A Tale of Two Farmers

Tom Baggot and Willie Dellacamera both farm in Connecticut. That’s nearly where the similarities end. Baggot works 1,200 acres across the state; Dellacamera works 145.

One built a business that ships trailer loads to Florida, the other a farm small enough to know every row by hand. What they share is a lifetime spent in the dirt — and, it turns out, a surprisingly similar diagnosis of what’s squeezing them.

Ask Baggot what would be lost if his farm disappeared tomorrow, and he doesn’t flinch. “Nothing about it matters,” he says. “Someone will farm the land, and someone will hire the people. There is no loss to society at all.”

Ask Dellacamera the same question, and the air in the room changes. He talks about a crisis moving in slower than anything the industry saw in the 1980s, one that will quietly take the small farmer down with it. Same state. Same industry. Two men who have spent their entire lives in the dirt, and two completely different verdicts on whether any of it matters once they’re gone.

Same state. Same industry. Two men who have spent their entire lives in the dirt, and two completely different verdicts on whether any of it matters once they’re gone.

Baggot has farmed in Connecticut since he was 8, though “farming” undersells it — he passed the CPA exam in one sitting before deciding the ledger he really wanted to run was a field. His 1,200 acres come from leasing 45 farms across the state, planting roughly 300 of those acres twice a season: sweet corn, squash, tobacco, peppers, eggplant.

His trucks move product to chain stores within 150 miles, with a tenth traveling as far as Florida and Texas. His tractors drive themselves. His sprayers know, row by row, where they’ve already been, and shut off before they waste a drop.

At Cecarelli’s in Northford, CT, Dellacamera represents the fourth generation of his family to work this land, and he’s spent his life reshaping it to survive weather his ancestors never saw.

Every 36 inches, he tills an 8-inch gap and drops a seed there instead of turning over the whole row — a skip-row method that cuts runoff and holds soil together through storms that now dump 2 inches of rain an hour, something that rarely happened a generation ago.

He rotates 65 to 80 of his acres each year between cover crop and cash crop, a rhythm he calls regenerative agriculture, and sells the results through a CSA and farmstand on-site, plus wholesale relationships across New England. He runs three trucks himself and calls in outside distributors the rest of the time.

His technology is a weather station and whatever his iPhone can manage. What he actually wants — soil-moisture sensors that could warn him a plant is stressed before he can see it — he can’t afford.

Here’s where the story gets interesting: Ask each man what’s eating his margins, and despite the gap in their acreage, they arrive at almost the same complaint. Too much product, not enough return.

Baggot’s version starts with crop insurance. He’d eliminate it entirely if he could, arguing it keeps inefficient growers in business who’d otherwise have folded — and every acre staying in production when it shouldn’t is downward pressure on price. Take away the safety net, he argues, and domestic prices would more than double.

Dellacamera’s version runs through the shipping lanes, not the insurance office. He watches cheap wholesale produce arrive from out of the country and out of state, flooding a market his farm can’t compete in on price, and he doesn’t hide who he blames — the regional wholesalers and distributors, the very buyers Baggot’s trailers are built to serve.

Different culprits, possibly the same disease: too much supply chasing too few buyers, whether that surplus comes from a policy that keeps marginal acreage alive or a global market flooding it in from elsewhere. Worth sitting with rather than resolving — if they’re both right, no single fix, farm bill or free market, solves it alone.

What the two men agree on, without hesitation, is that scale wins. Baggot is blunt about the mechanics: Freight economics punish small shipments, and a big buyer would rather deal with one grower who can fill a trailer than a dozen who can’t.

Dellacamera doesn’t argue the point — he almost envies it. At Baggot’s scale, there’s room to specialize: a marketing person, a food-safety person, a packing house of your own. At his, there’s just him. “The grower should just grow,” he says, half-joking, and not joking at all.

Dellacamera leaves the harder line behind. He points to the recent cyclospora outbreak tied to large-scale lettuce operations as the cost of a supply chain too vast to trace — a contamination that size, he argues, couldn’t happen on a farm like his own. If local growers disappear, he says, it won’t be an accident; every buyer up the chain will have played a part.

Baggot, for his part, asks only for a fair look: “We try to grow a good crop, and we try to take care of our customers. Maybe they should give us a shot.”

Two truths, both real at once, from two differently sized farms. One built big enough to reach Florida grocery shelves. The other small enough to trace every leaf back to its row.

The real question for everyone buying produce isn’t which model wins — it’s whether the industry will pay for what the smaller one protects, before there’s no longer one left to compare it to.

Maria DeSarbo is the chief procurement officer for Produce One.