Southwick's Farm Map Never Stays The Same Two Years Running
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Sunday morning, Southwick's Open Farm Day did what it always does: it opened up properties most residents drive past every week without ever pulling in. This year's activities included a walk through a Civil War-era tobacco farm, sunflower picking, cows and horses that don't mind visitors, and tractor-pulled wagon rides between stops. It ran free from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on August 16, organized the same way it always has been, by the town's own Agricultural Commission rather than a chamber of commerce or a tourism board.
If you live here, you probably know Farm Day exists. What's easy to miss is that the list of farms on it has never held still. This year's event featured eleven working farms plus the Southwick History Museum, with two new farms joining the lineup. That total isn't a record high. It's roughly the same number the event drew two years ago, which means the roster is turning over even when the headcount looks steady.
Back in 2024, when this was still a young event in its second year and co-hosted with sites in neighboring Granville, organizers added two new stops to the nine farms that had participated the year before, bringing that year's total to eleven. One of those additions was Second Eden Farm, described at the time as Southwick's newest farm, a homestead operation just getting started.
Fast forward to this August and the total sits at eleven again, with two more farms newly added to the roster. If the number is holding steady while new names keep showing up, that means other farms have quietly stepped away in between. Nobody publishes a public tally of exactly who dropped off, and that's part of the point. Farm Day isn't a fixed inventory. It's a snapshot of whoever is actively farming and willing to open their gates that particular August, which means the honest way to think about it is as reconnaissance you have to repeat, not a checklist you complete once.
Outside of the one Sunday a year when everyone's doors are open, a handful of Southwick farms operate on their own public schedules and are worth knowing regardless of Farm Day:
That's a shorter list than the eleven who show up for Farm Day, and that gap is worth sitting with. Most of what makes Southwick feel agricultural on any random Tuesday is a small set of year-round operations, while the fuller picture only becomes visible once a year when the Commission convinces the rest of the working farms to let people in.
Here's the harder fact underneath all of this. According to the town's own Agricultural Commission, Southwick used to have a meaningful number of dairy farms, and as of 2023, it has none. Not fewer. None. That's not a slow decline still in progress. It's a category of local farming that closed out entirely within living memory, and it happened quietly enough that the Commission is now running a volunteer effort just to document which dairy operations existed and where, before that history disappears along with everyone who remembers it.
The town's Right-to-Farm bylaw, adopted by Town Meeting in January 2006, was written for exactly this kind of tension between farmland and the residential development creeping around it. Its language is blunt:
One should expect and accept farming activities that cause noise, dust, and odors.
That sentence exists because the bylaw's authors already understood that a rural landscape with more than fifteen active farms and roughly 1,600 acres of protected farmland doesn't stay quiet just because new neighbors move in next to it.
The most concrete sign that Southwick is treating this as an active problem, not a nostalgic one, is that the Southwick Land Trust didn't exist until 2024. It was formed with direct mentorship from the Granby Land Trust just over the Connecticut line, built specifically around the idea that once farmland here gets sold for development, that acreage doesn't come back as farmland ever again.
One of the trust's founding board members, Janis Prifti, grew up on a dairy farm her grandparents bought in the 1920s. She's since become trustee for a 55-acre parcel that's been in her family for seventy years, and her own preference, like the trust's broader mission, runs toward keeping land in agricultural use rather than watching it convert to house lots. That's not an abstract preference. It's the same math playing out on parcels across town right now, one landowner conversation at a time.
None of this means Southwick's agricultural identity is disappearing. It means the identity is being actively renegotiated every single year, through a Farm Day that adds new participants on a rolling basis, through a Right-to-Farm bylaw written to protect an industry that was already under pressure two decades ago, and through a land trust barely two years old trying to lock in protections before more of what's left gets developed.
The practical version of that for anyone living here: don't treat this year's Farm Day map as permanent. Farms open, farms close, and the only way to actually know what's currently working land in Southwick is to check the Commission's list again next August rather than assuming it looks like whatever you remember. As the growing season turns toward corn and pumpkins later this fall, some of the same properties that had sunflower rows and wagon rides this month will already be switching over, based on the seasonal windows several of them post directly on the town's own farm list.
That's the actual shape of the story. Southwick isn't a postcard of old farms sitting still. It's a small, working agricultural economy that's losing categories of farming entirely while gaining new operations and a formal conservation effort in the same few years, and the only way to keep up with which is which is to keep showing up.
If you're weighing what a town like this means for your own plans, whether that's staying put, right-sizing, or thinking ahead to a move, Romina D'Angelo has spent years tracking exactly this kind of on-the-ground detail across Suffield, Southwick, and Longmeadow. Find the Home You Deserve — contact Romina to talk through what a town's daily rhythm actually looks like before you commit to it.
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