To the Editor, What’s Up Newport:
The Aquidneck Island Land Trust recently published a letter regarding the Sweet Berry Farm proposal. But it may have left readers more reassured than the facts warrant, because it does not answer the central question: will a project that destroys more than 1,300 mature fruit trees to construct an Instagrammable barn on conserved land result in a working farm, or a commercial events business that happens to be located on one?
The easement recorded in 1996 means this: Sweet Berry Farm’s 85 acres are permanently protected for agricultural purposes, binding every future owner, forever. Any structure must be accessory to agriculture — incidental to it, subordinate to it, in support of it. That is a perpetual legal obligation, not a suggestion.
The AILT approved the proposal conditionally, provided the property continues to function primarily as a working farm. That condition creates no enforcement mechanism. Neither document discloses any financial basis for the project — no capital cost, no pro forma, no revenue projections by use category. A 7,500-square-foot two-story barn connected underground to a 4,592-square-foot market and café, surrounded by 63 parking spaces and a commercial loading dock, represents a very large capital investment. What that investment is designed to return, and from which uses, is the question neither document addresses. Once that construction is built on conserved land, it cannot be unbuilt.
Look at the renderings above. The sweeping drive, curated plantings, commercial windows, fieldstone, covered porch and prominent silo are the visual language of a wedding venue. A working farm silo stores grain. This one exhausts a commercial kitchen. Farms grow trees. They don’t sacrifice 1,300 of them for an architectural statement.
A structure designed at this scale, requiring commercial event revenue to justify the investment, is not accessory to agriculture. It is a commercial facility that happens to be located on a farm.
The community has been asked to choose between approving this project or watching the farm fail. That is a false choice. There are better paths forward that have not been proposed, evaluated or publicly ruled out. The community deserves to know why.
Sweet Berry Farm deserves to thrive for generations. The question is not whether it should succeed — of course it should — but whether this project is the best we can do for land that carries a perpetual conservation obligation, one that depends on the active commitment of all concerned to mean what it says.
Einstein reminded us that no worthy problem is solved on the same plane as it was originally conceived. Sweet Berry Farm deserves that kind of thinking — from its owners, from the town, from the Land Trust and from the neighbors who care deeply about its future.
Respectfully,
Stephen M. Sullivan, J.D., M.P.H.
Middletown
