Notable Edibles: Catching Up with Bay End Farm
The debut issue of Edible Cape Cod included a feature story about Bay End Farm in Buzzards Bay. On a recent sunny spring day, we returned to find out what’s changed in 20 years.
The farm is still operated by Kofi Ingersoll and his wife, Erin Koh. Changes have been slow and steady. “It’s been attempted constant improvement,” is how he described it.
“I used to try to be the farm that grew the most interesting things and now I’m okay with it just being interesting and a little bit more traditional,” he said. “For a lot of people, when they first get into buying from a farm, it’s a different enough experience that they don’t need it to be over-the-top super new. People will buy yellow carrots and red carrots, but they won’t buy something if they don’t know what it is or what to do with it, like an oyster plant or Jerusalem artichokes.
“I think heirloom tomatoes are better, but people would come to the stand and ask, ‘Hey, where’s the red tomatoes?’ And so we ended up having to grow some of the red ones and we actually make good money selling people boring tomatoes. You don’t want to tell people they can’t have what they want.”
The farm’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, which has grown from 70 members in 2004 to 120 last year, also reflects gradual evolution. A CSA allows people to buy “shares” in the annual harvest and pick up a weekly package of fresh produce.
“We’ve worked from the same notebook for the last 20 years, going from the previous year’s notes and we think about whether it worked or not and then we make an adjustment,” he said. “There are things that have fallen out of rotation because too many people said they didn’t want them. We try to make it so that it’s diverse and not just a bag of leaves. Mid-season there’s between nine and thirteen different vegetable items every week.”
The biggest change has been the addition of a summer farmstand at 200 Bournedale Road, open from early June through early October. It opened during the first summer of the COVID pandemic, when people wanted to shop outdoors.
“We designed the farm stand so that you have to drive past the vegetables to get to the stand,” he said. “A lot of farms put their farm stand right on the street, but I wanted people to appreciate that it was actually a farm on their way in, and people seem to like it. Now people just come here instead of me going to them, which is a huge time saver.”
That home base provided the opportunity to add to their array. Along with fresh-from-the-fields organic vegetables, herbs and flowers, the farmstand offers baked goods (the lemon-hibiscus sugar cookies are addictive), along with some spreads, dips and sauces, including scape butter and Bay End tabasco.
Other changes include a gradual upgrade in equipment, such as a new tractor from Tilmor, an Ohio-based company that makes equipment for small farms. “Our old tractors were from the ’50s,” he said. “I got tired of trying to be a mechanic all the time. You get a little tired of doing things that you’re bad at.”
Bay End Farm’s roots go back to Grazing Fields, a dairy farm purchased by Ingersoll’s great-grandmother in 1906. Starting in the early ’60s, his grandmother waged a 20-year fight to keep the state from putting Route 25 through the middle of the property, which explains why the highway curves far east of Little Buttermilk Bay.
The farm might continue with another generation. Ingersoll and Koh’s son, Zeke, 17, “has been driving tractors since before he can remember,” said Ingersoll, but he said their daughter, Maya, 13, seemed more interested in taking over the business some day.
Bay End Farm
200 Bournedale Road, Buzzards Bay
