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Dan Heston

James Burke and Andie Fortier at Port Jefferson Farmers Market this past spring. Photo courtesy Burke and Fortier

By Lynn Hallarman

Here’s why supporting Long Island food producers is more important than ever.

It is a Sunday morning in July, about 5 a.m., and the birds are quiet. Andie Fortier and James Burke are loading their truck with a bounty of vegetables they harvested the day before. The drive from their 3-acre farm in Amagansett to the Village of Port Jefferson is about an hour fifteen this time of day. The weather is iffy, but Andie knows the regulars will show up, making the trip worthwhile.

Packed up, Andie hops in the truck and heads to the market. James stays behind on the farm because there is too much work for both of them to spend a whole day selling.

By the time Andie arrives at Harborfront Park around 7:15 a.m., several vendors in vans are already lined up along the circular drive at the park’s entrance, taking turns unloading their goods. Some are busy setting up plywood tables on stacks of crates, hanging signs or filling buckets with water for flowers. Others are grabbing a quick cup of coffee, breakfast or helping another seller set up their tent. Andie’s mother and a friend are there, waiting on a designated grassy spot overlooking the harbor to help with the setup. Later, when the market starts, they will pitch in to serve customers while Andie keeps the stand piled with fresh fare from the July harvest.

Fortier and Burke feel lucky to have landed a spot at Port Jefferson Farmers Market in 2020. On the South Fork where they work their 3 acres, getting into a market can take years. For their small startup, Sand & Soil, now in its fifth year, competing with roadside farm stands and established growers with a large, loyal customer base can be challenging — sometimes even impossible.

Vital part of community life

Eighteen years ago, Port Jefferson Farmers Market was established by the Economic Development Council under former Mayor Margot Garant. Since then, it has become a vital part of the village’s community life, now featuring around 42 vendors. These include three vegetable farmers, flower farmers, a herb farmer, honey producers, a cheese maker, meat and fish vendors along with a host of local food artisans. To qualify as a vendor, all items must be grown, gathered or processed on Long Island.

Port Jefferson village tapped into a growing trend of using farmers markets to strengthen ties between residents, agricultural communities and local businesses. Nationally, the number of registered markets in the USDA Farmers Market Directory, has risen from 2,000 in 1994 to 8,600 today. Farmers markets are increasingly used as a strategy to create walkable community hubs for all ages, bring fresh produce into urban environments and draw people to local business centers.

Sand and Soil farm stand at Port Jefferson farmers market. Photo by Lynn Hallarman

New farmers

Sand & Soil’s success at the Port Jeff market highlights the promise of the Farms for the Future Program, launched by the Peconic Land Trust in 2009. This program provides affordable land leases and technical support to new farmers, with the goal of creating the next generation of Long Island farmers.

“Fortier and Burke started farming with 1 acre as part of our incubator program. They are our superstars on the South Fork,” said Dan Heston, director of agricultural programs at the trust and leader of Farms for the Future.

According to Heston, farmers markets are the best way for new farmers who can’t afford their own land to get their footing in the Island’s grower community. These markets allow them to build a loyal customer base, with people returning weekly to fill a bag with freshly harvested vegetables.

However, Heston explained that the quality of farmers markets can vary significantly.

“Some of them are a whole lot better than others,” he said.

Most importantly, he added, “Farmers markets have to have farmers.”

Connecting with the farming community

Fortier and Burke remain loyal to the Port Jeff market even though they also sell at Springs Market in East Hampton and the Montauk Farmers Market. For one thing, they grew up in Port Jefferson where the parents of both of them still live, keeping connected to the community. However, the main reason they stay is the atmosphere of the market.

“People out where we live are always questioning why we still bother to drive to Port Jeff, but this is our best market — we love the comradery with other vendors and the customers are enthusiastic. They want to learn about our organic farming technique,” Burke said.

Ask any regular why they come back to the market week after week, they usually mention the relationships they’ve built with specific vendors. 

“It is part of our Sunday routine,” Susan Raynock from Rocky Point said. “We go to church, get coffee and then walk around the market.” Sometimes, Raynock and her friends will have lunch in the village afterward.

