Berkshire Agriculture Ventures Awarded USDA Grant

01:15PM / Thursday, April 27, 2023Print Story | Email Story

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Berkshire Agriculture Ventures (BAV) has been awarded a $630,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture through its Rural Development Meat and Poultry Intermediary Lending Program (MPILP).

Together with an additional $210,000 match from community members, BAV will use this grant to establish a dedicated, $840,000 fund that will enable BAV to issue loans to meat processors within the Berkshire-Taconic foodshed, over the next three years. As these loans are repaid, they will be invested into a permanent funding mechanism that will significantly enhance BAV's ability to support any kind of local food processing, distribution, and aggregation.

"The MPILP award from the USDA is transformative," said BAV Interim Executive Director Glenn Bergman. "It puts BAV in a unique position to continue to provide high-level support to regional meat processors that will increase their ability to meet food supply demands in financially and environmentally responsible ways. We are grateful the USDA recognizes the importance of our lending and technical assistance programs, and the resources we provide to meat processors and other regional food producers."

The creation of this additional, dedicated loan fund complements the work BAV conducts through its Local Meat Processing Support Program (LMPSP). Through the LMPSP BAV provides loans and high-level one-on-one technical assistance, ranging from financial planning to grant writing support, to processors and other agribusinesses in the middle of the local meat processing value chain. The LMPSP has helped BAV forge relationships with many of the existing meat processors in the Berkshire-Taconic foodshed and, with the MPILP funding, will now look forward to working with other regional processors to assess needs, develop strategies, and build a more resilient regional meat processing system.

"Thanks to the MPILP award," said Jake Levin, BAV's Program Manager for Local Meat Processing Support, "BAV can significantly expand its services to meat processors in the Berkshire-Taconic foodshed and continue to play a major role in the impact of our regional agricultural economy. Our dedicated team is ready to assess the needs of food suppliers and empower their potential for growth."

BAV previously received support from the USDA in 2021, when it received a $530,000 grant from the Regional Food Systems Partnership Grant to create a multi-year program that helped BAV address the vulnerability of local processing capacity exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The MPILP grant supplements the solutions and services from that program with a corpus of funds that can now be used to provide loans in perpetuity.

Tags: farming,

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Lee Wants Bioremediation in Housatonic River Vernal Pool Study

05:24AM / Thursday, September 03, 2026

LEE, Mass. — The town has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and General Electric to include PCB bioremediation in its vernal pool study on the Housatonic River.

Lee officials are urging the EPA to require GE to add a bioremediation treatment arm to the vernal-pool study or provide the public with a clear explanation for why such testing is being excluded.

"This is exactly the kind of question EPA and GE should be asking before final remedy decisions are locked in," Select Board Chair Bob Jones said in a statement released to the press. "The town is not asking to slow the cleanup. We are asking EPA and GE to make the cleanup smarter, less destructive, and more protective over the long term."

An open house was held in Pittsfield earlier this summer for the Vernal Pool Pilot Study on Reach 5A of the Housatonic River, a five-mile stretch between the river's confluence and Lenox border.

EPA has required GE to conduct a Vernal Pool Pilot Study as part of the Housatonic River Rest of River remediation, comparing excavation and restoration with activated-carbon-based treatments, including a product called SediMite and powdered activated carbon, the town said.

Ten vernal pools will be cleaned of polychlorinated biphenyls in total, five with excavation and five with active carbon, and seven additional vernal pools will be monitored as controls. Construction will be complete around October, but the pools will be left to their natural processes and monitored with surveys and sampling for three years.

The Lee PCB Advisory Committee wrote a letter calling for the 21st-century approach it said could reduce long-term toxicity, avoid unnecessary destruction of sensitive habitats, and improve the effectiveness of the cleanup.

It states that Lee supports the study's purpose and agrees that EPA and GE must understand how cleanup activities affect sensitive vernal-pool ecosystems.

"The current pilot includes 10 treatment pools and seven control pools, while local officials understand that roughly 100 vernal pools may occur in the broader remediation corridor," the Aug. 27 letter reads.

"That makes the pilot study consequential: the methods tested now could shape how many sensitive wetlands are excavated, reconstructed, treated, or left with PCBs managed in place."

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