The farm stand is open
Thursday through Sunday,
where guests can visit the
farm’s oxen; heritage
Berkshire pigs are raised
free of antibiotics.
It’s a family affair at Smithfield’s Blackbird Farm. One-year-old Loretta Bouthillette toddles
around the barn area, watching the ten-week-old heritage breed piglets as they play in their nursery. Then
she makes a run for the manure barn, which looks like a lot of fun to play in, especially since the farm dogs,
Beau and Blue, are doing it.
Loretta’s grandmother, Blackbird Farm owner Ann Marie Bouthillette, gently dissuades her, crushing the toddler’s
impulse to jump right in the muck, all while explaining the pigs’ precise diet of three stages of grains and sharing
details about what life is really like at the farm.
“I watch her every day. She’s part of our
family and this is what farm people do,” Ann
Marie says with a smile. The Smithfield family
farm humanely raises antibiotic-free,
pasture-fed, 100 percent Black Angus cattle
and American heritage Berkshire pigs. The
organic, dry-aged manure from the barn goes
right back out to the fields to fertilize the
grass that the cows eat.
While Ann Marie cares for Loretta and
multitasks at the farm, her son, Brandon
Bouthillette, Loretta’s father, moves
1,600-pound hay bales wrapped in green and
white plastic sheeting in the fields with a
tractor. Ann Marie affectionately calls the
mounds mushrooms and marshmallows and,
inside them, the grass ferments and turns to
hay for food (green) and straw for bedding
(white) for the cows for next winter. Brandon
looks after the fields and raises the cows and
pigs with help from a few farm hands and
his wife, Sarah, who also works at the farm
store down the road selling beef and pork.
Brandon’s sister, Samantha, raises poultry
for their eggs and cares for turkeys at the
farm. Brandon’s father and Ann Marie’s
husband, Kevin, owns and runs a steel business,
Inter-City Contracting, located across
the street; at the farm, he clears property,
makes fields and builds things while keeping
track of the books. Their other son, Troy,
also manages the steel shop and pitches in
at the farm when help is needed. Employees
at Inter-City Contracting get treated to a
Blackbird Farm burger barbecue for lunch
every Friday.
Kevin’s father and Ann Marie’s father-inlaw
originally purchased Blackbird Farm’s
initial four acres of land for his residence
when he was building Inter-City Contracting’s
steel shop across the street. When Kevin
and Ann Marie married in 1984, she moved
to the farm and the couple continued to buy
more and more land while Kevin operated
the shop. He sold his low-mileage Corvette
he kept preserved in the garage to buy the
back lot. The most recent expansion is the
side lot next to the family’s home.
“Can you imagine, there would have been
thirteen houses on this piece of property?”
Ann Marie says, pointing at a field that’s as
lush as Vermont’s green mountains. Instead
of another housing development, her cows
peacefully graze there right beside a street
98 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MAY/JUNE 2020