The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
SITE FEATURED IN FARM AID LISTED FOR NEARLY $5M
In September 2021, the Farm Aid music festival returned to Connecticut’s Xfinity Theatre in Hartford. The daylong music festival was created in 1985 by musicians Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp to bring awareness to the loss of family farms and raise money to help keep farm families on their land.
The last time the festival was in Hartford in 2018, the owner of Greenbacker’s Brookfield Farm was featured in conversation with the festival’s founders and board members. Now, the owner is selling his farm for nearly $5 million.
On the market for $4.999 million, the farm on 148/153 Wallingford Road known as Greenbacker’s Brookfield Farm was established in Durham over 100 years ago and has been owned by the Greenback family since 1983, according to the listing. Owner Joe Greenbacker was featured in Farm Aid interviews in 2018 alongside other farmers who discussed “some of the enormous obstacles faced by each farm and steps taken by the farmers to deal with and, hopefully, overcome those challenges,” according to a Farm Aid blog post.
Originally a dairy farm, the dairy herd that was part
of the 415-acre Brookfield Farm was sold in 2018. While the farm still has some cows today, it largely “focuses on vegetable cropland, field corn production and growing hay, with pastures rented to other farmers and horses boarded for additional income,” according to information provided by William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty. The farm’s entry to the real estate market marks the first time in almost 40 years the farm is for sale
Besides its agrarian use, the farm — which spans two parcels on either side of Route 68 — is home to seven residences with a total of 29 bedrooms and nine full bathrooms, as well as multiple barns and cattle and
equestrian facilities. The property also contains its own pond and woodlands. The listing notes that the state of Connecticut “acquired the development rights for the farm and all activities must be agricultural in nature.”
According to national real estate brokerage Redfin, home prices in Durham’s 06422 ZIP code were down 12.7 percent to a median sale price of $377,500 in March 2022 compared to the same month last year. The number of homes sold in the area increased by 12.5 percent to 18 in March 2022, up from 16 the year before. “Hot homes,” or those expected to be among the most competitive on the market, according to Redfin, can sell for about 8 percent about the list price and become a pending sale in approximately 37 days.