Lou-Ann Rippin owns and operates her farm at 1100 Lafayette Rd., North Kingstown, working seven days a week to keep it going. “I tried other jobs, but I didn’t like being inside all the time.”

>

The Providence Journal Bill Murphy

NORTH KINGSTOWN — Lou-Ann Rippin starts her day at 5 a.m., cell phone in pocket, vegetable basket swinging from her arm.

She’ll hear her footsteps crunch as she walks down the hill toward the vegetable fields — if her three dogs aren’t barking, and if the emu, pigs, llama, chickens and horses aren’t calling out their good-mornings.

She walks the same path her father, John Healey, walked when he farmed this Lafayette Road land in the 1950s. He showed her how to plant the sweet corn, green peppers, yellow squash, crunchy cucumbers, purple eggplant, how to prepare the land and irrigate it, how to deal with predators. He had learned from his father, who worked Warwick farmland near today’s airport. Her great-grandfather did, too.

Healey farming genes run deep. But during these crushingly hot midsummer days, Rippin doesn’t dwell on genealogy or the growing sound of beach traffic just beyond the trees on Route 4, or the housing developments on either side of her farm where streets are named Whisper Lane and Field Court.

She’s thinking about the need to irrigate, about harvesting vegetables at just the right time for selling, about corn, a late-July winner at the stand at the front of her property where customers’ tastes typically run far narrower than the range of food planted by her hand.

“Corn and tomatoes, that’s what everyone wants,” she said, both crops just days away from getting a standing ovation at various Rhode Island farmers’ markets where she also sells her vegetables, and where she is market manager at the South Kingstown market.

Healey Farm is where she works and where she lives. It’s where she was born, and where she raised her two children. It’s where she was when her mother Jean died, and then her father, who worked the farm during the summer of 2002. When he died around Christmas, Rippin was rushed into running the farm based upon what she remembered.

She gave herself five years. She’s giving herself five more because “it took that long to put all that knowledge to work,” she said, as she harvests summer squash and zucchini.

She checks each squash, puts it in the basket, and bends for another.

“I am the farmer,” she says, slicing a voluptuous zucchini from its plant. I make all the decisions when it comes to the farm.”

SHE MOVES DOWN the row, summer sun beating on her tanned arms. She works solo, though two other friends and family members join her on random days to harvest and prepare for markets. When her husband, Scott, comes home from his day job at Electric Boat, he picks up the newspaper roadside and joins her. Sometimes they don’t have dinner until 9 p.m. Most days she can’t get to the housework.

“My mother did the cooking and cleaning, and took care of the animals and flowers,” she says, up-front about having to learn all that, too, having spent so many years out in the fields.

If vegetables need to be harvested, other things just don’t get done, and she doesn’t apologize. “I need to concentrate on the farm.”

The sun gets hotter. She’ll pick zucchini until midday, and then stop until the earth cools down. In late afternoon, she’ll start again.

She likes things done a certain way — as her father did — so just like her father, it’s hard for her to let other people work in her place. But Lyme disease took her down one summer, and she had to give in, hiring people to bring in the harvest. She’s since recovered.

Rippin is familiar and comfortable with the heavy farm equipment, some of it left over from when her father cultivated these hilly acres. She knows the equipment, how to operate it, what it’s for, and she and Scott do what they can to keep it all in working order.

That’s one of the biggest misconceptions about farming, she says: “People don’t understand how expensive the equipment is.”

And for her, there’s another frequent misconception that involves gender.

“People are surprised to find out I’m the farmer. They kind of don’t believe it.

“I tried other jobs, but I didn’t like being inside all the time.”

She’s 54, this is the life she knows, and she thinks it’s what her father hoped for — that among his three daughters, someone would choose the farm life.

Lou-Ann Rippin is the youngest, and was married once before Scott. She and her first husband had two children, one with a disability who required a great deal of care before his death. They lived in a house on the farm. Problems developed.

“My first husband left. And I stayed.”

“THERE ARE MORE and more women farming in Rhode Island,” said Kenneth Ayars, chief of the state Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture, citing an agricultural census that lists 856 primary farm operators in Rhode Island, farms being described as places where at least $1,000 in agricultural products are produced and sold in a year. Of those farmers, 142 are women.

