school program in the Chicopee school district that stands as a model of how public schools can introduce food sourced from local farms into their menus and integrate farm and garden education into their classrooms.

When Joanne took over as Chicopee’s Food Service Director in 1991, the district’s lunchrooms were serving mostly convenience foods: “from the freezer to the oven,” says Joanne. Improving the quality of the food by reintroducing scratch cooking was the first order of business, and luckily the schools were still equipped with fully functional (if outdated) kitchens and run by staff with cooking expertise.

This dedication to serving quality food, prepared with in-house skill, laid the groundwork for the farm to school efforts that Joanne started to explore a decade later. In 2003, when Joanne was president-elect of the Massachusetts School Nutrition Association, she was part of the small team that wrote the grant that ended up funding exploratory work around developing farm to school programs in the state. Says Joanne, “No one was really buying local here at the time—it was really an up-and-coming thing, and we wanted to find out if we could do it.”

The grant, a result of the Massachusetts Vitamin Litigation Project, funded Kelly Erwin’s early work developing relationships between farmers and school food service staff. Kelly went on to found and serve as Executive Director of Massachusetts Farm to School, which continues to build and support farm to school efforts all over the state.

Although Joanne’s farm to school work goes back 15 years, it remained a relatively small part of the school district’s purchasing until several years ago. “I always tried to buy a little more local every year, and then four years ago Chicopee Public Schools got a grant from the Kendall Foundation for ChicopeeFRESH, a new program that enabled us to make more connections, set up systems that could be copied by other school districts, and do this work on a larger scale. We went from 1-2% local to 15-18% local because we were able to hire someone to concentrate on this process,” says Joanne. “It’s clear to everyone—the administration, parents, staff, students—that this work is a huge asset to the whole community, so now we have a permanent Sustainability Coordinator!”

This commitment to incorporating locally grown food and garden education into a large meal program (Chicopee Public Schools serves 10,000 meals a year, and Joanne manages a budget of $5 million!) is the result of personal conviction. Joanne says, “This is my favorite part of the job, because I grew up with a garden as a girl, and I know how important that food was in our kitchen. I want kids to be familiar with fresh vegetables, and to live that healthy lifestyle.”

For her forward-thinking approach and years of dedication to bringing local food into Chicopee Public Schools, CISA is proud to present Joannne Lennon with a 2018 Local hero Award.