A new vision for farming
Farmington Farm Truck at Hein Farm is a mix of traditional farm and mobile produce stand
After two decades in agriculture and landscape design, Jennifer Villa has a new vision for local farming in Connecticut: Grow crops, run a co-op farm stand and operate a mobile farmers market, too. This fall, Villa has been merging her popular Farmington Farm Truck operation into the Hein Farm, a local landmark about a mile north of Route 6. The business is a mix of retail sales, traditional farming and a project with nearly two dozen other farms that sell through her store and her mobile farm stand.
“Farmers have always been innovative. And with what we’ve been experiencing this year, farms are like other businesses that have had to become even more creative.”
— Joan Nichols, executive director of the Connecticut Farm Bureau
After two decades in agriculture and landscape design, Jennifer Villa has a new vision for local farming in Connecticut: Grow crops, run a co-op farm stand and operate a mobile farmers market, too. “I’m good at juggling. There are a lot of things in the air right now,” Villa said Thursday at the Farmington farm she bought in October.
This fall Villa has been merging her popular Farmington Farm Truck operation into the Hein Farm, a local landmark about a mile north of Route 6. The business is a mix of retail sales, traditional farming and a project with nearly two dozen other farms that get to sell through her store and through her mobile farm stand.
“Farming has been changing, there’s a lot going on,” said Villa, who is also in the midst of renovating the nearby farmhouse, where she and her family will live.
This fall, she remodeled a small storage building at Hein Farm into a farm store, with wooden shelves to display fresh produce as well as locally produced pies, cider, jam, relish and even “Farm Truck Fire” hot sauce. She and the farm’s staff also put so much into seasonal decorations that a customer could mistake it for a small Christmas shop.
“I don’t sleep much past 5,” Villa replied when asked how she keeps so many enterprises going at once. “I also have a landscape design business here, too.”
Villa is the type of younger entrepreneur that is keeping many smaller Connecticut farms alive by diversifying, said Joan Nichols, executive director of the Connecticut Farm Bureau.
“The words innovation and creativity should be on everybody’s radar now,” Nichols said. “Farmers have always been innovative. And with what we’ve been experiencing this year, farms are like other businesses that have had to become even more creative.”
Villa started her career in the garden center at Gledhill Nursery in West Hartford, a long-established operation that was later sold for residential development.
Several years ago she created the Farmington Farm Truck, using a refurbished 1950s pickup truck to bring produce from a number of local farms to big events and business-sponsored gatherings. She also grew flowers and small amounts of produce on several tiny fields in and near the Farmington Valley, and by last year was looking for a farm where she could consolidate the operation.
The Hein family was ready to sell the farm that relatives had run for three generations, and Villa said the deal was in the works when the pandemic began. The cutoff in public gatherings essentially sidelined her farm truck business
“I don’t sleep much past 5. I also have a landscape design business here, too.”
for months, but sales at the farm have been good.
The truck part of the business should rebuild in 2021, she predicted, and already has had some appearances this fall.
While it was down, she spent part of the summer developing an online ordering system for her product line, which ranges from New Britain-made Avery’s Soda to maple syrup from Southington’s Karabin Farms, cider from the Avon Cider Mill and egg nog from Litchfield’s Arethusa Farm.
Her long-range plan is to try produce delivery directly to local homes with her farm trucks; she now has two running 1950s Chevy pickups and a 1948 Dodge that’s used for display.
Nichols said she’s interested in seeing how produce delivery works out, and noted that the Oak Ridge Dairy in Ellington has carved out a successful niche with its Modern Milkman delivery service.
— Jennifer Villa, Farmington Farm Truck owner