By Danielle Ray
Landmark correspondent
STERLING — Mike Pineo comes from a multigenerational line of farmers and has been farming the 127-acre tract of beautiful country land on Tuttle Road for decades. It’s a family legacy he is working hard to continue.
His grandparents bought their first farm, Schenk Farm down the road, in 1954. They bought his current farm, known as the Coyne Farm, in 1962.
“It has a lot of history to it — goes back to the Burpee seed family in the 1800s,” Pineo said of what has been called the Pineo Family Farm since 2007.
Mike grew up on the property after short stints in houses on Meetinghouse Hill and Beaman roads in the house his parents built in 1975. Pineo started farming when he was 10 years old, after buying his first Jersey cow to start a dairy herd. But he was “out of commission” for nearly a year when he broke his back at 17 when he fell through a trap door while helping to remodel a carriage shed at the Murray farm on Upper North Row Road, where he worked from age 12 to 19.
“I fell through it 12 feet and landed on my feet,” Pineo recalled. “I couldn’t do anything, so I sold off all my livestock, cows, and beef animals.”
Once he recovered, he started farming again. He married Amy, who helps a lot around the farm, and they moved to the Tuttle Road property in 1992 and built a house there three years later.
In 2007, Pineo started doing small gardens, “what gave birth to what is now Pineo Family Farm, and we took off from there.”
What started off as a modest effort grew over time. They started with mini greenhouses and “expanded to bigger, homemade” ones, and in 2012, they did “a big land clearing” of 6 acres. They now have 9 acres on which they grow all kinds of vegetables including tomatoes, squashes, greens, cucumbers, peppers, apples, and more, which can be purchased at their farm and farmstand and through CSA shares/ They also offer firewood in season.
Forty acres of the 127 total could be cultivated, he said. They have room to expand, he said, and when asked if that was the plan for the future, he noted, “Oh yeah, the future is sitting right here on the floor,” pointing to his toddler grandson, who loves helping him around the farm.
“He knows every tractor and everything about it,” Pineo said of the young boy and quipped, “I get tired awful quick.”
Two years ago, they built a high tunnel greenhouse that enables them to grow produce year-round, a project that was funded with a NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture that was “just shy” of $10,000.
“Because of all the fun with climate shift, we used to start growing in April. Now we are lucky to grow by June, and we are now still picking tomatoes in September,” Pineo said, explaining how the changing weather has affected farming. “The growing season has shifted 45 days to the fall.”
The 30-by-100-foot greenhouse has increased their tomato production by 60%. Pineo said he did the majority of the greenhouse build himself, but had some help from his two brothers and some friends.
This winter they built a 20-by-32-foot propagation house that is used to start plants; they can also grow in it.
“We will start winter crops beginning of August, then change over the crops in the high tunnel from tomatoes and cucumbers to salad greens and stuff,” Pineo said, adding that they now have the ability to offer “year-round spinach.”
Funding for that came from the Community Foundation of North Central Massachusetts.
“It was an interesting grant,” Pineo said of the money. “It required me to increase production by 51% for low-income communities. I surpassed that and did 92%.”
Pineo works with and provides produce to Growing Places, a Leominster-based nonprofit focused on providing fresh food for low-income communities. Growing Places does CSA pickup or delivery, senior center and pop-up farmers markets, and serves the elderly and the food-insecure, among other things.
“Through them we have created the local Food Works, a new North Worcester County food hub that is a farmers-first program,” Pineo explained. “It provides work for farmers so they can have a sustainable program, and then they provide for the community. The subsidies are not for the farmers, they are for the farmers in need.”
He went on to say that the program is focused on addressing “the people in need.”
“We use the staircase mentality. You lift people up from the bottom to the top and then there’s only one way and that’s up. We hear so many aspersions (cast) on the low-income community. We are all up in arms and talking about race; we need to talk about people. I don’t care what color you are or what bedroom you sleep in, we need to help people. And we need to help people by bringing people up.”
He said the newish idea that food is medicine has always been around in the farming community, and he is happy to be involved with programs that help people have access to fresh, quality food.
“We are put here and the food here is supposed to be what we have,” Pineo said. “We lean on out West (for food crops) for some reason, but it all started here. All the things they grow out West we can grow here relative to the local climate. If we go back to the mentality of the early 1900s, foods like citrus fruits were treated as a special treat. They are meant to be special, and we need to go back to that. Once you can have it all the time, it’s not special anymore. The everyday staples, we have them and that’s what we are supposed to eat.”
Pineo Family Farm has received other grants that have enabled him to purchase farm equipment, funding Pineo said he is very grateful for, as farming in modern times can be fiscally challenging.
“So many grants, I can’t keep track of the amounts. It’s huge, I don’t have to take a loan to pay for this equipment,” he shared.
Another tricky factor Pineo and other farmers are constantly dealing with is the weather, which is notoriously fickle in New England. He said he heard that because of the extreme low temps in February, peach farmers in the region are facing $1 million in revenue loss.
“It is a huge loss,” Pineo said. “We do fruit with the Philbins. They have a lot of peaches and nectarines. Stone fruit will be nonexistent for this year. The same thing happened seven years ago. The (fruit) will come back next year.”
The hardworking farmer is involved in many organizations that focus on farming and agriculture. He is vice president of the Worcester County Farm Bureau, vice president of the Massachsuetts Association of Agricultural Commissions, treasurer of the Hardwick Farmers Co-op Exchange, and is part of the Montachusett Agricultural Alliance, which does “roundtable discussion, education, and promotion” around farming.
He is also involved with Central Mass Grown, “quasi-involved” with the Freight Farm effort at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg, and runs the Sterling Farmer’s Market, which launched June 9 for the season that runs downtown on Fridays from 3 to 6:30 p.m. through October.
Pineo Family Farm is one of the market’s vendors, along with other area farms and businesses, and Pineo brings his farm fresh produce weekly. He said he now has a Haitian immigrant “both farming for myself and me, kind of like a crop share,” a man who joined them last fall and got started prepping land to use.
Pineo is working on a building a storage shed for the man who also works at a research farm in Shrewsbury to use, which will also double as a break room.
“He brings his family along every once in a while,” Pineo said of the man, who provides “in-kind labor.”
When asked what he enjoys about farming, after joking that he doesn’t have to ask anyone for vacation days “because I don’t get them,” being his own boss is clearly what Pineo appreciates the most.
“I get to pick and choose what I do. I don’t have anyone harping on me, and I don’t have to adhere to anyone’s schedule. Farming is freedom.”
