Seva Water first got into farming in Perryville, Arkansas while living in agricultural community. After several seasons of weaving education and ecological sensibility along with farming internships in South Central Pennsylvania, she returned to Western Massachusetts to find a home place to dig in. In 2012 she began learning from and working with refugee and immigrant farmers in Greater Springfield and Worcester, providing technical assistance and managing a community farm CSA. She submersed herself in locally-abundant expertise and enthusiasm around ecological agriculture, food justice, agroforestry, and indigenous ways of relating to the land. Her meanderings brought her to the 2014 Northeast Permaculture Convergence in Unity, Maine, where she met Kalyan and (quickly) agreed to join hands. Seva has since worked in landscaping, food service, a rural grocery cooperative, local political campaign, and local community development agency and helped start-up the Hilltown Mobile Market, an hyper local online food marketplace. She now works part time at Regenerative Design Group and is passionate about building soil, eating homegrown food and connecting people to place.
Kalyan Water is a collector of skills and a dreamer, looking for ways to live lighter and help regenerate this planet. With a very alternative upbringing focused on food and spirituality, Kalyan embodies a desire to give not just people but all things the respect that life deserves. His thirst to holistically understand the world and its people has accompanied him throughout his life and the many different places he has lived and traveled. In previous incarnations, Kalyan has worked as a carpenter, massage therapist, bookseller, cook, orchardist, and animal husband, among others, choosing to be schooled through life experience rather than books or experts. The hilltowns of western Massachusetts have been long been his grounding place and it is a pleasure to finally come home to Cummington with Seva.
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Nutwood Farm is located on 7 acres of hillside in Cummington, MA on land that was once stewarded by the Muh-he-con-neok (“People of the Waters that are never still”) or Mohicans. Other indigenous caretakers may have included the Pocumtuk, Nonotuck, and Abenaki. Before intensive deforestation and agricultural exploitation by settlers in the 1700s, these hills were rich with culture, abundant wildlife, ancient woodlands, medicinal plants, and thick topsoil.
Today, 300 years later, old stone walls mark the boundaries of old pastures and crop fields and young forests blanket once denuded hills. The soil now is thin and stony with gently sloping contours that are ideal for regenerative agroforestry. Our fragment of this landscape was last used as a christmas tree farm, cleared and left for regrowth sometime in the mid-1990’s. It re-grew into a beautiful diverse array of young hardwoods and pines, wild brambles, hawthorns, blueberries, elderberries, serviceberries, crabapples, and more, and became home to a wide variety of birds and native wildlife. In our work to reimagine the possibilities in this place we seek to honor the all intricacies of ecological mutuality at play and maintain this place as a refuge and habitat for the widest possible diversity – including us!