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Green Acres

Jennifer Cermak (CAS’93, MED’94,’98) is keeping a disappearing way of life alive at Berlin Farms.

By Vicky Waltz

Jennifer Cermak is being followed. As she walks down a dirt lane, a bucket of grain swinging from her right hand, a goat named Nabisco trails closely behind. Like every farm animal on Cermak’s property, Nabisco has a job. But today, the tall Nubian goat is more interested in emptying Cermak’s pail than in trimming the lawn around her large white farmhouse.

 

Nabisco is the mascot of Berlin Farms in Berlin, Massachusetts, where Cermak grows fruits and vegetables and raises rare breeds of North American livestock. “Since the rise of corporate farming, more and more breeds that were introduced in the mid-1800s are becoming endangered,” says Cermak (CAS’93, MED’94,’98), a fourth-generation farmer who is also a pathologist at CombinatoRx, Inc., in Cambridge. “A large-scale turkey farm, for example, may raise thousands of turkeys, but it will raise only one breed.”

 

Cermak purchased the farm, formerly called Berlin Orchards, a year and a half ago. Once a 200-plus-acre operation, it was broken up and sold for house lots after the death of the previous owner. Today, the property consists of only twenty-four acres, an ideal size for Cermak’s business venture: a no-kill farm focused on agricultural tourism, staffed mostly by local teenagers who work part-time.

 

“Large corporate farms forced small farmers out of business years ago,” she says. “Small farms that managed to survive did so largely through agritourism,” inviting visitors to come sample the farming life and the locally produced food. At Berlin Farms, for example, guests may wander the grounds and observe rare breeds, such as Southdown sheep, Friesian and Percheron horses, alpacas, Nubian goats, Silkie chickens, and Royal Palm turkeys. They can also browse the country store, which sells fresh fruit and vegetables (many grown on-site), chicken and turkey eggs, honey, homemade baked goods, and ice cream.

 

“The store brings in far more money than anything else,” Cermak says. “In the fall, the lines for apple cider doughnuts stretch out the door. And during the summer, a local children’s musician performs each week, which brings in a lot of people.” 

 

Although her great-grandparents and grand- parents owned a farm in western Massachusetts and her parents owned one in Maryland, Cermak found the first year difficult. “There was so much to learn,” she says. “For example, sometimes baby turkeys spontaneously drown themselves. And during the first harvest, we ended up with a mutant-looking strain of corn.” The second season, she lost her entire strawberry crop when an inexperienced teenager flattened it with a tractor. But things are picking up. “The corn looks much better,” she says. “We had a very nice blueberry harvest, and I think the pumpkins will do well.”   

 

By far the most challenging aspect of operating the farm, according to Cermak, is turning a profit. “My goal is to be fiscally fit by 2009,” she says, “but it’s going to take a lot of strategizing. Without my other job, this dream would not be happening.”