Corn paradise
The farm traces its roots back to Gill’s grandfather, who came to the area with partner Henry Paul in 1937 to make a fresh beginning after he missed a few mortgage payments on his Long Island farm. Farms were mostly dairy and chickens back then, although much of the land was planted in corn. Today, approximately 3000 acres of the Hurley Flats are under the plow, the majority planted in sweet corn. The crop is ideally suited to the local conditions — and one that’s been here for hundreds of years. The maize fields of the Native Americans were supplanted by the farms of the first European settlers in the mid-17th century.
Hurley sweet corn is nationally famous, thanks to the high nutritional capacity of the soil — Gill said his fields still have ten to 30 feet of topsoil — and ideal growing conditions: “Because of the long hot days and cooler nights, the corn goes to maturity [faster] and builds up a high amount of sugar,” Gill explained.
To the thousands of motorists who daily speed down Route 209, the corn fields of the Hurley Flats form a scenic panorama, quaintly reminiscent of a time when the American countryside was still mostly farms. The reality is that farming is a tough business, whose thin profit margins — Gill estimates from three to five percent — require farmers to innovate in seeking more efficient ways to grow and harvest crops.
“To me the future is managing my farm as best I can,” Gill said. Five or so years ago he moved to zone tilling, a practice that reduced the number of men needed to till and plant his fields from six to three and cut the six pieces of equipment required for the job to just two. The zone tiller, a massive machine whose multiple moving parts loosen the soil and create a row of trenches, injects nitrogen at the right depth into the earth, mounds the soil into raised beds, and levels it out. A worker follows with a corn planter, whose disk deposits fertilizer along four trenches at a time and drops the seed with a precision that eliminates the need later on to weed out excess plants.
Gill’s newer equipment is much more fuel-efficient. He runs everything on diesel, including the six pumps used to irrigate his vegetable fields with water from the Esopus Creek. His fuel bill skyrockets in a dry spell, when he has to irrigate portions of the corn crop, a job that entails six to eight men setting up big overhead pipes over the fields. The process consumes 500 gallons of diesel a day — a cost of about $2000.
Another important aspect of his job is determining how much pesticide is needed to kill pests —the corn borer, ear worm, army worm and aphid. Gill sets pheromone traps that attract moths; the number of insects caught tells him how much he has to spray. He also walks into his fields and counts how many plants are infested with eggs; a count of more than ten to 15 percent indicates the need to spray. He said the pesticides he uses are the least poisonous to the environment, and he doesn’t spray more than he has to.
“I’m as environmentally sound as I can be,” he said, noting that his practices are carefully monitored by the New York State Department of Conservation. Farmers, he said, often get a bad rap, but in fact, “we’re stewards of the land. We keep the land open and productive, and we feed the world.” Noting he routinely puts in 100 hours a week, except during the winter, when the number goes down to 40, he added wryly that “the only thing I have to show for it is my gray hair and extra pounds.”
