Frank Panciera’s folks, Sylvio and Margaret, bought the Ocean Breeze Farm in Westerly, Rhode Island in 1938. Two months later the hurricane of the century hit. Frank remembers the newly constructed chicken coops that were blown apart like everything else in this town, tucked in along the shore snug up against Connecticut in the southwest corner of the state.

Frank farms about sixty acres with his daughter Sylvia a half-mile from the water and another sixty a bit further inland. The Weekapaug Foundation for Conservation had preserved a belt of property here that abutted Ocean Breeze on two sides, and the Pancieras were glad to sell development rights a while back to insure that there land would stay in farming.

On the bright May day Bob Eddy visited the farm, Jim Haggerty had joined Frank to get the rich bottom land turned for planting. The farm lived up to its name as steady winds washed over the land from bright blue waters just beyond treetops and summer homes. Between shifts in the fields, Frank sold two loads of manure to locals for the vegetable gardens and took time to pose with his dog ‘Sassy’ in front of a small barn built entirely from ‘broken shore cottages’ after the big storm nearly sixty years ago.

Ocean Breeze Farm was recognized as Rhode Island’s 2005 Farm of the Year, an award Frank and Sylvia were proud to receive on behalf of Franks parents and the thirty-five Holsteins still being milked at the farm they started in the year of the ‘big storm’.