The surviving remnants of a commercial kitchen collect dust in the back room of James Meinecke’s farm stand.

A gas range sits untouched, and a metal range hood rests on the ground beside it. The remainder of the structure has, in large part, become a cluttered graveyard of wooden dressers and brass lamps. Where he once hosted farm-to-table dinners and holiday brunches, Meinecke’s antiques and collectibles have staked their claim.

Meinecke, the self-appointed farmer-in-chief of Lewis Farm, and his wife, former state Rep. Rebecca McWilliams, own the 118 acres that surround the stand. Dunes of earthy compost – the farm’s main cash crop – tower behind their family home near the edge of the property, forming muddy rivulets along their perimeters in spring and sprouting sunflowers and volunteer squash in summer.

For eight years, the couple has lived there with their children. For nearly as long, the farm has been a bureaucratic battleground where they say they have fended off the city of Concord’s attempts to stymie their small business and restrict their control over their operations.

“I still want to do farm-to-table dinners. I still want to do music events here, and I still want people to come to the property to enjoy the outdoors, enjoy the fields, enjoy the fact that compost is actually not that bad to look at sometimes. But whenever I try to propose anything to them, they say, ‘This is not farming,’” Meinecke said. “They’ve shown us at every step of the way that they’re going to do everything they can to continue to shut us down.”

Meinecke and McWilliams maintain that their attempts to broaden their business are protected by the state’s agritourism law. In New Hampshire, agritourism includes any event or activity that attracts visitors to a farm without displacing or superseding the primary farm operation. These events are subject to local regulation as long as municipal planning and zoning powers – or the interpretation of those powers – don’t “unreasonably limit” these activities.

The law’s vague wording has given rise to neighborhood conflicts across the state. In one recent case, a dispute in Newfields boiled over into an ongoing lawsuit between nearby homeowners who want to limit a local farm’s events, which the owners say are vital to their financial success. The suit may ultimately add some clarity to the extent of farmers’ freedom or the restrictive power of communities and their residents.

One of the landmark agritourism disputes occurred a decade ago between the owner of a Christmas tree farm in Henniker that hosted weddings and his neighbors, who didn’t appreciate the noise or traffic. The state Supreme Court ruled against the farm, which had been issued violations by the town for hosting events, and affirmed the right of municipalities to authorize, restrict and enforce certain kinds of land use on farms. The farm has since been sold.

Meinecke and McWilliams said they want to avoid litigation, but they aren’t willing to continue waiting for a resolution to a permitting process that has been stalled since 2019.

On Earth Day this past April, they hosted volunteers with the Boys and Girls Club for a farm clean-up, and Meinecke has plans to refresh his farm-to-table dinners with a “barbecue concept” for small groups of guests.

He said he’s “done begging” for permission to reopen his farm stand and the surrounding acreage for events, even if it means defying City Hall.

‘Beyond bitterness’

When Meinecke and McWilliams purchased Lewis Farm in August 2016, they were both architects and parents to newborn twins. They moved to Concord from Quincy, Massachusetts, inheriting a box of t-shirts from the farm’s legendary former owner, Harry Lewis, in the process.

The shirts reproduced a slogan they recognized from Lewis’s bumper sticker: “Support your local farmer or watch the houses grow.” Meinecke and McWilliams interpreted that as their charge to preserve the farm business at any cost. That would turn out to be more difficult than anticipated.

Apart from the lettuce and fresh herbs growing in their greenhouse, they found the soil to be largely depleted and unproductive. They began to scale up their predecessor’s composting operation, receiving yard and food waste from as far afield as Manchester-by-the-Sea, in a long-term attempt to nourish the land.

As compost piles grew, so did a secondary business operation: Meinecke began hosting holiday brunches, yard sales and music events, and his brother, a trained chef, joined him for farm-to-table dinners in the farm stand. They paved a concrete patio to accommodate outdoor seating and began preparing simple meals for parties of as many as 75 people.

“A one-night event would clear me $5,000. That’s equivalent to selling 140 yards of compost. A pickup truck can carry one yard of compost,” Meinecke said, doing the math while ambling through the stand. “I’d have to sell 140 pickup trucks of compost to make up for one farm-to-table dinner, and I don’t sell 140 pickup trucks of compost in a year.”

The city unexpectedly withdrew their event license — which McWilliams explained simply as “just a single sheet of paper that cost I think less than $100” — and required them to apply for a more detailed Conditional Use Permit, according to Meinecke and McWilliams.

Meinecke described the application process, which began in the spring of 2019, as a labyrinth of trap doors and two-way mirrors. His wife found it “extremely onerous.”

They said the city required them to convert part of the farm stand where they hosted their dinners into a commercial kitchen. Until then, they had prepared food on a propane grill on the patio, in their own kitchen, over a fire or a portable burner. They bought a storage container from a former restaurant and salvaged its contents, including a freestanding gas range and a fume hood, both still functional.

Then-City Planner Heather Shank found that their application was incomplete but issued a report outlining additional steps to secure the permit.

