What Is Bramble Hill farm?

Bramble Hill Farm is a 120 acre former dairy farm in Amherst, MA. The old farm buildings have been carefully renovated during the past ten years to provide living and working spaces for a range of people and projects. A new set of farm structures have been built to support several pasture based livestock initiatives and a range of organic growing programs. “The Open Field Foundation”, a nonprofit corporation which was created to legally hold the assets of the Farm, has absorbed the major capital costs of this project to date. The goal of The Foundation and the Farm is to test innovative ways to build a sustainable, healthy, creative farm centered community, accessible to and interactive with the larger community which surrounds it.

Bramble Hill Farm is very much a work in process. Each piece of the Farm has the potential to be developed in a myriad of ways. The form this development takes is determined in large part by the people and enterprises working and living there. The Foundation believes in the “value” of diversity to provide creativity and market stability, and the value of relationship to encourage diversity.

The Land was certified organic in 1998 – 2002, and although certification has not been renewed, nothing has occurred which would compromise certification again in the future.

The Farm shares a border with The Hitchcock Center (an Environmental Education Center) and the Common School ( a private K – 6 elementary school with a curriculum based on “in-depth studies and experiential learning”). Amherst College maintains several hundred acres of pasture land across Rt. 116 from the Farm, and the Town Conservation Commission maintains land along another Border. In 2004 the Larch Hill Collaborative was formed, with Bramble Hill Farm at the center, to bring these entities together into a working group around shared concerns for the sustainability of the land and the ecosystems which form the core of all of our individual work. The Farm welcomes projects and classes from The Hitchcock Center, The Common School, and other groups interested in learning about and creating from its’ diverse resources.