The Mysterious Red Fire Appeal

When Ryan Voiland graduated college in 2000 with an Ivy League diploma in hand, he didn’t follow his classmates into the big-city banks or management consultancies. Instead he did something unexpected: He bought farmland. Ryan’s acreage is in Granby, Massachusetts, a small town of six thousand in the center of the state, not far south from Amherst. The land quality in Granby is mixed—it’s too far east from the Connecticut River to guarantee access to the river valley’s best soil—but Ryan still managed to coax a variety of fruits and vegetables out of his plot. He called the fledgling concern Red Fire Farm.

When I arrived in May 2011 to spend a day at Red Fire, Ryan, who is now working with his wife, Sarah, had seventy acres of organic produce under cultivation. The bulk of Red Fire’s revenue comes from their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which subscribers pay for a share of the farm’s output at the beginning of the growing season and then pick up their produce every week at distribution stands throughout the state. In 2011, the program had around 1,300 CSA subscribers and had started to turn people away—there was more demand than they could meet.

In other words, Red Fire Farm is a success, but this is not what drew me to Granby. I arranged to spend a day with Ryan and Sarah for a more personal reason: I wanted to figure out why their lifestyle was so appealing.

To clarify, I’m not the only one entranced by Red Fire. This is a farm with fans. When Ryan and Sarah arrange special events throughout the year—a dinner to celebrate the summer strawberry harvest, for example, or their fall pumpkin festival—they quickly sell out. During my last visit I overheard a middle-aged woman tell her friend, “I just love Ryan and Sarah”—and I’m pretty sure they’d never actually met. The idea of Ryan and Sarah, and what their lifestyle represents, was enough to draw her to Granby.

This appeal, of course, goes beyond just Red Fire. The dream of leaving the rat race to start a farm, or otherwise live in harmony with the land, is the perennial fantasy of the cubicle-bound. In recent years, the New York Times, for example, has made great sport of telling the story of ex-bankers who head off to Vermont to start farms (stories that usually end with the banker slinking home, mud-stained hat in hand). Something about working outdoors, sun on your back, no computer screen in sight, is undeniably appealing. But why?

This question motivated my visit to Red Fire. I was unlikely to move out to the country, but if I could isolate the underlying traits that attracted me to this lifestyle, I reasoned, I could perhaps then integrate some of these traits into my own life in the city. In other words, figuring out this appeal became a key goal in my quest to understand how people end up loving what they do. So I wrote Ryan and Sarah and asked if I could spend a day following them around. Once they agreed, I packed up my notebook, dusted off my work boots, and drove due west out of Boston: I was on a mission to crack the Red Fire Code.