Leila Chowning, 3, and her brother Nicholas, 6, of Cumberland, pick blueberries at Jaswell’s Farm in Smithfield. Laura Kashmanian, 16, below, a new employee, loads a cart with vegetables at the end of the day.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

SMITHFIELD — Blueberries cascade from a small yellow bucket and into the pint-sized green cardboard containers Chris Jaswell has lined up in a box. He shakes the bucket gently, and the fruit tumbles out, until mounds of blue peek just over the top of the waiting containers.

The sight of the fruit alone at Jaswell’s Farm is enough to make you wonder how you ever shopped in a supermarket at all.

“I think our quality is better,” Jaswell said. “I mean, face it, they were picked this morning. How many stores can say that? They ship them in from Michigan or New Jersey or wherever else. These were actually living this morning. And now they’re not.”

That freshness — and local affinity for the Jaswell clan itself — is what keeps many people coming back to the farm year-round for apples, zucchini, pumpkins, eggplant and those blueberries.

The farm that first set down roots 110 years ago has evolved and changed to keep up with a dynamic market and cater to more discriminating customers who demand more from their food as the decades have gone by.

“It’s increasing at a faster rate as the public becomes aware of local food and food-safety issues become apparent nationally,” said Stu Nunnery, director of the Rhode Island Center for Agricultural Promotion and Education. “Tainted milk in China, peanuts in Georgia — people lose confidence in wholesale mass-production forms of farming that exist in the country and concentrate on knowing where the food comes from, how it’s produced, who produced it and what it looks like in the field as it’s picked.”

That has contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of farms in Rhode Island.

FOR ANYONE WHO didn’t grow up on a farm, strolling through the crops at Jaswell’s on a warm summer day is pretty close to heaven. (And even the Jaswells, all of whom, except for daughter Allison, live in a white house next to the rolling fields and farm stand, will admit that it’s pretty sweet.)

Blueberry bush branches stretch into a grassy aisle, while dragonflies flit among the fruit, making it feel as if you’re in the middle of a storybook, rather than just 15 minutes from Providence. The air doesn’t necessarily smell of fruits and veggies, just nature. But as you walk through rows of corn reaching high above head, or see the apple tree limbs droop downward, heavy from the coming harvest, it feels as if you can almost taste them.

“In a sense, it is a matter of convenience,” Ron Morin of North Providence said as he chose some pickling cucumbers back at the fruit stand and placed them in a plastic bag. “I know when coming here, I’m getting a good quality product. And I’m not running to the supermarket to find they don’t have what I need today and then I have to go to another store. Here, we know what we’re getting.”

That desire to be involved, to know where food comes from and just how fresh it is, emerged only recently.

THE FARMING LANDSCAPE in Rhode Island has changed much over the years. Up until the early 20th century, Colonists and settlers produced their own food, said Kenneth Ayars, chief of the division of agriculture of the state Department of Environmental Management. At one point, 80 percent of all land in Rhode Island was used for farming, but that changed at the start of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of manufacturing, and later more importance was placed on tourism, Ayars said, decreasing the economic value of farming.

“Family farms went from the many thousands to the many hundreds,” Ayars said. “And farmers went from the family farm to wholesale market.”

Many of the farms that remained shifted from producing food to selling Christmas trees, turf and other lawn ornamentals. Only recently has the push for sustainable food grown by local farmers emerged, said Kristen Castrataro, of the URI Extension Services, a group that provides research and assistance to farmers.

“People want to buy local,” she said. “People see buying local as a benefit in a lot of different ways. Economically, it’s keeping a lot of our hard-earned money in the state. The more you spend in the local community, the more stays in the local community.”

That push has created a surge in the number of farms in Rhode Island selling a lot more food products. According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, the most recent data available from the federal Department of Agriculture, there were 1,219 farms in Rhode Island, compared with 858 in 2002. The census defines a farm as any place that sells or produces $1,000 or more of agricultural products within a given year. Rhode Island requires that farms have at least $2,500 in sales and consist of at least 5 acres to take advantage of state programs which benefit farmers. Ayars said the green industry — nursery, horticulture and turf — were 60 percent of Rhode Island market sales in 2007 compared with 67 percent in 2002 as a result of more farmers shifting their focus to fruits, vegetables and livestock. It’s a shift the Jaswells saw years ago, and in some ways, Ayars said, helped create.

STARTING IN THE 1960s, Richard and Patricia Jaswell, were one of the first farmers in the area to open their fields to the public and allow them to pick fresh fruit and vegetables.

“People get a thrill out of going to the farm, seeing what’s involved, picking directly from a tree or vine and bringing it home,” Ayars said. “They’re eating something that was growing an hour ago, or feeding it to their family.”

