South County Succession

On this rainy start to February, farmer Tim Schartner, wrapped in a long tweed coat and plaid scarf, waits anxiously in an SUV outside Exeter Town Hall for the clerk’s office to open.  

He was supposed to be here yesterday, sealing the deal on some high-stakes financing. Instead, he was on the phone again with another loyal investor seeking eleventh-hour help. The request carried an urgency so familiar now as to be informal: “It went something like, ‘I need $65,000, and I need it today.’”  

Who knew growing tomatoes would get this complicated?   

After six years of planning, of resisting opponents, reassuring investors and surviving a three-year town-ordered shutdown, Schartner’s $80 million plan to encase twenty-five acres of his family’s farm under one colossal greenhouse has never been closer to reality than this morning. Nor closer to disaster.  

If things don’t go smoothly inside Town Hall today, a foreclosure auction for the landmark South County farm and another half dozen Schartner properties will take place in a week. If that happens, his vision of growing 42,000 pounds of tomatoes a day, year-round, saving the rest of the farm from development and passing it on to a fifth generation of Schartners will die with the highest bid.  

The immediate crisis: The land where the mall-sized greenhouse will go — all one million square feet — is owned by his father, Richard Schartner, and facing delinquency. Tim Schartner’s banks have agreed to absorb the debt, but a stipulation has cropped up: He will first have to pay off his father’s $65,000 property lien and have the transaction recorded at Town Hall. Only then will a bank representative meet him back here later today to release the first chunk of greenhouse loan money — $25.8 million.  

His investor came through with the $65,000. Then Schartner sped to the Warwick office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is overseeing the project’s financing and providing the remaining bulk of loan money, and waited for staff to produce needed documents.

Now, standing at the town clerk’s counter with all his paperwork, the tense scrambling of the last twenty-four hours — indeed for the last few years — catches up to him.  

“I’ve had to keep my head down and stay focused on the goal just to get here,” he tells deputy clerk Patricia Whitford and clerical assistant Janette Morrissey. He rubs an eye. “I don’t want to get emotional, but it’s almost surreal,” he says, his voice breaking. “The farm’s not going to get developed. We’ll save the farm for the next generation.”  

“Phew,” replies Morrissey. “Nobody wanted to see houses there. And we all like tomatoes.” She chuckles.  

But Schartner still has a long row to hoe.

Schartner, who is fifty-seven, with a white streak flowing through his hair, heads back to the farm four miles away with his wingman Peter Posk, his business advisor in the greenhouse company he’s formed, Rhode Island Grows, LLC.  

The headquarters of their new agricultural venture is located at the farm’s former “Tree House” cabin, where holiday crowds once sipped warm cider and listened to carolers as workers tied fresh-cut Christmas trees onto their car roofs. To get to the office, Schartner passes the charred husk of what had been the financial heart of the family business, clinging to the side of Route 2 like some time-resistant perennial, ten years after the devastating fire.  

The Schartner market stood two floors with a gabled roof and resembled a barn more than any colloquial farm stand. Since 1972 the store had lured generations of customers inside for its seventy varieties of vegetables and plants, jams, pies and home-cut curly french fries, and all the four-season festivities.  

The gutted store remains there now along the road for a reason.  

“We leave it there because we don’t want the brand to die,” says Schartner.  

The 2015 fire led to the farm’s eventual closure. Richard Schartner wanted to rebuild, but new fire code requirements made it too costly and impractical, with store shelf space sacrificed for much wider aisles, his eldest son says.  

“My father was like, ‘They don’t want us, they don’t care about us in Rhode Island.’” He had had go-arounds with town and state officials before with other land projects. “He said, ‘Let’s move north to the other farm,’” the strawberry farm in North Conway, New Hampshire, that the Schartners have operated since the 1990s.   

But Tim Schartner says he and his brothers — all representing the fourth generation to work the South County land — wanted to keep the farm. However, the land was growing more debt from unpaid taxes and loan insurance than produce.  

Tim Schartner’s first plan to save it, like the greenhouse project now, called for sacrificing about twenty-five farm acres to spare having to sell the remaining 125 acres.

He would build a “farm hamlet,” clusters of about 120 small, single-family condominiums along Route 2. As part of their condo fee, owners would agree to purchase produce from the farm, supplied each week like a milk delivery. “We would go from house to house and we’d give them sustenance.”  

It sounded nice, anyway.  

