This story by Emma Roth-Wells was first published in the Valley News on Oct. 2.
NORWICH — Four years after the Norwich Farm Foundation was formed and launched a major fundraising campaign, the nonprofit organization is giving up its effort to save what it marketed as the town’s “last remaining dairy farm.”
In a Sept. 13 email to its supporters, the organization announced that it was putting Norwich Farm on Turnpike Road up for sale. The asking price is $1.275 million, according to a listing last week on the website for Four Seasons Sotheby’s in Hanover.
The foundation relied on private contributions, including a $100,000 gift from an undisclosed nonprofit, to purchase the farm for $1.065 million in 2022. Around the same time, the foundation embarked on a five-year, $1.25 million fundraising campaign to “Bring the Cows Back.”
But it hasn’t worked out.
The Norwich Foundation lists total liabilities of $905,000, including a secured mortgage of $850,000, according to the nonprofit’s most recent federal tax filing.
The foundation is also more than a year behind in its property tax payments to the town. On Monday, an employee in the town’s finance department confirmed the unpaid tax bill, but declined to provide documents that would show the amount overdue.
In 2023 Town Meeting ballot voting, Norwich residents rejected Norwich Farm Foundation’s request for a 10-year property tax exemption, 942-323.
“We have been unable to find the ongoing funding needed to match the excessive debt obligations put upon this property by the prior owners during the last sale,” the foundation’s email to supporters stated.
When contacted by the Valley News this week, the Norwich Farm Foundation governing board said “we have no further comment at this time.”
When asked if the Norwich Farm Foundation will dissolve or continue operating as a nonprofit, the board also declined to comment.
The Norwich Farms saga dates back almost a decade. Andy Sigler, a prominent Dartmouth alum and retired Fortune 500 CEO, donated the property to Vermont Technical College in 2015 after spending years rebuilding an aging Norwich family farm. The 358-acre property and buildings was valued at an estimated $2.5 million.
The Randolph-based Vermont Technical College, which is now a part of Vermont State University, intended to use the property as a hands-on laboratory for students in its agricultural program.
Due to a lack of interest from VTC students, the campus was short lived, with the farm’s dairy cows departing in 2017.
Chris Gray, who was hired by the college in 2015 to run the program, and his wife, Laura Brown, paid $500 a month in rent for the three-bedroom renovated house adjacent to the farm’s multiple barns.
Gray and Brown, who still live in the house, declined a request for an interview this week.
In 2017, the couple founded Norwich Farm Creamery. The for-profit business is a Grade A creamery which makes bottled milk, chocolate milk, ricotta cheese, yogurt, ice cream and rice pudding with equipment housed at Norwich Farm. But since the farm lacks dairy cows, Norwich Farm Creamery has been bringing in milk from Billings Farm in Woodstock.
“We are frustrated not to have been able to run this farm at its full potential and show you the true impact that this infrastructure could have on our food system and community,” wrote Gray and Brown in an email to their supporter list on Sept. 24.
They will continue to operate the creamery throughout the sale process and will only close if the farm’s buyer does not want the creamery there, the couple wrote.
VTC sold 352 of the acres, mostly fields and forestland, to the Upper Valley Land Trust, or UVLT, for $300,000 in order to fund their use of the farm’s buildings.
In 2021, UVLT leased what is now called Brookmead Conservation Area to John Hammond of North Star Livery in Cornish for his herd of Devon cows. The cows left in 2022 and there have been no livestock on the land since.
“We made plans for the use of the property and they knew that our land is not available for their business uses,” said UVLT President Jeanie McIntyre when asked if the Norwich Farm Foundation or creamery ever asked UVLT if they could put cows on the fields.
From the moment that the Norwich Farm Foundation was formed, many people in the Upper Valley’s agricultural community were skeptical. With the farm’s footprint reduced to the six acres, there was little room for cows to graze and to grow feed.
Still, the foundation’s leaders continued their fundraising efforts. “Norwich Farm is the last remaining dairy farm in Norwich,” the foundation wrote on its website in 2021. “Our fear is that the dairy, agricultural and educational heritage in our community will be lost forever.”
The purpose of the foundation is to ensure the Norwich Farm continues as a functioning dairy farm “serving the educational and nutritional needs of the local Upper Valley community,” according to its website. The foundation is made up of a board of four Norwich residents as well as two “agricultural advisors.”
But the foundation’s big plans,including bringing cows back to the farm, hiring a herd manager, and establishing an education center, failed to materialize.
The Upper Valley Land Trust isn’t interested in buying the farm, McIntyre said in an interview Tuesday.
John Farrell has lived near the farm on Turnpike Road, a few miles from the town’s main village, for a dozen years.
“I wish it worked out,” he said, sitting in his backyard Tuesday. “The foundation had good intentions to save Norwich Farm, but it’s not a farm right now.”
“Someone with (deep) pockets and a good vision of what it could turn into could do a lot with it,” he added. “I just don’t know what that will be.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Nonprofit foundation puts struggling Norwich farm site up for sale.