The New Yorker, October 2025
Bardwell Farm, which is fifty acres of diversified vegetables in western Massachusetts, has been in operation since 1685, making it older than the steam pump, the seed drill, and the Glorious Revolution. Last year, Harrison Bardwell, the farm’s ninth-generation proprietor, was selling thousands of pounds of cucumbers at a time, transportable by pallet and forklift. By this summer, he was struggling to move twenty-pound boxes of the same product. When he realized that he couldn’t recoup the costs of picking, packing, and washing the cucumbers, he stopped. He also gave up pulling from his cabbage field. Gleaners from a local anti-hunger group harvested some of the crops to donate to nearby food banks and shelters. The rest was tilled into the ground.
Farmers always have to navigate known unknowns of climate and weather—Bardwell recently had to rip out and replant his carrots after sudden heavy rains packed the soil, entombing the seeds. Prices and markets fluctuate; this year, President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada have helped to spike the cost of fertilizer and packaging. But, in the case of Bardwell’s abandoned cucumbers and cabbages, the mortal blow was struck by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in March, when it abruptly terminated a billion dollars in Biden-era funding that had helped food banks, schools, and child-care centers procure fresh food from local farmers. (The U.S.D.A. stated that the programs “no longer effectuate the goals of the agency.”) Bardwell Farms earned about two hundred thousand dollars selling vegetables through these federal programs last year, and expected to make a little more than that in 2025.
