Farm Hub Seeds of Synchronicity
Gill Farm educational center plans to boost local agriculture
by Anne Pyburn Craig
The Local Economies Project (LEP) and the NoVo Foundation made big news
last December when they announced the acquisition of the 1,255 acre Gill Farm,
located in Hurley, with the intention of establishing a Hudson Valley Farm Hub
that will nurture and support local agriculture in a number of ways.
For some time now, local farmers,
families and foodies have been unsatisfied with the mess that is Big
Agriculture, struggling to compete economically while refusing to mimic its
folly. “A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather
than change the earth to suit a crop—which is what we do with corn and soybeans
and a handful of other agricultural commodities—it would diversify its crops to
suit the earth. This is not going to happen in big agriculture, because big
agriculture is irrational. It’s where we expose—at unimaginable expense—our
failure to grasp how nature works,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in an article for
Yale Environment 360 entitled “The
Folly of Big Agriculture: Why Nature Always Wins.”
The Farm Hub presents the enticing possibility of the Gill property,
famed for fine sweet corn and community fun, transitioning in a more organic
direction—something John Gill, who has said he’s thrilled that the property
will remain agricultural, would no doubt have found prohibitive as an
individual farmer.
“The project is unique in that it has the benefit of a
large, centrally located tract of prime farmland in addition to plans for a
dynamic combination of programming,” says LEP spokesperson Brooke
Pickering-Cole. “A farm business incubator, educational programming,
demonstration of new technologies, and agricultural research in conjunction
with Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences…these are all
in the works.”
Although farm incubator projects have sprung up in various
agricultural regions, most over the past five years, Pickering-Cole is quite right
about the unique scale of this endeavor. Most farm incubators are less than
one-tenth the size of Gill Farm, and few have the breadth of programming
envisioned here.
In many ways, a Farm Hub is a logical next step. Last
April, the LEP released a study of local food hubs that identified a need for
on-farm infrastructure and farm business and production planning. The study
recommended providing “farmer business and production services to improve
efficiency, increase production, and get ‘wholesale ready.’”
No one doubts the demand is there. New York City is a
hungry place, with a lot of health- and flavor-conscious eaters; estimates of
unmet demand for local food there are at about a billion dollars. Farm to Table
Co-Packers owner Jim Hyland told the Kingston Daily Freeman last year that his company processed over 800,000
pounds of produce from some 60 different farms in 2012; that statistic was
cited in a Freeman story in
January 2013 about Farm to Table receiving $775,000 in grant monies from Empire
State Development and the state Department of Agriculture and Markets. Hudson Valley Harvest, founded in 2011, partners with
over 30 farms (Gill’s is on their list) to assist in marketing and distribution
to not just New York City but the tri-state area. A regional website called
FarmersWeb that connects farmers and wholesale purchasers was thriving as of
last September: “Our sales have been averaging a 25% month-over-month
growth since last summer, which shows just how eager wholesale buyers are to
efficiently source local ingredients. On the farm side, we’ve had so many sign
ups that we had to institute a waitlist,” co-founder and CEO Jennifer Goggin
told AlleyWatch.
Founders envision the Farm Hub as fitting neatly into the
larger picture, offering something new to the region and, in its sheer scale
and breadth of services, unique. “A Farm Hub is
focused on production, whereas a Food Hub is focused on post-production:
aggregation of product, processing, and distribution. Of course both involve
education, and the relationship between the two can be symbiotic, even
overlapping,” says Pickering-Cole.
“In developing Farm Hub initiatives, LEP will
continue to collaborate with its extensive list of partner organizations that
are working to strengthen sustainable agriculture in the Hudson Valley. We view
this collaboration as a key to the Farm Hub’s success and its potential to have
a broad impact.”
The current list of partners on LEP’s website
is impressive: regional sustainability organizations like Scenic Hudson and Mid
Hudson Pattern for Progress, agricultural groups like the National Young
Farmers Coalition, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, the Hudson Valley
Agribusiness Development Coalition, and the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening
Association. That’s but a sampling; there are 21 in all, including regional
players like the Columbia County-based Hawthorne Valley Farms, where they’ve
been organic and biodynamic since 1972, and Glynwood, based in Cold Spring,
where a farm begun in 1929 has grown into a major preservationist, research,
and educational facility. Cornell University, which has long served the
region’s growers through its Cooperative Extension of Ulster County, has two other
entities involved as well—its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and its Small
Farms Program. Also in on the educational side is the Wild Earth Wilderness
School.
