Board of Health candidate profile: Susan Murray

For the past 14 years, Susan Murray has worked to establish and grow her farm throughout Dartmouth. Now she is looking to bring her experiences as a farmer and small business owner to the Board of Health if elected on April 1.

“I think it’s important to be represented,” she said. 

Murray said that while she realizes there’s a “small number” of farmers in Dartmouth, they are “a part of what helps maintain the open space here, helps maintain the beauty, but also growing our own food — it really is important.”

Murray also sees running for the Board of Health seat as part of her “civic duty,” adding that she feels “very connected with this town.”

“I think it’s important to be involved in town politics, and I feel like this is somewhere that I can bring some expertise and knowledge and can be a reasonable voice,” she said.

Serving on the town’s Agricultural Commission for around nine years, Murray said she’s been introduced to how the town works and understands the Board of Health’s permitting process. 

“We were often the people that would go talk and negotiate between the town and the farmer, kind of educating the town about why a farmer is doing something in a particular way,” she said.

She added that the Commission would then have to come up with a “reasonable solution between the town and the farmer because sometime’s there’s friction there.”

While with the Commission, Murray also worked with animal control, performing yearly barn checks, adding whenever an animal control problem that dealt with a farm arose, it was brought to the Commission to handle.

After a spot opened up on the Community Preservation Committee, she saw it as a “great next step for me to fulfill my civic duty.”

Murray is currently still with the Community Preservation Committee, and also works as the executive director at the Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership.

It wasn’t until last fall when someone told her about the opening on the Board of Health and said she would be a “great fit for it” that Murray considered joining the board.

“I just kind of laughed it off because that entails an election and all that sort of stuff,” she said. “I sat with it for a month or so, and I realized I actually really would like to do that.”

Murray said as a farmer she needs to be “up on all the regulations and what the latest food safety rulings are” to ensure she doesn’t make anyone sick.

“As far as health and safety related to food, I’m up to date on that,” she said.

Murray helped run both Dartmouth’s and New Bedford’s farmer’s markets for a number of years, noting that she’s had “a lot” of interactions with both town’s Board of Health.

She said she’s also familiar with bio safety measures, having previously had sheep and goats on her farm and currently having chickens.

“I’ve done a lot of research on the avian flu and what’s going on,” she said. “I understand a lot about viruses.”

After graduating from Dartmouth High School in 1992, Murray attended UMass Amherst where she majored in wildlife and fisheries biology then earned her master’s in ecology and evolution from Eastern Michigan University.

Murray has also taken food safety courses through the Mass Department of Agriculture, which she said not only keeps her on top of what food safety looks like for farmers but also what it looks like for the Board of Health.

“I’m very community focused. I love this community. I love Dartmouth, and I want to serve this community, so I think those things all together make me a really strong candidate,” she said.