Smith’s Blueberries in New Ipswich marks 50th anniversary with pig roast and celebration

It’s a special year for Smith’s Blueberries.

The pick-your-own farm on Turnpike Road in New Ipswich recently held a pig roast and community celebration, marking the 50th anniversary of the business, now run by the granddaughter of the original owners.

It was the official opening day for Smith’s, and owner Lorraine Rodier said that in addition to 123 people purchasing tickets for the pig roast, hundreds of people also turned out to pick blueberries and mingle, and by the end of the day, she had sold 400 pounds of blueberries.

“I do not have a blueberry in the field,” Rodier said.

Rodier has been running the farm since 2015. She has seen the farm add new elements under her ownership, and is hoping to grow to add more. In addition to pick-your-own blueberries, the farm now hosts animals like goats and chickens, and a market on Saturdays.

The blueberry farm was started by Rodier’s grandparents, Lorraine (for whom Rodier is named) and Merrill Smith in 1975. The couple had met during World War II, when Merrill was serving in the Navy and Lorraine was a cigarette girl in New York. The two met at a dance. Rodier said that her grandfather was originally a dairy farmer, but after a property swap with a neighbor, ended up on the current property off Turnpike Road and started to plant the blueberry bushes that cover the front portion of the property today. She said at the time, highbush blueberry cultivation was still an early prospect, with most farms using the strain developed at Pemberton Farms for high-yield highbush blueberries.

Those bushes still persist today, with the first two rows of picking belonging to the Pemberton strain, Rodier said. Since then, the family has added bushes from various types of blueberries, which extend their growing season throughout the summer.

“We now have 16 varieties, and we’ll be picking right up until the frost,” said Rodier.

Rodier said her grandfather was an old-fashioned kind of guy, whose entire marketing strategy was a sign at the end of the driveway that said “Berries.”

“It was like that up until 1998, when we convinced them to get a landline,” Rodier said.

Rodier said the business then was mostly word-of-mouth, with additional income coming from her grandmother’s pickles and jams, and her grandfather delivering their berries to some local stores.

“Every good memory I have of my childhood is at this farm. We camped here, picked blueberries, learned about plants and how to make maple syrup,” Rodier said. “I remember my grandmother and grandfather telling me things that I didn’t know were important, but thank God, they wrote everything down — recipes on soil, what to do in a drought. He ran the farm with no spraying or irrigation, practiced what we would call regenerative farming, today, but he called just letting it be wild.”

Rodier said her stepfather bought the property in 2009. She started to run the business in 2015, and officially purchased the property in 2022. She said she’s determined to keep the family tradition going.

“Farming, without direction or funding, can be difficult and frustrating, and it’s not for everybody. I’m going to hold fast,” said Rodier.

She maintains a price of $4 per point, a price she hasn’t raised since 2018 — in part, she said, because she knows food is expensive.

“I want my community to eat. In my mind, I want to sell or donate every berry on the bush, and make sure it fed someone.”