Mark Parlee, The Fruit Laborer
My favorite food is ice cream, and I’m not too shameless to say that one of my favorite meals is a strawberry shortcake with ice cream that we offer here at the farm.
Mark Parlee ’80 caught the farming bug at a young age. When he was 12, he started working on his uncle’s farm in Chelmsford. Parlee, who studied biology before switching majors and earning a degree in chemical engineering, continued to work on the farm on weekends.
After earning his degree, he went to work in Boston at the engineering firm Stone & Webster, where he spent 10 years and met his wife, Ellen. But when some farmland along the Merrimack River in Tyngsboro became available, Parlee couldn’t resist. He gave up his chemical engineering career to pursue his true calling.
“It had always been in the back of my mind that it wouldn’t be a bad way to make a living,” says Parlee, who started with two acres of pick-your-own strawberries in 1988 and now manages 93 acres of apples, strawberries, blueberries, cherries, peaches, sweet corn and pumpkins. His chemistry background is useful, he says, when it comes to choosing the least-toxic methods for growing crops.
The business has flourished through the years and now features a spacious retail shop (The Farmstand) that sells fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers, as well as Mary’s Country Kitchen and Bakery, where visitors can enjoy strawberry shortcake in the summer and warm apple crisp and cider donuts in the fall.
“Everything we grow is sold on the farm,” says Parlee, who adds that he can’t compete on the wholesale level with the 3,000-acre farms of the industrial agriculture industry. “We’re at the end of the food chain. Our fertilizer costs and labor costs are high, so we pretty much retail everything directly to the public.”—EB