Chris Jaswell and Allison Molis, the brother-and-sister team that run the farm today, are the fourth generation to fill the 100 acres of land at 50 Swan Rd. Their father, Richard, now 73, “retired” and still tanned from picking produce in the fields every morning, has smiling eyes and a lit cigar perpetually in his hands. His wife, Pat, 64, keeps the books and, on most days, her grandchildren, too.

At the time, Richard Jaswell said, he just saw the farm needed to make a change. He’d been farming the land since 1941, when his parents took over from his grandfather, Nicholas Gesualdi, (Jaswell was the closest customs officials could come to a phonetic spelling of the family surname when he came over from Italy). His grandfather raised livestock, and his parents mostly farmed to live –– selling the leftovers to local restaurants or in the farmer’s market in Providence. By age 16, he’d quit school to run the farm full time and support his parents, who were profoundly deaf, and worked odd jobs in the off season.

“Everyone just tried to survive,” Richard Jaswell said.

He met Pat in 1967 and after the two married, Jaswell began the shift to move the farm to more innovative territory. They kept the veggies from his father’s days, but Richard Jaswell added asparagus, apples and blueberries so that if one vegetable crop failed, they still had something to sell to customers. With the apples came the cider mill, which now produces a well-known product. They opened the farm to school tours to educate children about where food came from. A two-car garage became the summer fruit stand where the Jaswells honed their sales skills as they made the transition from wholesale to direct retail marketing. Pat oversaw the store filled with baked goods and pastries while she reared the couple’s two children, Chris and Allison.

The Jaswells also do their best to support local farms. They sell local cheese, Rhody Fresh milk, Del’s Lemonade and Centerdale-based Yacht Club soda in their store, alongside freshly baked pastries using their own produce.

FARMING ISN’T WHAT most people think it is, said Nunnery of RICAPE. It’s the people who come every Sunday for their weekly produce and take trips to pick berries and apples — not supermarkets and large-scale canneries — that keep Rhode Island farms viable.

“Many people have a very old sense of what agriculture is,” he said. “This ain’t Nebraska. And regional agriculture is based more on the direct market model, which is to produce not high volume, but lower-volume, high-quality specialty crops and products and sell them directly to the consumer at retail, rather than wholesale.”

Farms in Rhode Island that sell directly to the public earn about $25,270 annually in direct market sales alone, the third-highest sales in the country, according to the 2007 federal Census of Agriculture. That year, 249 farms — or 20 percent — sold directly to the public, the highest percentage in the nation. Those farms raised $6.3 million worth of agricultural sales. The percent of the overall market attributed to direct market sales — 9.5 percent — is the highest in the nation.

(The Jaswell farm still dabbles in wholesale. Excess crops are sold to places like Dave’s Marketplace, Belmont Fruit Market and Eastside Marketplace.)

“One advantage we have compared to states in the Midwest, our consumer base is very close to the farms, so it’s easy to make a connection between the two,” Nunnery said. “Many of the urban centers, even the rural and semi-urban population centers go there, to the farm, for the sake of recreation.”

Or they allow the farm to come to them. Since the resurgence of local farms, farmers markets — such as the ones Richard Jaswell frequented with his parents — are blossoming all over Rhode Island. Farm Fresh Rhode Island operates seven markets, including an indoor winter market in Pawtucket. They’ve installed wireless terminals at the farmer’s markets to accept food stamp benefits, set up a program where chefs can buy from local farms and the organization will deliver the goods, and worked with organizations to get local foods into schools and hospitals, said Noah Fulmer, director of Farm Fresh RI.

But a lot of people prefer to get it straight from the farm because of everything that comes with it.

COME SUMMER, the Jaswell Farm takes on a carnival atmosphere, with hotdogs for sale in the farm stand, and people coming to the fields by the carload to pick baskets full of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. In fall, the crowds come for the apples — fresh off the trees and those coated in chocolate for sale in the farm stand — pumpkins, hayrides and cider by the gallon.

For many, the farm becomes more than just a place where food was grown. It becomes a getaway. A community. And people feel like they are part of the family.

“Last year, I had a woman stop me and say ‘You cut down our tree’,” Chris Jaswell said. “She had her kids take a picture by a tree on the farm so they could see, in relation to the tree, how they were growing. It was kind of neat to see it had become such a destination for them.”

Farm facts

Number of farms: 1,219

Average annual direct market sales: $25,270 per farm, third-highest in the nation

Farms selling directly to the public: 249

Value of retail sales: $6.3 million. That represented 9.5 percent of all agricultural market sales in the state, the highest percentage in the country.

Source: 2007 Census of Agriculture from the federal Department of Agriculture

tbuford@projo.com