Frank Martinez Nocito
Lina Martinez Nocito photo

Frank Martinez Nocito, Assistant Director of SNAP Nutrition Education for the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), has devoted his career to advocating for public health. Over the past decade, he has consistently and successfully brought local food into the conversation about healthy eating and food access.

After earning his Master’s Degree in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Frank joined the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy. There he worked to develop nutritional guidelines to help combat global and regional health issues such as diet-related diseases and malnutrition.

Returning to western Massachusetts five years later, Frank joined the Springfield-based Partners for a Healthier Community. There, his work included Farm to Preschool, a project that sought to help early childhood service providers overcome institutional barriers to buying from local farms.

In 2011, Frank was hired at DTA as the director of a new USDA grant-funded initiative called the Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP). HIP offered a group of randomly selected SNAP recipients in Hampden County an instant 30 cent credit on their EBT card for every SNAP dollar they spent on fruits and vegetables. HIP demonstrated that offering an incentive for buying fruits and vegetables increased the amount of produce SNAP recipients ate per day by a statistically significant 26%.

HIP was originally designed to focus primarily on mainstream grocery stores, and Frank played a crucial role in advocating for local food providers to have equal opportunity to participate. As part of HIP, DTA and its partners assisted farmers’ markets and farm stands in getting the technology needed to process SNAP and HIP transactions. When asked why he chose to advocate for local food having a place in HIP, Frank responded, “We’re not only aiming to increase access to food in general, but most specifically access to healthy food. Local food is fresher, it lasts longer, and the flexibility of local food providers can help overcome food access barriers in ways that larger grocery stores cannot.”

Building on HIP’s success, Frank led the application process for a USDA grant to make both the financial incentive and the local food component of HIP available to all SNAP clients throughout the state. Starting in the spring of 2017, HIP will become a statewide program that will offer a dollar-for-dollar incentive when SNAP customers spend their benefits on fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets, farm stands, mobile markets, and through CSA shares.

Frank’s commitment to making local food accessible to everyone in our community has helped create programs that both combat food insecurity in the Pioneer Valley and invest SNAP dollars back into the local economy. “Food is a complex issue, whether on a personal level or a policy level,” Frank says. “People really care about what they eat and where it comes from.”

Steve, David, Shannon, Steven II, and Kelly Barstow CISA Photo

Owned by the Barstow family since 1806, Barstow’s Longview Farm has undergone many changes over the course of two centuries. The current generation has preserved the legacy of this Hadley dairy farm while introducing exciting changes to enable the farm to thrive in the 21st century.

After incarnations as a cooper shop (you can still see handmade barrels in the farm store from this era!), a sawmill, and an extensive vegetable operation, Barstow’s became a dairy farm in the 1930s. Today, the dairy operation is run by brothers Steve and David Barstow and Steve’s son, Steven II. Together, they manage 400 acres of farmland, milk 230 cows, and sell their milk to Agri-Mark, the farmer-owned cooperative that makes Cabot products.

Dairy farming is well known as a challenging business, with slim margins and heavy labor demands, and modern dairy farms have had to innovate to survive. The Barstow family has emerged as a leader in Massachusetts dairy as a result of undertaking three major projects in recent years.

First, the Barstows opened Barstow’s Dairy Store and Bakery at the farm in 2008, managed by Steven’s sisters Kelly and Shannon and their cousin Denise. Shannon had envisioned a little place to sell her baked goods, but the planning process led to something bigger: a farm store selling their own meat and a variety of local products, a restaurant serving breakfast, lunch, and lots of baked goodies, and a catering business. They also host farm tours and events. “The store is really our way of interacting with the public and helping people have a connection to their food. We try to educate people on what we’re doing here, and the store allows us to do that,” says Kelly.

In 2013, the Barstows completed construction of an anaerobic digester—a “huge undertaking,” according to Steven. Anaerobic digestion, a cutting-edge sustainable energy technology, processes manure and food waste into electricity, with heat and nutrient-rich fertilizer as byproducts. Every day, the Barstows’ digester generates 800 kilowatts per hour by processing all of the farm’s manure, some 5–6,000 gallons, plus 7,000 gallons of food waste from nearby businesses.

Finally, the family conserved 123 acres in 2014 through the Agricultural Preservation Restriction program, which enables farms to sell the development rights on their land to the state. Steven started thinking about investing the proceeds into innovations in the milking parlor. They have since added robotic milkers—machines that enable the cows to be milked on demand, and that test the milk and track health indicators and production levels for each cow. The farmers are still in the barn twice a day doing chores and checking on the cows. The robotic milkers, however, allow flexibility in the farmers’ daily schedule while providing data that enables them to manage the herd’s health even more effectively. Says Steven, “I’m not sure I could take over the farm if we’d left the milking parlor the way it was—I couldn’t do this alone when my father and uncle retire. Each new generation brings new energy and ideas, and this will make it possible for us to grow.”

Oona Coy and Ben James

In 2008, after scouting the town for months by bicycle for the ideal location, Ben James and Oona Coy settled on the plaza nestled between Thornes Marketplace and the Northampton parking garage as the home of the brand new Tuesday Market. Today, the market is a thriving fixture of the local food scene, bringing cultural vibrancy and fresh, healthy food to the community.

Living in Northampton and running their own small vegetable farm, Ben and Oona envisioned a bustling sales outlet for local growers and a unique community space. They wanted the market to be equally about farmers and about bringing people together. Ben says, “We asked ourselves: what’s going to get people meeting each other, and how do we enliven an existing public space and make everyone feel welcome?”

Twenty-five farmers, artisans, and other vendors currently make up Tuesday Market, selling fresh fruits and vegetables, meat and cheese, honey and maple products, mushrooms, medicinal herbs, pizza, and other prepared foods. It’s no small feat to build a new farmers’ market. Yet Tuesday Market has quickly become a viable sales outlet for local farmers, a destination for families, and a vibrant space for art and music, as well as occasional theater and dance performances.

For Ben and Oona, it was always a priority to ensure that the food and sense of community at the market would be accessible to people of all income levels. With a small grant provided by the  Northampton Health Department, Tuesday Market was one of the first local markets to invest in the machine needed to process SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps).

In 2010 Ben and Oona raised funds and launched a program called FoodStampsX2, which aimed to make local food even more affordable by doubling SNAP dollars spent at the market. That program led to an immediate increase in SNAP sales and brought countless new people to the market. It also led to a partnership with Healthy Hampshire and CISA, creating today’s SNAP & Save program, which in 2016 will match SNAP at markets throughout the Pioneer Valley.

Now, after eight years, Ben and Oona are feeling the pull to challenge themselves in new ways, and they have recently finalized the sale of the market to Grow Food Northampton, a Northampton-based nonprofit. They look forward to the changes that fresh energy and new ideas will bring to Tuesday Market. “It’s interesting to imagine how the market is going to change and reflect what people really care about in the future,” says Ben. “I want to be a community member who shows up at the market and is surprised.”