By RUDI HEMPE
CELS News Editor and Reporter
When it comes to year-round farming success in Rhode Island, one farm probably comes to mind first—Schartner’s.
Straddling the North Kingstown/Exeter town line, Schartner Farms, is owned by URI alumnus Richard Schartner Sr., and his family and they subscribe wholeheartedly to the concept that diversity is the key to successful farming in Rhode Island.
Schartner Farms (the property the family owns is in separate parcels in Exeter and North Kingstown and they have a farm in North Conway, NH., for a combined total of about 500 acres) could easily be dubbed a ‘farm for all seasons” because no matter what time of the year, there is always something going on and being sold.
That’s even truer now that the family owns four florist shops spread around the state.
Schartner Farms is mainly a retail operation although the recent acquisition of nearby Bald Hill Nurseries will be largely a wholesale endeavor.
The main location offers corn, tomatoes, blueberries, (the latter pick-your-own) and a farm stand that offers a wide array of fresh produce, pies, a deli and preserves. A certified kitchen is in the plans.
Attached to the stand are huge greenhouses that are filled with annual flowers and vegetable plants and outside on pads are sweeping displays of perennial flowers, trees and shrubs.
In the fall there are big fields of pumpkins, toured by school children and live Christmas trees, poinsettias and other holiday plants.
After the holidays, Schartner Farms used to shut down for a couple of months. But no more. The stand stays open and there is plenty of work to be done preparing for the spring season. In addition, the highly productive land at the North Conway location provides an overabundance of strawberries that are converted into preserves using a family recipe.
Schartner has about 205 acres at the New Hampshire location, mostly river bottom land which Schartner says produces strawberries far superior to those that can be grown in Rhode Island. During the main season, daily truckloads of berries come from New Hampshire to Rhode Island.
Another cash crop in New Hampshire is hard stem garlic, says Schartner.
Even though his farm is huge by Rhode Island’s standards, Schartner still has to follow the concept of diversity in order to succeed. |
“Other than turf, I could never figure out how you can survive on one crop,” he says of farming in Rhode Island.
His family has been in farming for generations. Old timers might remember the days when his father and uncle had a farm stand and restaurant on Boston Neck Road in Saunderstown in the late 1940s—early 1950s. To attract people, the Schartners had a real steam train kids could ride—way ahead of this era when agritourism has become the in-thing. (Schartner hopes to relocate the train).
There are no trains at Schartner Farms today but the place has become a weekend stop for many Rhode Islanders. A lot of that success has come from their marketing efforts, something many farmers are slow to adopt.
Schartner was always curious about his customer base and how to analyze it. One policy he had years ago was to instruct his cashiers to observe who paid for the produce at the check out—the wife or the husband.
A big believer in frequent newspaper advertising, he often pays for extra white space around his ads so that the ads stand out from the rest the page.
He also values public relations as well by helping support non-profit community projects, the URI Master Gardener Program (Schartner is a trustee of the Master Gardener Foundation) and the Southern RI Conservation District. He also sits on the Extension Small Farms Technical Advisory Group which over the next two years will assess the needs of farmers throughout the state. Currently he wants to install a permanent Ask a Master Gardener information booth in his store that would be staffed during peak weekend hours in the spring and fall.
But increasingly, Schartner feels he can be most effective by addressing farming issues not in the fields—which are overseen by his family members and a large number of employees—but in the hearing rooms.
In the last few years it has not been unusual for Schartner to be seen in the hearing rooms at the State House and in the town council chambers in North Kingstown, addressing farming zoning and land use issues and legislation.
Traditionally, says Schartner, farmers who shunned public interaction just “complained to one another but did not confront the issues outside.”
“We need a strong Division of Agriculture in Rhode Island. We need advocates who are well rounded. In the past, decisions involving agriculture were basically made by individual departments,” says Schartner. “If it was a wetlands issue, a department would only see wetlands, not the whole
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