“It made me feel better about losing the farmland because there was an agricultural theme, a community of ‘farmies’ I called them, and it would save the rest of the land. But at the end of the day, it was still houses, you know what I mean? I was trying to color it to make myself feel better.”  

He needed an alternative to houses. Then he heard what was happening 270 miles north in Madison, Maine.  

In 2006, a company there called Backyard Farms, using greenhouse technology perfected in the Netherlands decades ago, opened its first twenty-acre “controlled environment agriculture” greenhouse, where computerized sensors set the perfect temperature, light and humidity and feed the plants a brew of nutrients and water, all in the absence of soil. 

Schartner was inspired by the company’s success. (It would expand to forty-two acres under glass in two greenhouses.) Perhaps, he thought, he could adopt their model. He traveled to the Netherlands and negotiated an agreement with the same company that built Backyard Farms, Havecon. It had also built a seventy-acre greenhouse in Oneida, New York.   

“So, I looked at that and said, ‘That’s what I gotta do. I gotta use their floor plan, their organizational chart. I gotta build a greenhouse.’”  

It remains an enormous risk. But Schartners had proven for almost a century they’re not averse to risk. 

The first Schartner farmers in New England were brothers who arrived from Europe around 1900 and went to work on a fruit tree farm in Berlin, Massachusetts. Within a decade, each had their own farm, one in Berlin, the other in nearby Bolton. They, too, would have farming children and by the late 1920s, brothers Edward and Albert, and later, brother John, had pulled up stakes in Massachusetts to work the farmland along the border of Exeter and North Kingstown which they would one day own.  

The Schartners have diversified operations several times in the last ninety years to stay in business, from starting as dairy farmers to plowing their cow pastures into potato fields to supply the emerging potato chip industry, to creating a popular retail market and area plant shops.  

Along the way the family became early practitioners of what’s today called agritourism.  

In the 1950s, Tim’s grandfather, John, and John’s brother, Edward — the family adventurer who abandoned farming for a time to prospect for gold in Africa — saw an opportunity passing by another farm they owned along Boston Neck Road, south of Wickford: beach traffic.  

The brothers built the Schartner Dairy and Snack Bar, then expanded it into “Kiddieland,” a small amusement park complete with rides and a miniature steam railroad. The park eventually closed after Route 4 became the main throughfare for day-trippers.  

Schartner’s newest innovation now rises from a low field paralleling Route 2; you see it there behind the market ruins, the farm’s future iteration rising over its last. The forest of white metal stanchions, two stories high, was rooted into the ground with laser precision. Row after row, the greenhouse framing stretches for a quarter mile, creating an illusion like fluttering movie frames for passing travelers.  

As the white framing took shape, Schartner underestimated opposition; both toward his project’s enormous size and what critics said was his disregard for the local approval process.

Schartner insists he did get initial approval; some town officials attended the project’s 2021 groundbreaking. Yes, it was enormous in scale, but it fit the definition of a greenhouse all the same, he says, and thus enjoyed certain local and state agricultural protections, among them the exemption from Exeter’s zoning review — at least in its initial construction phrase.   

A Superior Court judge disagreed, ruling in August 2022 that even “permitted uses are still subject to the dimensional requirements of local ordinances.”   

Last September, the Exeter Planning Board gave conditional approval for the project to resume, but there’s been little visible progress along Route 2. Behind the scenes, though, Schartner and Posk have led a team of consultants in meeting the board’s stipulations over permitting, water use and fire protection. They’ve swapped out lighting and other initial plans and studied harvest “harmonics,” using sound waves to improve tomato growth in controlled environments.

Virtually every nut and bolt of the project needs some form of approval before a real estate closing transfers the land from his father to Rhode Island Grows, and the federal agricultural department releases the rest of the loan money. Besides the Planning Board conditions, the Department of Environmental Management has set some environmental requirements on the project, including gaining an air quality permit once the greenhouse is operational sometime next year.

Still, Tim Schartner can see beyond the entwined challenges, can see in his mind a restored farm, a bustling new produce market, corn mazes and lines of happy berry pickers, college horticultural classes held inside his greenhouse.

The greenhouse project must succeed. It’s his only play now.

“It’s like this. I burned the boats,” he says. “We either get it done or we lose all the farms in three states and forty people are out of their homes. [Schartner still has ownership interest in the family farm in Massachusetts.] That’s the truth. But when we made the decision to go with this, it wasn’t controversial to us. The town told us we had this [greenhouse] by right. We were given the go. I ordered the steel and the whole thing. So when we did this, we didn’t know we were putting everything in peril.”  

