LOCAL LEADERS Kenney Farm
“If you do retail, you’d better love dealing with the public. It’s like keeping cows, you gotta be there every day.” That’s not to say that Concord farmer Bill Kenney isn’t a people person. But he knows from experience the differences in direct sale versus wholesale distribution, and he prefers to stick with what has worked for Kenney Farm for the better part of ninety years in the business: wholesale. When Kenney’s grandfather, Phillip Kenney, moved the family to Virginia Road (once called Virginia Flats and one of the town’s first farmlands) in 1922, he brought with him a one-horse plow, a tipcart, a manure wagon, a market wagon, a wheelbarrow, a cultivator, and two hoes (Garrelick). After a lifetime in the family business, Bill Kenney still diligently farms what’s left of his grandfather’s land and resides in the original farmhouse on Virginia Road in the East Quarter, which was once a vibrant community of Irish, Italian, and “Yankee” farming families (Garrelick). Kenney barely remembers the “truck farming” days beginning in the late twenties and thirties when his father and uncle carted vegetables to Boston for commissioners to sell at Faneuil Hall Market—an early, local form of wholesale distribution.
Concord farmer Bill Kenney in front his barn on Virginia Road.
Beginning in the thirties and lasting into the sixties, Kenney Farm sold its produce exclusively to A&P Grocery Stores at wholesale value (but any surplus still went to nearby Faneuil Hall). Lean times forced many small farms like Kenney to scale down operations in the sixties, when federal government cost-sharing declined, demand for houses increased, and farmland began to be partitioned and sold for residential development. “The best land in Concord has houses on it now,” says Kenney. Kenney adapted by taking a second job at age twenty-two as a truck driver by night, continuing to help his father on the farm by day. As the viability of small-scale farming continued to dwindle, he continued his second job as a truck-driver to supplement the farming income until his recent retirement. Upon retirement, he found the time to attempt a radical move for Kenney Farm by starting a CSA. After two years (with nearly three hundred members by the second year), Kenney decided against the direct sale approach for several reasons: he needed someone to manage the logistics and customer service, the labor costs were too high, and he priced his shares too low. Kenney expresses gratitude to the “organic people” and the “Buy Local” movement, and is not opposed to another attempt at direct sales. As for the future of the family plot, he nods to the land’s history: “It’s what my father left, and we want it to stay a farm.”
Lawrence Kenney, Bill Kenney’s father, harvesting lettuce on his farm on Virginia Road in 1941. Source: Garrelick. Courtesy of Bill Kenney
Community Food System Assessment
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