A few years ago, Eric and Alison Rector took a hard look at the work they do to maintain their life on Windswept Farm in Monroe, where the couple grow vegetables, tend an orchard and care for chickens and a small herd of cows.

They asked themselves if they would still be able to do the same amount of work at age 60.

The answer? Probably not. They decided to make a 10-year plan for transitioning their farm to new owners, instead of waiting for an emergency to force their hand.

“We still liked living on the land and growing things,” Eric Rector explained, “but didn’t see the need to commit to doing as much as we were doing at 50, or certainly not expanding it.”

The Rectors examined their options and ended up retaining 80 acres of the farm and building themselves a new house on that land, about a quarter mile away from the existing farmhouse. They put 18 acres and the farm’s infrastructure, including the farmhouse and barn, into a limited liability corporation called Windswept Farmstead Cooperative LLC. Then they went shopping for young farmers.

The Rectors interviewed 10 people before settling on Noami Brautigam and James Gagne, who moved onto the farm in March and got married there. The couple will lease the facilities for two years in a “get to know you” period.

If all goes well, at the end of that time they’ll move forward with a purchasing plan in which they earn shares in the farm, bit by bit, until they own it 100 percent. Rector, a cheesemaker, will still have use of the commercial kitchen in the barn three or four days a week, and he will still source apples for his hard cider from the farm’s orchard.

The deal represents a 20-year buyout, governed by a 30-page contract. Both parties have a “back-out clause.”

Eric Rector said he preferred this strategy over leasing because he believes the new farmers should receive some equity for the work that they’re doing and any improvements they make on the farm. Easements were another possibility, but they require regular maintenance and Rector wondered how it was possible to compel someone to keep the open farmland mowed and fertile.

He said he was interested in seeing how the young couple might make the previously unused fields on the farm part of a sustainable business, and he also considered what kind of neighbors they might be. “You do also want to be able to get along,” he said.

Brautigam and Gagne changed the name of the property to Dickey Hill Farm – a move that doesn’t bother the Rectors. The Rectors became the first paying members of the Dickey Hill Farm’s CSA, and used the time they saved in gardening work to landscape around their new house.

Eric Rector has set up a website where he documents how their arrangement is working out, for the benefit of other farmers who may be considering a similar setup.

 

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