Fortier and Burke are happy to answer questions from customers about their products. They want people to know that everything they see on the stand has been grown on their property and picked by them, usually the day before the market.

Melissa Dunstatter, the market’s longtime manager and herself a vendor, sees the farmers market as an incubator for local businesses. She points to several food entrepreneurs in the area that got their start in the Port Jefferson Farmers Market.

“Without the market … our businesses would struggle to be successful,” she said. “It brings people together every week, they look forward to it. And they’re eating better.”

 

By Lynn Hallarman

When Leslie and Priscilla Howard heard they had been chosen, they were shocked and relieved. They knew their pitch to win the farming rights at Cleo’s Corner in Southold was solid. But they also knew the competition was stiff. “We were worried it wasn’t going to happen, a lot of worthy farmers applied,” Leslie said. 

A few weeks after receiving the good news in February, the Howards moved into the Case House, a newly renovated historic colonial from the 1700s situated on 5.7 acres of farmable property owned by the Peconic Land Trust. The house was still empty of furniture, but they stayed anyway, sleeping on an air mattress just “to make it feel real,” Priscilla said. 

The Case House property is located at the intersection of Horton’s Lane and County Road 48, known as Cleo’s Corner. Across the road, lies another stretch of farmland also owned by the Peconic Land Trust. This land is leased to aspiring farmers as part of their Farms for the Future program. The Howards are recent graduates of the program. Priscilla’s Farm, a project they began together in 2018 on a single acre as part of the program, is now being recast as the Case House location as a fully operational, certified organic vegetable farm. Priscilla’s Farm has a community-supported agriculture pledge now with 30 members and sells directly to the public at the Port Jefferson and Sayville farmers markets.

Farms for the Future

Growing vegetables is easy, selling them is hard, according to Dan Heston, director of agricultural programs at the land trust and leader of Farms for the Future. It’s the infrastructure demands — fencing, water access and equipment — that derail farming ventures, he explained. “You also need a solid business plan,” he said. “Just because you grow it doesn’t mean you can sell it.” 

Heston helped launch Farms for the Future in 2009. The program offers emerging farmers technical assistance and affordable land leases. “Everyone starts with one acre,” he said. “An acre is a lot bigger than most people realize.” Participants have five years to expand their farms, adding acreage and crop variety. The program also created a cooperative for equipment rentals, and assists with field layouts, irrigation systems and tractor operation — resources that are hard to master without guidance. “This is not a gardening program,” Heston said. “We’re trying to find the next generation of farmers.” 

The program encourages, but doesn’t require, participants to farm food or organics. “We support all kinds of agriculture — wine, sod [grass], nurseries — but we give more help to food growers, because it’s harder,” Heston said. According to him, Farms for the Future has 32 leases covering 400 acres run by farmers of all ages and backgrounds. “We have a lot of women farmers,” he added. 

After five years, farmers are expected to move on from the program to expand their businesses. “Nobody gets kicked out but you have keep people moving, otherwise it wouldn’t be a program anymore, it will be stagnant,” Heston said. He estimates that 90% of farmers who go through the program continue doing something that relates farming. “Just not always going on to running their own farm,” he said.   

A more complicated piece of the program is land acquisition. The trust buys, protects and sells farms with a verve associated with saving endangered species habitats. The strategy involves selling the development rights of a farm to local governments and then applying an easement that prioritizes food production. “Farmers pay a fair rate, we’re not looking to make money,” Heston said. This approach makes the land affordable for food farmers either to purchase or to lease from the trust. 

The Case House project is a recent example of the trust’s mission to combine affordable housing for a farm family ready to run a larger operation. Heston, who has farmed his whole life, wanted the property to be set up for somebody to be successful. And the land trust predicted that the Howards would be a perfect fit. “They were ready to move on to the next phase about the time we finished renovating the Case House,” he said. 