In order to continue hosting smaller events, such as weddings and dinners, and to host as many as 10 large events per year with up to 2,400 attendees, Meinecke and McWilliams would need to hire third-party professionals to conduct a traffic study and wetland survey. They would need to pave a parking lot with adequate drainage and stormwater management or obtain a variance from the Zoning Board, according to the planning board report.

The couple remembered that the city required the installation of a toilet in the farm stand, despite their insistence that guests could continue to use the bathroom in their family home. A telephone pole by the second entry to their property would need to be moved, a demand they eventually complied with, costing the couple almost $8,000.

Then, at a planning board meeting in June 2019, the permit was determined to be a Development of Regional Impact, which gave the neighboring town of Bow a say in the matter. The 118-acre farm straddles the town line, stretching far into the forested horizon and disappearing from view. The decision further slowed the process and two months later, Meinecke and McWilliams withdrew their application.

All told, the couple estimates they invested $50,000 in meeting permitting requirements that, in the end, yielded no permit.

Years later, the farm stand functions as storage. The slim aisles separating rows of old furniture are almost impassable. A dozen salt-and-pepper Cairn Terriers, a litter of newborns and some adults, had taken over the sunroom where Meinecke once nurtured racks of fresh greens.

Sitting at his kitchen table, he nestled one tiny puppy in the crook of his elbow and reflected on his memories from the permitting process.

“I was beyond bitterness,” he said. “There was no time and no money left.”

A last resort

Meinecke said he reeled from the withdrawal of his event permit.

“I turned around to my wife and I said, ‘They just canceled our business plan for the next 25 years,’” he recalled. What he did next, by his own admission, became the “worst PR thing that could’ve happened for the farm at that time.”

In late September 2018, the Equinox Festival, originally set to be hosted in Candia, lost its venue, and Meinecke welcomed the festival’s organizers to Lewis Farm. The aftermath of his decision prompted 29 of the farm’s disgruntled neighbors to draft, sign and deliver a petition to the Concord Planning Board while the board considered Meinecke and McWilliams’s conditional use application.

During the three-day festival, an estimated 700 people traveled to the property, blaring a “barrage of loud, expletive-filled music starting on a work day and going into the wee hours of the morning,” according to the petition, provided to the Monitor by Deputy City Manager Matt Walsh.

Festival-goers camped out overnight, and independent vendors joined them during the day. One month later, the city issued the couple a violation letter.

These clashes are becoming more frequent as farms are trying to diversify their activities and grow their income, according Jada Lindblom, a community and economic development field specialist with UNH Cooperative Extension.

“It’s one thing if you have a steady trickle of visitors stopping by for a farm stand, but it’s another if you have, say, 500 people coming all at once to go to a wedding or a music event,” she said. “That’s really where you start seeing more concerns about trespassing, parking, traffic, visitor behavior from drinking, noise pollution and certainly the environmental impacts, as well.”

Lindblom said rapid changes to familiar, rural landscapes can contribute to feelings of hostility and a reticence on the part of local governments to green-light agritourism endeavors. Even areas that are farming footholds may resist agritourism as a result of generational differences in how farm owners choose to use their properties.

The allure of agritourism as a business model for farms seeking year-round profitability can put farmers at odds with their communities.

“Many farm operators have really tried to make farming alone work, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. There’s a feeling from the farm owners that farmers are having to adapt with the times and the circumstances, but many community members aren’t really willing to adapt along with them,” Lindblom said.

Meinecke and McWilliams concede their regrets. They said they aren’t interested in holding another Equinox Festival — their fields, covered in 20,000 yards of compost, wouldn’t allow for it anyway. After all, Meinecke said, “I never would’ve done the festival if they hadn’t taken away my rights to do farm-to-table dinners and small events in the courtyard.”

What they said they are interested in is returning to bite-sized events as a means of keeping the farm in business.

In February, New Hampshire’s food waste ban went into effect, requiring any schools, hospitals and other large businesses generating at least one ton of food waste per week to compost that waste at a facility within a 20-mile radius. Lewis Farm hasn’t seen a pronounced uptick in deliveries, and McWilliams doesn’t predict it will until there’s clearer enforcement of the measure.

Until then, Meinecke and McWilliams said the farm is open for business. Earlier this month, they hosted a group of 12 guests for the first farm-to-table dinner at Lewis Farm in years, putting out a hat for voluntary donations rather than charging a fixed fee.

They met with city staff in early March and proposed a wide range of potential uses for the land.

“While Mr. Meineke had many ideas and visions for the property, he did not provide any specific detailed information about his potential proposed uses for city staff to review,” In an email, Walsh said in an email to the Monitor.

Walsh said the city has not yet received any additional information from the couple, but since the meeting, Meinecke and McWilliams have hired a lawyer to help them in future negotiations.

“We want people on the farm. We’re going to try to make some money under the state agritourism statutes,” said McWilliams.

“Litigation is always a last resort. But our family business is worth fighting for.”

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com