As the chairwoman of the state Senate's newly created Environment and Agriculture Committee, Senator Susan Sosnowski (D-South Kingstown) has become one of New England's most prominent advocates for sustainable organic farming. The legislator and her husband farm 65 acres in South County, organically growing potatoes, melons, lettuce, Swiss chard, flowers, Christmas trees, and sod, selling them at a roadside stand near the University of Rhode Island.

Packed with ideas for preserving groundwater, encouraging direct marketing of farm products, and perhaps even modifying the new federal organic regulations, Sosnowski, 47, says her unusual path to organic farming will help her to effectively run the Environment and Agriculture Committee.

While many organic growers took up chemical-free farming for philosophical reasons or as a hobby. Sosnowski is a convert. Although her parents weren't farmers, she began working the land in 1984, driving a tractor, sewing seed, and harvesting sod for South County farmer Hollis Tucker. Two years later, she married Mike Sosnowski, the manager of Tucker's 500-acre turf farm.

Tucker encouraged the Sosnowskis to lease their own farm and gave them seed to grow five acres of sod. Sosnowski's switch to organic farming also started on Tucker's chemically fertilized and herbicide-sprayed land. After mowing and harvesting Tucker's sod, Sosnowski became ill, developed allergies, and she blamed the chemicals. Then, Tucker developed esophageal and liver cancer. "Hollis died in 1992," Sosnowski recalls, "and I haven't sprayed since."

The three-year process of shifting fields from conventional to organic production was difficult and filled with doubt, the four-term legislator remembers. Denied fertilizer, "the soil didn't seem alive," Sosnowski relates. The couple had crop failures and bug problems. And when she announced at farm bureau meetings that she was an organic grower, she was viewed as an oddball outsider. "It took a great deal of faith to hang in there," Sosnowski says.

But farming success emerged from the unconventional path, helping Sosnowski to avoid the "that's the way we've always done it" thinking that plagues some farm families. "It allowed me to look at and research a lot of avenues," she adds, noting the willingness to listen and experiment assists her work as a state senator.

Sosnowski is upbeat about the future of New England farming, which, she says, lies in direct sales to consumers. Rhode Island no longer has a produce market, Sosnowski notes, and the large suppliers rely on California for fruits and vegetables. This forces farmers to connect to the community, she says, through farmers' markets.

High on Sosnowski's priority list is securing more conservation money to preserve New England agriculture. "We're up against it with suburbia coming out into farm land," she says. Last year, she convinced the General Assembly to encourage rural land to remain in agricultural production, authoring a law that allows municipalities to exempt farmland from local property taxes. As a result, both Portsmouth and Sosnowski's hometown of Richmond have reduced taxes on local farms, she says.

Last year, the senator also authored new laws to preserve fish stocks, permit farmers to sell yeast breads, pies, pickles, and jellies directly to consumers, and prohibit landlords from evicting victims of domestic violence.

Issue Date: February 28 - March 6, 2003