Food farming in Suffolk County

Organic vegetable farming in Suffolk County is its own microcosm, existing on the margins of the agro-industry that is itself subject to a tangle of state and local regulations, competing interests and the constant pressure to rebuff development. Navigating it all can be daunting and expensive. In Suffolk County there are currently 20 organic certified farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Organic vegetable farming is particularly ephemeral, and cultivating high-quality soil and crops can take years. 

Harder to know is how many of these farmers are sustaining profit margins big enough to stay in business for the long term. Larry Foglia, an executive committee member of the Long Island Community Agriculture Network and himself a farmer for decades, noted that for some farmers sticking with vegetable farming, organic or conventional, is an impossible choice in a marketplace where sod, for instance, offers real profit. He believes that soil preservation is key to sustaining the organic industry in Suffolk — “my soil is like chocolate cake, I have been building it for 60 years” — and in recent years has focused on educating the public about this issue.  

Growing Priscilla’s Farm

As it happens, vegetable farming is Leslie Howard’s secret superpower. He is 50 and when he gave me a tour of the farm, his face hidden by a baseball cap and a reddish beard, his strides were hard to keep up with. He has a calm competence built on years of tinkering with growing techniques, and his opinions about organics come across as missionary, but without the arrogance or bluster. “We never lay down plastic sheeting to suppress the weeds — we could, but we don’t,” he said emphatically. Howard loves soil and water, and old farm machinery. He pointed to his 1949 Allis-Chalmers tractor. “We got it for free and it is easy to fix,” he said. 

Howard is a descendent of the Wells family, whose farming roots in Suffolk County date back to revolutionary times. Although Leslie Wells, Howard’s great-grandfather, was the last of his family line to farm, Howard believes farming is “in my blood.” After spending over a decade as a winemaker for local vineyards, he decided to transition to food farming when a series of personal and health events left him feeling burnt out with the wine industry. Then, in 2016, he met Priscilla. 

What began as a chance encounter while working on the same organic vegetable farm quicky blossomed to romance, and in 2017 they married. Starting an organic vegetable farm together was a natural next step.

For Priscilla Howard, 46, a gardener and vegetable grower her whole life, realizing she was a farmer took years. She spent her 20s and 30s raising two children and working in the public school system teaching social studies. What ultimately drew her to take the plunge into farming was the challenge of figuring out the magic of growing, turning that into a plan to earn a living — and being outside while doing it. 

Priscilla has showstopping green eyes and a schoolteacher’s penchant for listening. Together the couple can come across like characters from a Tolkien novel — he working wizardry, she earthbound and observant. While Leslie described the intricacies of organic pest management, Priscilla wandered among rows of newly-sprouted beans, digging up remnants of plastic sheeting left by the previous tenant. 

 “It’s a labor of love for us and we like the lifestyle. We just need to make enough that we can support ourselves,” Leslie Howard said, adding, “And we really like to eat fresh food.” 

Beetles, which thrive in warmer temperatures, are threatening pine trees

Residents from Cutchogue work together to place sand bags at the edge of the Salt Air Farm before Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Photo by Prudence Heston

While surrounded by salt water, Long Island is in the midst of a drought that is heading into its third year. Amid a trend towards global warming, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation sent a letter to water district superintendents throughout Suffolk and Nassau County to ask them to lower their water consumption by 15 percent in the next three to four years.

“The primary area that is ripe for reduction is summertime watering,” said Bill Fonda, a spokesman for the DEC. The department has asked the water districts to reduce consumption, but it’s up to the districts to determine how they will reach those goals, he said.

The letter, written by Tony Leung, the regional water engineer, indicated that “results for 2015 show both Nassau and Suffolk County have exceeded the safe yield as cited in the 1986 Long Island Groundwater Management Program,” and that “a concerted effort is needed to reduce peak season water demand.”

The letter, which doesn’t cite global warming, indicates that salt water intrusion, contaminant plumes migration, salt water upconing and competing demand have raised concerns about a need to reduce peak season water demand.

Observers suggested the demand was likely rising for a host of reasons, including increased use of underground irrigation systems and a rise in the population of Long Island.

Water experts welcomed the DEC’s initiative, which is one of many steps Long Islanders can and are taking to respond to a changing environment.