Schartner holds on to two axioms like rosary beads. The first: “pressure makes diamonds.” The second: “The pioneers always get the arrows.”  

He recites them now as he paces the floor of his Tree House headquarters. He’s awaiting word for when to meet the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank representative back at Town Hall. Because the $25.8 million loan will be paid off as a voluntary property tax assessment instead of a traditional mortgage, it must be recorded at Town Hall.

His father drifts in with two other sons for an update. Rich and Jeb Schartner run another farm three miles away growing mostly greens and root vegetables. They sell to restaurants and through the Farm Fresh Rhode Island program that connects farmers to consumer markets.   

Rich has three children studying agriculture and business at the University of New Hampshire. Jeb has a daughter at UNH, too, majoring in agriculture sustainability and food systems.  

The children are part of the fifth generation of Schartners Tim often refers to, along with his own two children, who are much younger. It would be up to them if they joined the family business, of course. But first the opportunity must exist. 

Some former vocal critics of the project are reluctant to speak now that it’s been given the green light. But not Scott Millar, the former chair of the town’s Conservation Commission and Planning Board. 

“My big concern is that these facilities are essentially an industrial use,” he says. “You could build one of these on top of the Central Landfill.”  

Why put it over prime agricultural land, asks Millar, when there’s so little of it left in Rhode Island? “And what little remains is under tremendous threat to be converted to other uses in the future.”  

Schartner’s response to this argument has always been that the greenhouse is technically a temporary structure. It has no permanent flooring and could be taken down. And, oh, by the way, it’s his field. And he doesn’t own industrial land anywhere.  

Millar also worries what might happen if the greenhouse proves too costly to operate, its market shrinks, and it runs into financial trouble. Rhode Island Grows is a corporation answerable to stockholders, he says, “and they’re likely to develop [the land] for its highest and best use. Right now, there’s a huge demand for housing, and that’s likely what it would be. It’s not likely going to be Tim Schartner’s decision unilaterally.  

“Schartner sells it as a family farm,” Millar says. “But we have to be honest. This is a limited liability corporation. It’s not a family farm.”  

Posk, who will become Rhode Island Grows chief executive officer if the land transfer goes through, dismisses Millar’s speculation.  

He says Tim Schartner owns a majority interest in Rhode Island Grows and is also chairman of the board. “Rhode Island Grows is a tightly held corporation with decision-making in only a few hands.”  And the Canadian company, Mastronardi Produce Limited, that has agreed to buy all of Rhode Island Grows’ tomatoes for at least ten years — that’s 42,000 pounds a day, trucked by eighteen-wheeler to markets in New York City and Boston — has no ownership interest in the company, Posk says.  

For the Schartners, their succession attempt has played out as a public controversy. For other farmers, the difficult and sensitive transition is often handled privately.    

Laurel Witri understands the pressures those famers face better than most.  

As a mediator for the Warwick-based nonprofit Center for Mediation and Collaboration, she offers free guidance to farmers, introducing them to legal, tax and loan experts to ease ownership transfers and resolve creditor disputes.  

“My whole idea is to help them build relationships with folks they can trust,” she says.  

Witri’s work started in 2022 as an offshoot of the Farm Stress Assistance Network, a federal program that offered small grants to struggling farmers during the pandemic. The grants paid for such things as car repairs, child and elder care, and even off-season gym memberships to recover from farming’s physical toll.  

During a program review, “succession planning was identified as a stressor and a priority for both established farmers and for new farmers looking for land,” says Witri.   

Rhode Island has the most expensive agricultural land in the country — averaging $22,000 an acre, five times the national average — and a shrinking supply.   

In 2022, Rhode Island had 1,054 farms operating on just 59,076 acres of farmland, and many of those acres included harvestable woodlands, not fields, said a U.S. Department of Agriculture report last year. The acreage was a fraction of the 331,600 acres reported a century ago when the state, like the country, was more agrarian.    

“It’s a really limited resource here and it’s only gotten so much more expensive for the next generation trying to enter,” says Witri. “That’s stressful for them, and it’s also stressful for farmers who are looking to retire. They’re trying to figure this out: ‘How do I know when I’m ready and who’s going to take over my farm?’”   

Witri hasn’t worked with the Schartners but has helped other farmers in Rhode Island.  