“She’s been running the farm since her father passed away,” Ayars said. “He was an old New England farmer and an advocate for agriculture. We’re grateful to see her efforts. She participates in the farmers’ markets and it’s a really important outlet for her.

“Like any farm,” he added, “it’s a struggle.”

Rippin said an early deed lists the farm as being “65 acres, more or less,” but she said there are 43 acres, 25 of them cultivated.

“I’ve always worked here with my parents,” she said, recalling how her father at one time had more than 75 cows. He quit the cows, started a septic-system business, sold gravel for roads, but continued planting crops until he died.

“I never really ran the farm on my own,” she said. She relied upon what she learned from her father, and what she could teach herself. She points to equipment, a corn fertilizer and planter.

“I just planted 20 rows of corn this morning,” she said, which will let corn production be staggered into September.

She and Scott recently planted Christmas trees, and last year, they made and sold wreaths.

Come first of the year, she said, she gets bored until it’s time to start work in the greenhouse.

“It’s born in me,” she says of farming.

FARMS SUCH AS Rippin’s are increasingly rare.

Rippin said nearby fields her father once leased to grow hay for his cows “are all plats now,” and offers to buy her land arrive constantly.

“I’d love to sell the building rights,” she said. “I’m on the list.”

Ayars said Healey Farm has been accepted into the state’s Purchase of Development Rights program along with more than 20 other farms. But Ayars said any future steps depend on funding, and that a $2.5-million dollar open-space bond issue passed by the General Assembly will be voted on in November. If approved, he said it would allow for negotiating with farms on the list.

Property owners who want to preserve their land as open space, but would also like to capitalize on its development potential, can achieve both by selling the development rights. Typically, the buyer is a land trust or similar organization dedicated to preservation.

Healey Farm, Ayars said, is “a farm surrounded by house lots, and there’s a lot of development pressure.”

Operating a farm as Rippin does “isn’t easy, but … we hope she’ll be able to keep that land open.”

Ayars said fresh produce grown in-state has become of prime importance to area residents.

“Absolutely. No doubt about it. There’s a tremendous interest in local food in Rhode Island, because there’s problems with imports and with transportation.”

AT 1100 Lafayette Rd., North Kingstown, there’s a sign that says “come visit Gramma Jean’s barnyard,” a reference to the exotic animals Rippin’s mother Jean craved. Rippin keeps the animals to attract people to come in.

“There’s no hayrides,” she said, but school groups can arrange a trip to the farm, and individuals can stop in.

“People are welcome to go over and look at the animals,” she said. “People need to get out and walk and smell the farm and listen to the farm.”

After that, if they want to buy her cut flowers or her two dozen varieties of just-picked vegetables, all the better.

Sometimes Rippin’s too busy with the farm to run the stand, so she’ll put vegetables out on an honor system. Other times she’s away, selling at one of four farmer’s markets, so she might just close up.

Ask her what she planted this year, and she responds with a where-do-I-begin sigh:

“Beets, sweet corn, Indian corn, pumpkins, big and little, butternut squash, acorn squash, peppers, green, yellow, and purple, cut flowers, fennel, eggplant.” She stops, then starts again. “Beets and carrots, summer squash, zucchini, round zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, oh, several kinds, cukes.

“I’ve got the thumb,” she says smiling proudly, morning dirt dusting the thumb she holds up. “I’m very proud of the fact that I can make things grow.”

THERE ARE more crops to mention, but she’s interrupted by dogs barking, which reminds her of another challenge in farming: predators.

“The dogs deal with the woodchucks, but I lost my best woodchuck dog last year at age 15.”

Deer continue to be a problem, as is drought, but Rippin said “my big worry is that I’m going to have to sell it. I’m making enough to get by, as long as the taxes don’t go up much higher.

“It takes a lot of time, and you never get back the money for your time.”

She knows there are other women who farm, but not many farming on land where they grew up. She recalled sledding down a hill into what is now her vegetable field. Her granddaughter, who often joins her in the fields, can do the same.

Maybe she’ll take over the farm someday, Rippin said. In the meantime, “I’m just hoping to make a living if I can.

“I look at my fields and say, ‘God, they’re beautiful.’ ”

afleming@projo.com