Farming has long been a family business -often passed down from founder to subsequent generations in the same family since agriculture took the place of hunter-gatherer-forager societies and became the staple form of food and livestock production, domestication, and consumption some 10-12,000 years ago. Though nearly everything else about farming has changed, the ties between farming families and their communities are still there when small, local, family farms are supported and protected.
In fact, local family-run farms have found an appreciation renewed through the newly growing field of agrotourism -creating tourist destination experiences amidst producing, fully-working farms, thereby allowing guests and non-farmers to learn about, participate in, or be immersed in farm life and harvests. One such local farm is Bensons Pond Cranberries, and one of the driving forces and brains behind its continued success is Plympton local, Erin Williams.
A Cornell University graduate who grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania, Williams was long-instilled with the appreciation of farm life, and aware of the work ethic, problem solving, and innovation required to keep an agriculturally based family business running amidst the changing landscape from family to cooperate farming models. By chance, she met her match in someone from another farming family in Massachusetts -Cassander Gilmore, a third-generation cranberry farmer.
“It all started when Cass and I got married,” explains Williams, “We had a traditional reception in Pennsylvania -you know, two farms, two families, but when we got to Massachusetts, we wanted to celebrate with people there, so we hosted a family clambake on the bog. I got permission from my in-laws to clean out the top part of the screenhouse and we got it ready to host the clambake. At the reception, we had some people show interest in using the space for more events and it gave me the idea.”
After a bit of uncertainty as to how this idea would go, and what Williams joked about as “too much free time on my hands that winter”, she got the approval of her in-laws, as well as the necessary town permits and legal clearances, to make some changes to the space to be appropriate for its intended use. “We kept most of it original and only updated a few things like the electrical and some basic rehabbing, but we wanted to keep is as intact and unchanged from the classic cranberry screenhouse as possible.”
That winter of excess free time was certainly fleeting, as Willliams’ business model for the farm has given way to Bensons Pond Cranberries and The Barn on Bensons Pond becoming a local tourist attraction now drawing up to 10,000 people a year. This dramatic transformation from a traditional cranberry bog to a wedding, educational, and event center, in addition to staying a working farm, was the result of Williams acting on the expressed interests of guests and locals and thinking of ways to meld them while sustaining farm production. “We would have family and friends visit and they expressed interest in the process of cranberry farming -particularly in harvesting, so we started offering ‘Berry Bog Adventures’,” explains Williams, “We host about 350-400 people a year to spend two hours in the bog. They wear waders and harvest with us and learn about the whole process. We have one full-time bog tour manager and 3-4 bog tour assistants, and we do groups of 25 people, with two groups a day, so that we can also keep up with the harvest side of things.”
Williams says that maintaining the working-farm aspect of the business while trying to incorporate tourism is a challenge but they are finding ways to make it work. “Some bogs have a ‘sacrifice bog’ where it is strictly for tourists to have bog experiences and harvests for commercial means are not taken from that bog, but we don’t have that here. I am passionate about keeping it a pure-farm model and balancing harvest with the volume of guests -we try to find a way to blend both.” Williams says that people who attend the Berry Bog Adventures are about 50% locals who have been here all their lives and never had the chance to be immersed in the cranberry harvest, or people who have been here a few years and are looking for ways to explore their new home. “The other half of our guests come from all over the country and even the world. We had some lovely people from Britain the other day on one of our adventures.”
One of the other challenges in an agrotourism business model is trying to plan guest’s schedules around Mother Nature. “The first few years we were learning how to time the Berry Bog Adventures around the needed time of harvest -which can vary by the date each year based on the season and weather, explains Williams, “We used to announce our dates for bog tours in July or August, but now, in our ninth season of offering tours, we have enough data and experience to be able to announce the dates as early as March or April and start booking then.” In addition to paid bog experiences where harvesting is part of the offerings, Bensons Pond Cranberries also offers strictly educational tours in the form of field trips for local schools. “We are part of the Ocean Spray Cooperative and so we largely do a wet harvest -which is what people love to see.”
Bensons Pond Cranberries is not, however, just a cranberry farming business anymore. Williams has taken the former screenhouse -now called a “barn” to better fit Google searches for event destinations, and made it a popular spot for local weddings, as well as events like Cranberries and Cocktails, and the Harvest Dinner with a Berry Bog Adventure. The Barn on Bensons Pond is now a stunning event space offering everything needed for events. Currently, however, Willams has scaled back on the number of weddings hosted each year to spend more time with her two young boys and her other full-time job at Rockland Trust as an SVP and Commercial Loan Officer. “We were hosting about 25 weddings a year,” says Williams, “but we have scaled back to ten a year.” The beautiful circa 1942 screenhouse has been transformed into a country-chic space -complete with strung white barn-lights, a gorgeous bar, long wooden tables, and carefully curated, antique and vintage farm-equipment-lined bride and groom rooms downstairs for the wedding party to change and get ready in. Truly, Willams has taken a common cranberry screenhouse and made it into a countryside fairytale spot for families to celebrate and gather together surrounded by 80 acres of bogs, woods, and local history. The Gilmore family purchased Bensons Pond Cranberries and Barn in the 1980’s, and it had been a working bog since the 1920’s, but Williams has taken it into the 21st century with creativity and style while insisting it stay true to its roots and function.
“My biggest challenge is the time constraint” says Williams as she is fitting in the call on her drive to work amidst her chaotic schedule, “I just don’t have time to do everything I think of, but the juggling act is worth it to be able to share this place with the community.” Any local, family-run farm would be so lucky to have someone like Williams taking risks and coming up with new ideas to keep their farm relevant and respected in a modern society that veers dangerously toward mass production and business models that damage, rather than support, the small-farm business model. Benson’s Pond Cranberries and The Barn on Bensons Pond, however, seem to have found a way to keep the core values of family and community at the heart of all they do while yielding an uncompromised volume of glorious cranberries each season -and that is the kind of well-rounded harvest our communities need.
For more information on Bensons Pond Cranberries and The Barn on Bensons Pond, please visit: