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IGI’s co-executive director wants Martha’s Vineyard to buy local — and think bigger.
Caroline Pam joined Island Grown Initiative as co-executive director last March, bringing with her nearly two decades of experience building Kitchen Garden Farm in western Massachusetts — a one-acre startup that grew into a 70-acre certified organic operation. She and her husband recently sold the farm to two longtime employees after creating a year-round business known for its vegetables and value-added products, including sriracha hot sauce and salsa sold in stores throughout the U.S. and Canada.
We spoke with Caroline about what it takes to make farming sustainable — for both the land and the people doing the work — and how she hopes to strengthen Martha's Vineyard's food system through her work at IGI.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Britt: You spent nearly 20 years building Kitchen Garden Farm in Sunderland, Massachusetts, before coming to Martha’s Vineyard. Tell me a little about that experience and what it taught you.
Caroline: My husband and I started our farm in 2006 on one rented acre. I had gone to culinary school and worked as a journalist, and we were just really interested in food and growing things we weren't seeing at markets. We wanted to share our enthusiasm for cooking with locally grown food.
It was just a shot in the dark, but it grew into a 70-acre certified organic farm, and we sold it in the spring of 2024 to two of our longtime employees. We were growing a lot of vegetables in Sunderland and Whately, Massachusetts. We were at 12 different fields on two sides of the Connecticut River, and we also built a commercial kitchen. We were making value-added products from ingredients we grew on the farm. We built a year-round operation to keep our core crew busy and support people with a career in farming — a longterm, year-to-year opportunity. That was sort of our life’s work: building and developing the vision, reinventing ourselves year after year, and training and mentoring people to take it on.
Britt: Tell me more about your value-added products. Why were they such an important part of your business model?
Caroline: Adding the value-added products part of the business was part of a concerted desire, number one, to produce something in a kitchen to share, using our ingredients. But it was also to make the business year-round. And the whole business model was: we grow all the ingredients, we sell a lot of fresh produce during the season, and then preserve a lot in the offseason in many different ways. For the hot sauce, it was fermented peppers. For the jardiniera, it was pickled vegetables. For the salsas, we could freeze the tomato and tomatillo puree and all of the roasted ingredients, and we would dehydrate chilies for chili powders and herbs — making all of these ingredients in a preserved state so that we could spend the winter keeping our staff employed and generating revenue by doing the manufacturing and sales.
Britt: It sounds like you were thinking about sustainability in a broader sense. Not just environmentally, but economically.
Caroline: I strongly believe that communities and our society rely on farms, and for farms to continue — to not have the land just continuously lost and sold to development — farms need to be viable. I was just really driven to find a model that was sustainable, business-wise, for the humans doing the work — and to build a community at our farm where people make enough money to continue farming. I had this strong feeling that people had this expectation that nobody goes into farming to make money — and that’s true — but farmers do have to make money in order to continue farming. You can’t expect people to come and take a job and do the work if it’s not a good job. So we made it our personal mission to build a community and a workplace that was sustainable for people to return to year after year, or to stay in continuously.
I had always been aware of the work of Island Grown and admired how ambitious they had been in tackling really big problems. To be able to really make such a deep impact, with the mobile poultry processing unit and the composting pilot, the farm to school work — being in every school — it’s just really incredible.
– Caroline Pam, co-executive director of Island Grown Initiative
Britt: It sounds like a lot of what you built in western Mass. is similar to the kind of work IGI does here on Martha’s Vineyard.
Caroline: There’s definitely a lot of overlap, and that’s a lot of the reason why I was drawn to working with Island Grown.
The Vineyard was one of the places where we would take a week’s vacation with our family, and we had been coming here for about 17 years. We had friends who introduced us and who had a place here, and we just really loved the strong agricultural community. As a food lover, it’s an incredible place — to have all this access to farm-grown produce and meats and a working fishery, to be able to go out and harvest your own clams and oysters. It just really spoke to us.
I had always been aware of the work of Island Grown and admired how ambitious they had been in tackling really big problems. To be able to really make such a deep impact, with the mobile poultry processing unit and the composting pilot, the farm to school work — being in every school — it’s just really incredible. So I was excited about the opportunity when it came up, and I was already here. We moved here in 2023, and I had spent the last winter working with the Ag Society, doing consulting with farmers, and doing some workshops on loans and grants and employee management — just sharing my experience with farmers here and getting a better understanding of what the challenges and opportunities are in farming here.
Britt: You mentioned that one of the things that drew you to IGI was its willingness to tackle really big problems. One of those challenges here is building a more resilient food system. The Island’s Climate Action Plan sets a goal of sourcing 50% of food regionally by 2040. What are your thoughts about that goal?
Caroline: I’m really excited about starting to work in that direction. In addition to being a producer and vegetable grower during Covid, we launched a food hub called Sunderland Farm Collective and brought together a network of eventually 60 farms to do home deliveries to customers all around the Pioneer Valley. It was such an eye-opening experience to see what the demand can be when people change their purchasing habits — when people stopped getting everything they needed from the supermarkets and started looking to smaller, more local farmstands for their weekly shopping.
At that moment, I was like, “Wow, we need so many more farms. We actually don’t have nearly enough capacity to meet demand if people were actually looking to us to feed them.”
Then, of course, when the world reopened and restaurants reopened and people started traveling again, everyone went back to their same old shopping at supermarkets. All of the farms in this network had scaled up to meet the new demand, and then suddenly, they were left without the customers showing up. So there’s a real opportunity here on the Island to address that problem.
Britt: How did that experience shape the way you’re approaching your work at IGI?
At Island Grown, we’re distributing food, we’re growing it at the farm, but we’re also buying food for the pantry and for the kitchen. So that’s where I want to start. If our goal is to strengthen the food system, let’s do it here first.
We want to build up the supply chain so we know everything that's being grown on the Island, choose local food as our first option beyond what we’re producing ourselves, and then identify the gaps and source those products from regional suppliers in Massachusetts and New England. I have a lot of relationships with local distributors, so I feel like we’re poised and ready to just connect the dots.
Britt: What does “connecting the dots” actually look like?
We have a lot of trucks coming to the Island on the boat every day from the mainstream distributors that are not carrying a lot of local products. But there are local food hubs and distributors that are focused on buying from small farms. We just need to connect a few dots to get those products onto the Island to fill the gaps in what we’re not producing here.
As we’re purchasing for IGI’s programs, we’ll be able to identify what’s in demand and share that information with growers to see who wants to grow those crops locally and reduce our reliance on outside suppliers. So that’s really the concept.
We have grant funding that’s helping us build those logistics and giving us the purchasing power to buy more local food while we develop these systems.
At Island Grown, we’re distributing food, we’re growing it at the farm, but we’re also buying food for the pantry and for the kitchen. So that’s where I want to start. If our goal is to strengthen the food system, let’s do it here first.
– Caroline Pam
Britt: It sounds like you’re focused on working with existing distributors rather than creating an entirely new system.
Caroline: My goal is not to reinvent the wheel. I’d rather find where the channels are already working and get the right information in front of people so they can use those existing systems. There are already distributors coming to the Island, and some already carry local products. One way to influence those larger players is by demonstrating demand. They’ll respond to the market.
Britt: Do you think the goal of sourcing half of the Island’s food regionally by 2040 is realistic?
Caroline: One of the challenges is that we don’t actually know where we’re starting. We're embarking on a food assessment with partners across the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket to look at everything from production capacity to infrastructure and community health.
One tricky part is simply figuring out where the food is coming from. If you look at a Sysco invoice, for example, it doesn’t tell you where those products originated. Understanding our baseline is really the first step.
Britt: That's part of the CARAT assessment [Community & Agriculture Resilience Audit Tool] the Island is participating in. What exactly is that process trying to accomplish?
Caroline: The Southeastern Massachusetts Food Security Network has been doing these CARAT assessments every five years through the Marion Institute, and this is the first year that Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Cape are included. So we’re all looking at the different areas of the food system, such as natural resources and community health and productive capability and infrastructure. And we’re using the same metrics to evaluate what we have, what our resources currently are, and to invite stakeholders from across the food system to participate — people experiencing food insecurity and people working in the hospital and people working in government. Everybody is at the table for these conversations to understand, what do we have? Where are our strengths? What are the gaps? And what do we need to focus on to get there?
Britt: Since Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket share many of the same challenges, do you see opportunities for the two islands to collaborate more on regional sourcing?
Caroline: I know that Mayumi [Hattori] at Pip & Anchor has been doing local sourcing for the food access program boxes they put together. And Posie [Constable] from Sustainable Nantucket is also on the CARAT Community of Practice. We’ve been meeting monthly to launch our food system assessment. There’s definitely a lot of opportunity to collaborate, to see if we can use our shared demands to bring more food to a Cape location that can then serve both of us, and coordinate on those logistics. I also had a conversation with another partner from the CARAT, who’s based on the Cape in Barnstable with the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, and we were talking about where they might invest in a cold storage facility that could serve as sort of a spoke in the food hub network. There’s definitely an opportunity to look at this regionally.
Britt: What are some of your bigger-picture goals as co-executive director of IGI?
Caroline: One of my overarching goals is making sure our food access programs are set up to support the farms on the Island — that local food is part of our food supply plan. From my experience at my farm, I also see a real opportunity to utilize the kitchen that we run. We produce almost 70,000 prepared meals each year for distribution through the pantry and other food access partners across the Island, and I'd love to use more local food in those meals and preserve ingredients during the growing season so we can use them year-round. We have that capability.
More broadly, I put a lot of energy into fostering a community at work where everybody feels engaged in the bigger picture and recognizes that their role is part of a larger goal. That's something I bring to my work every day — being clear about the values, the mission, and how everybody's part is so essential to it.
Britt: Outside of work, are there any sustainability practices you personally prioritize or simply enjoy?
Caroline: We recently got a flock of laying hens again. I've done it in the past, but not for many years, so now we have 18 backyard chickens. I love feeding them our food scraps. I love composting too, but they get so excited when we toss them radicchio or stale bread.
Really, though, we do a lot of preserving. We grow a lot of our own food and preserve it, and that's one of the joys of life for me. Last night we cooked radicchio from the garden with polenta that we grew and processed ourselves. We made ravioli with our own eggs, North Tabor Farm spinach, and tomato sauce that we'd preserved. That's kind of how we roll.
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Tomato Passata (Tomato Purée)
- Yield: Makes 9 pints 1x
Description
Island Grown Initiative co-executive director Caroline Pam shares this recipe for tomato passata — perfect for August. (Read our full interview with Caroline here.)
Ingredients
- 20 lbs tomatoes, washed and roughly chopped (with the core)
- 1 Tbsp salt
- 1 Tbsp lemon juice
Instructions
- Heat a large heavy bottomed stock pot over medium-high heat. Add the tomatoes little by little. It’s helpful to add a small amount of water at the beginning to prevent sticking and burning.
- Stir the tomatoes frequently as they heat up and release their liquid. Once you’ve added all the tomatoes to the pot, allow them to reach 195°F to 200°F.
- Turn off the heat and use a handheld sieve to scoop out the tomato pulp, letting the liquid drain off. Transfer the pulp to a large bowl or other vessel, and drain off additional liquid as the pulp settles. The more liquid removed at this stage, the thicker the consistency of the finished product. Reserve the liquid for another use (use it in veggie stock, make rice with it, drink it, etc).
- Run the pulp through a food mill. Collect the purée in another pot and return to the stove. Heat to 200°F to 205°F.
- Add the salt and lemon juice. Taste for seasoning and correct if necessary.
- Ladle the hot passata into clean jars using a canning funnel. The contents of the jars should be at least 195°F.
- Wipe the rims of each jar clean, then seal them. (Do not over tighten the lids.)
- Invert or lay jars on their sides for 5 minutes to allow the hot liquid to fully sterilize the neck of the jar and the lid. Return the jars upright to cool. Within 1 hour, their safety seals should pop down.
- Once fully cool, wipe any splatter off the outside of the jars and store them in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight.