“People don’t go into farming for the money,” says Witri. “They go into it because they love it and they’re passionate.  It’s a hard profession, physically and mentally, so there’s a whole emotional piece of letting go and feeling ready.”  

Tim Schartner doesn’t want to let go. 

And there’s a need for his greenhouse, says Ken Ayars, chief of the division of agriculture and forest environment in the state Department of Environmental Management.  

“To me, it is essential for keeping and improving food security in the state and keeping the viability of agriculture strong,” he says. Rhode Island produces less than 5 percent of its own food. As traditional farms shrink away and weather-changing challenges become more common, “we need these types of operations mixed in with everything else that we are doing.”  

Controlled environment agriculture isn’t new to Rhode Island; Gotham Greens has a 110,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse in Providence. But one of Schartner’s size remains an unfamiliar concept for many, says Ayars.  

“I’ve said to Tim before that, ‘What you’re doing will ultimately help other people who want to do the same thing. Maybe not just in Rhode Island but elsewhere.’”  

Back at the town hall parking lot, Schartner sees the man he’s been waiting for heading for the door and he joins him.   

James Braz is the director of the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank, which connects capital providers with projects needing funding that the bank considers a public benefit.

With a few paperwork formalities, stamping and copying, a buoyant Schartner has his first $25.8 million.  

Braz turns to Peter Posk: “If I could tell you how many times I had to talk him off the ledge,” he says, referring to Schartner. Then to Schartner he jokes: “Free tomatoes for life.”  

“I owe a lot of free tomatoes for life,” Schartner replies.  

Schartner is only a few steps back outside Town Hall when his cellphone rings with the howling theme from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.   

It’s his builder, Jason Pannone, of Bentley Builders, in Warwick, calling to check whether the lien and these first financing arrangements are all set. He’s been blowing up Posk’s phone with text messages all day looking for the same update.  

Schartner doesn’t bother saying hello. He answers with two words: “It’s done,” he says, smiling. 

One big financial hurdle scaled.

It is spring break week for the University of New Hampshire, and students have drifted off the Durham campus for a rest from academia.

For four young Schartners, the time off means more time working around the family farms and catching up with relatives.  

Jack Schartner, twenty-two, his brother Tyler, twenty, and their sister Madalyn, nineteen, have spent this Saturday morning planting Swiss chard, cherry tomatoes and kale inside one of the regular-size greenhouses at the family’s nearby Slocum farm. Their cousin Saige, nineteen, is back home in Exeter, too, enjoying a pause between studies.

They’ve taken a break to come over to their Uncle Tim’s greenhouse office at the main farm to talk.  

Jack graduates this year with a major in precision agriculture, “which is all about how to use AG sensors like in the greenhouse my Uncle Tim is putting up, and also out West with bigger conventional AG. It’s not just how to use them but how they work so you can troubleshoot any issues you have.”  

Saige is majoring in eco-gastronomy: “It’s the sustainability of agriculture and food systems and food production.”  

Madalyn is majoring in finance and information analytics; Tyler, business for now with an eye toward a farming future.  

The young Schartners seem naturally rooted in farm work.

“Even as kids, when we were weeding, the most dreadful job, we all had each other, and we would make it fun,” says Saige. “You used your hands. You were in the dirt. You had the plants. It was magic. We made it magical.”  

Jack says, “I’ve been told my whole life to follow your dreams, whatever you want to do, but at the same time, yeah, it’s just in our blood. You grow up on the farm, and it’s a certain lifestyle that you learn to love.”  

“It’s in your values,” adds Madalyn.  

“I love agriculture,” says Tyler. “I hope that is what I can do someday. Obviously, it’s not the easiest thing to do, but if I can, that would be my hope.”    

Two generations ago on Schartner Farms, workers carried small pairs of pliers for the innumerable times they needed to loosen a nut, tighten a valve, pinch a piece of wire.  

An old farmhand bought Tim Schartner and his brothers their own pliers, but eventually they stopped carrying them.  

Young Jack Schartner heard the plier story from his grandfather and saw present-day value in its history. He bought a pair with a leather sheath to wear on his belt and began presenting other sets as gifts.  

He gave Saige a pair when she returned from a semester abroad. 

He bought a pair for his father, Rich, to wear again, and gave a set to his Uncle Jeb for Christmas.  

Last summer Tyler graduated from high school.  

Tyler lifts his T-shirt now to show the pliers on his belt. The red handle protrudes from a leather sheath monogrammed with his initials, TRS.  

Another Schartner carrying on tradition.