Council buys APR on Palmer's Tyringham Valley farm

On February 5, the Berkshire Natural Resources Council purchased an Agricultural Preservation Restriction on a 153-acre farm in Tyringham owned by Gilder Palmer.

Gilder Palmer at Four Brooks Farm

The acquisition means that Palmer's Four Brooks Farm will remain in agricultural use in perpetuity.

The Resources Council paid $360,000 for the APR. Tad Ames, director of the Council, said that the organization will hold the APR temporarily, and plans eventually to sell it to the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

"It's a key farm, adjacent to Tyringham Cobble and the Appalachian Trail, and close by other protected farmland in the valley . Gilly Palmer and his family worked hard to make this come about, and we were fortunate enough to help them bring it home," Ames said.

"We're very pleased by this," said Gilder Palmer. "With the amount of frontage on Main Road and up George Canon Road, the farm could have been destroyed. It would have been disastrous."

The Palmer family has long concerned itself with preservation. The family was one of the leading forces in purchasing Tyringham Cobble, and later donating it to The Trustees of Reservations .

Gilder Palmer's grandfather purchased two farms in Tyringham in 1898, and combined them to make Four Brooks Farm. Palmer gave up his dairy operation in 1955 after a pair of fires. Today, he raises beef cattle and sheep, which graze on the farm and the Tyringham Cobble pastures.

(Perhaps illustrating the extent to which agricultural ventures in the Berkshires are all part of an interrelated web, one morning earlier this month, Palmer's son Reese was lambing sheep the family had purchased from Lila Berle, protector of Sky Farm.

(Berle's sheep farming is conducted at the former Wolf farm in Egremont. The Wolf farm is protected by an APR, and is, coincidentally enough, adjacent to Peggy Whitfield's Great Pine Farm.)

Ames said that this latest initiative continued a program of significant APR investments in Tyringham.

"At one end the Hale farm is protected, and at the other end of the valley the Slater farm is under an APR. Preserving Gilly's farm helps ensure a good agricultural land base in the valley," he said.

Home