Jennifer Nissi.
Going all in on her children's dreams.
In December 2023, we launched our first ever Liberty Food Fest. It was a last-minute idea to bring people together to celebrate farmers, discuss new agricultural ideas and share locally-sourced meals at places like the Hungry Diner. Against the sound fiscal advice of more cautious friends, decided to go for it. We rented out the basement of the Bellows Falls Opera House, and a couple weeks before the event, launched a website to sell tickets. There’s always a kind of terror when you’ve paid the rental fee and don’t know if anyone is going to show up. Slowly but surely, sales trickled in.
The first day of the event, got there early to clean, organize tables, and setup chairs. It was a late arriving crowd. As we got closer to the starting time with no one there, I began to question my life choices. The first people to show up was a family of four, the Nissi family. Joel and I introduced ourselves. The family’s passion for farming was contagious. It was especially rare to see the boys- young men in their late teens- Antonio and Marcello- express their collective desire to dedicate their lives to farming. My earlier anxiety and uncertainty disappeared. Even if we didn’t have a blockbuster, the fact that the kind of people who were attending were people like the Nissis, made it clear this event had purpose.
A few months later, in the summertime, I found myself in the car driving a couple hours North through a Vermont dreamscape of rolling green hills, evergreen trees and underdog towns like Tunbridge that hosts a legendary world’s fair. The Nissis farm is out of a storybook, with the main house up on a massive hill surrounded by a patchwork of old barns and silos mixed in with new state-of-the art farm buildings. Just a few years earlier, the family had been living a “typical” life in suburban Massachusetts when one of the boys had a life-changing internship at a local farm. Both boys said they wanted to become farmers. Instead of writing it off as a youthful fantasy of adolescence, Jenn and her husband Dan decided to invest the entirety of their life and money into their kids’ dreams. They bought a farm in Vermont.
Being around people who are following their dreams is energizing. I spent the day chasing around Jenn, Antonio and Marcello as they tended to the hundreds of animals and acres. They were kind enough to host me for a ridiculously good lunch with grass-finished burgers from cows raised right there. A couple weeks later, I returned to conduct interviews and get some additional shots.
The part of the interview with Jenn that moved me the most was when she talked about how farming allowed her to just listen. To be in the presence of the bees, and flies. To just look at a chicken and appreciate it. She even took a moment in the middle of the interview to bring our attention to the crickets…
We’re excited to share this short film portrait of Jenn, below, with our incredible paid supporters. This will be the first of three portraits of Nissi family.
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Check out the portrait of Jenn below!