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Jennifer Spira

Farm to table. It’s a global movement promoting fresh, locally sourced food — and for one father-daughter team, it’s their bread and butter.

Nearly every day in Southbury, Conn., Richard Manville ’79 is working his family’s cattle ranch. Depending on the season and weather, he’s mowing and preparing 3,000 bales of hay, mending barbed-wire fences, caring for newborn calves, or exercising his accounting skills for the farm he owns with his brothers, Jeffrey and Duane. 

The three saw humble beginnings on these 150 acres, in a little house at the end of a dirt road where they raised beef cattle and tended the family’s vast vegetable gardens. They churned butter, canned elderberry jelly, harvested and sold honey, froze corn on the cob, and pressed apple cider.

“There were lots of things we used to do that you’d say are nuts now,” Manville says of a boyhood that included hunting and trapping.

Today, Manville Farm hosts a herd of 25 white-faced Herefords that are grass-fed at home and in a cousin’s nearby meadow. Much of the meat is kept for their own families, but they are increasingly selling to the public in bulk and in smaller cuts at local farmers markets.

His reward – in addition to plentiful fresh food – is living and working alongside kin.

“It’s tough enough to get along in any business,” observes the 57-year-old. “On this farm, we figure things out together and help each other out.”
 

"On this farm, we figure things out together." - Richard Manville ('79) #farmtotable

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His daughter Linda – a 2012 Economics degree graduate – grew up on the farm as well and envisioned a similar career in agriculture. Instead, she landed at the Connecticut Food Bank, working as an inventory control assistant.

The food bank is part of Feeding America, a national network of 200 banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs that serves more than 46 million people. Donations come from farmers, manufacturers, retailers and the government.

In a typical day, Linda invoices up to 20 trucks, each carrying heavy, towering pallets of food into and out of the warehouse. She helps fill backpacks for schoolchildren so they can feed their family on weekends, and meets with area soup kitchens to glean their needs and preferences. 

“I’m happy in this part of the food industry,” she says. “I love that I can work somewhere where I get to feed people, even if it’s not from my own farm.”

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Photos by Chris Conti