FILE 2010: Members of a picking crew work at Tuttle Farm in Dover, New Hampshire. (AP)
Three years after it was put up for sale, an 11-generation family farm in New Hampshire has been sold for a fraction of the price that was first listed.
Members of the Tuttle family owned the 135-acre farm in Dover since 1632, one of America's oldest continuously operated family farms. They put the fruit-and-vegetable farm up for sale in the summer of 2010 as they dealt with competition from supermarkets, pick-it-yourself farms and debt.
The original price was $3.35 million. Foster's Daily Democrat reports it sold last month for a little over $1 million to Matt Kozazcki, who owns a farm in Newbury, Mass.
"It's huge," Kozazcki told the paper. "It's a lot of heritage. We're trying to make it as much of a farm as possible. You can't forget the Tuttles. I can appreciate the work they did," Kozazcki told the paper.
Kozazcki calls the business Tendercrop Farm and plans to sell meat and produce starting in December.
Kozazcki said he plans to install a memorial plaque honoring the Tuttles near the farm store entrance.
The New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a piece in 2010 when the farm went out of business. She points out that the farm was founded when there were, maybe, 10,000 colonists in America.
"It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn," Klinkenborg wrote. "In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend."
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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