One partner organization in particular will be
key to the endeavor’s success: the Rondout Valley Growers Association.
Sponsored by the Open Space Institute—yet another LEP partner—the RVGA has been
carrying the ball for local farming for over a decade, with around 60
participating members producing everything from beef to herbal tinctures to
Christmas trees. “Rondout Valley farmers produce over 23,000,000 pounds of
vegetables, fruit, beef, eggs, and poultry a year,” the RVGA points out with
pride.
Although there are undoubtedly emotions stirred by the
prospect of the Farm Hub among local growers that run the whole human gamut, it
looks as though the LEP may prove a powerful partner in advancing one of the
RVGA’s cherished goals: getting more locally grown food onto school cafeteria
and other institutional menus. “Local Economies
Project is a strong supporter of efforts to bolster farm-to-school initiatives
and to encourage greater distribution of local farm products to institutions,”
says Pickering-Cole, welcome tidings to bands of parents in various area
districts who have been advocating such steps for years. “LEP has supported
farm-to-school initiatives in the Poughkeepsie City School District and we are
also a supporter of the Rondout Valley Growers Association, the latter of which
will be hosting its second annual School Food Summit later this year…In 2013,
in conjunction with the Goldman Family Foundation, we began supporting a new
statewide coalition called Farm-to-Institution New York State (FINYS).
Organized by American Farmland Trust, FINYS aims to increase the amount of
local food purchased by institutions, such as public schools, colleges,
hospitals, and other outlets. This support has led to a grant for a project
with SUNY schools to increase their local procurement of fresh produce.
“Though we are still in the planning stages,
we know that the Farm Hub will present expanded opportunities to move these
efforts forward, including business incubator programming aimed at helping
farmers connect with schools and institutions.”
All of this dovetails nicely with the
big-picture thinking of the NoVo Foundation, the grant-makers who came up with $13
million to purchase Gill’s property and plan to hang onto it, while keeping it
on the tax rolls, until a suitable indie nonprofit can be formed. On its
website, the organization’s mission is described as “catalyzing
a transformation in global society, moving from a culture of domination to one
of equality and partnership. We support the development of capacities in
people—individually and collectively—to help create a caring and balanced
world. We envision a world that operates on the principles of mutual respect,
collaboration, and civic participation, thereby reversing the old paradigm
predicated on hierarchy, violence, and the subordination of girls and women.” The
Local Economies Project, and its nonprofit parent organization The New World Foundation,
undoubtedly fit under the “Promoting Local Living Economies” sector of NoVo
operations. NoVo is administered by billionaire Warren Buffett’s youngest son
Peter and his wife Jennifer, who in 2009 and 2010 were named to Barron’s list
of the top 25 most effective philanthropists. (Peter is also a musician and
composer, and the man behind the fire dance scene in Dances With Wolves.)
In several ways, then, it would seem to be a natural fit
between these big benefactors and our region’s culture and subcultures—especially
when it comes to food. “The Hudson Valley has a strong agricultural history, an established
farming community, a lot of interest on the part of young and new farmers, a
good growing climate, excellent soil and abundant water,” points out
Pickering-Cole.
All of which is being noted on a number of
fronts. In mid-January of 2014 it was announced that Amy’s Kitchen, a
California-based organic food processor and manufacturer, would be opening a
major plant in Goshen in Orange County. Amy’s Kitchen supplies organic food to
such major players as ShopRite, Price Chopper and WalMart.
“We could not be happier about it,” says
Pickering-Cole of the news about Amy’s Kitchen. “We certainly see great
potential for collaboration with the Farm Hub and with all of the area’s
growers. This represents the type of burgeoning activity that was explored in
the Food Hubs Study published by Local Economies Project last spring. We
wouldn’t call it a coincidence; we would call it synchronistic. Clearly the
Hudson Valley is becoming a national focal point for innovation and forward
thinking in the food and farming sectors.”
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 11:45 AM.
Filed under
Environment,
Farming,
Feature,
Local Economy
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