“Most people have no clue how much water they use…They get their water bill, it is what it is, and then they write a check and send it in.”

— Sarah Meyland

Sarah Meyland, the director of the Center for Water Resources Management and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology, commended the DEC for asserting control over water withdrawals.

“Most people have no clue how much water they use,” Meyland said. “They get their water bill, it is what it is, and then they write a check and send it in.”

She admitted changing consumer behavior will be challenging.

The first step in ensuring water suppliers meet this request, Meyland suggested, is to inform the public about the need for less water use, particularly during the summer months. One possible solution is for irrigation systems that turn off automatically after a rainstorm.

The change in climate has posed a threat to trees that commonly grow on Long Island.

Pine trees have faced an invasion from the southern pine beetle, which extended its range onto Long Island in 2014 and is now a pest that requires routine managing and monitoring.

Long the scourge of pine trees in southern states, the pine beetle, which is about the size of a grain of rice, has found Long Island’s warmer climate to its liking.

“We’re assuming either [Hurricane] Irene or Sandy brought it in,” said John Wernet, a supervising forester at the DEC. “Because it’s getting warmer, the beetle has been able to survive farther north than they have historically.”

Forestry professionals in the south have waged a battle against the beetle for years, trying to reduce the economic damage to the timber market. On Long Island, Wernet said, they threaten to reduce or destroy the rare Pine Barrens ecosystem.

The beetle can have three or four generations in a year and each generation can produce thousands of young.

The first step relies on surveying trees to find evidence of an infestation. Where they discover these unwanted pests, they cut down trees and score the bark, which creates an inhospitable environment for the beetle.

“If left alone, the beetle is like a wildfire and will keep going,” Wernet said. Without direct action, that would be bad news for the pine warbler, a yellow bird that lives near the tops of pine trees, he said.

Wernet added Long Island’s drought also increases the risk of
wildfires.

Farmers, meanwhile, have had to contend with warmer winters that trick their crops into growing too soon while also handling the curveballs created by unexpected cold snaps, frosts, and the occasional nor’easter.

Dan Heston and Tom Wickham survey waters that entered Salt Air Farm after Hurricane Sandy. Photo by Prudence Heston

Last year, the colored hydrangeas of Salt Air Farm in Cutchogue budded early amid warmer temperatures in March, only to perish amid two eight-degree nights.

“We lost [thousands of dollars] worth of hydrangeas in two nights,” said Dan Heston, who works on the farm with his wife Prudence, whose family has been farming on Long Island for 11 generations. “Our whole colored hydrangea season was done.”

Heston said he’s been a skeptic of climate change, but suggested he can see that there’s something happening with the climate on Long Island, including the destructive force of Hurricane Sandy, which flooded areas that were never flooded during large storms before.

“I think the climate is shifting on Long Island,” Prudence Heston explained in an email. “Farmers are constantly having to adapt to protect their crops. In the end, pretty much every adaptation a farmer makes boils down to climate.”

Changes on Long Island, however, haven’t all been for the worse. Warmer weather has allowed some residents to grow crops people don’t typically associate with Long Island, such as apricots and figs. For three generations, Heston’s family has grown apricots.

Other Long Islanders have attempted to grow figs, which are even more sensitive to Long Island winters, Heston said. This was not an economically viable option, as each plant required individual wrapping to survive. That hasn’t stopped some from trying.

“People are now finding our winters to be warm enough to make [figs] a fun back yard plant,” Prudence Heston said.

In other positive developments, the Long Island Sound has had a reduction in hypoxia — low oxygen conditions — over the last decade, according to Larry Swanson, the interim dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.

“The state and the Environmental Protection Agency have agreed to a nitrogen reduction program,” Swanson said. “It appears that the decline in nitrogen may be having a positive effect.”

Brookhaven Town took a similar step in 2016.

The town board approved a local law proposed by Supervisor Ed Romaine (R) last summer that established nitrogen protection zones within 500 feet of any body of water on or around Long Island. The zones prohibit new structures or dwellings being built in that range from installing cesspools or septic systems.