All jobs in one
Yet Gill clearly relishes the challenges of being a farmer. “I’m a personnel manager, chemist, mechanic, equipment operator and agronomist,” he said. To that he might add student, teacher and speaker: Gill regularly reads trade journals to keep up with the latest trends, attends the annual New York Vegetable Growers Show, held inSyracuse, lectures at the Culinary Institute about the merits of farming and gives the CIA students tours of his farm.
He also meets with chefs, who regularly shop at his farm stand on Route 209. He’ll plant certain varieties upon their request; the assortment of ethnic cuisines served atHudsonValleyrestaurants is reflected in the vegetables he grows. For example, his dozen varieties of eggplants include the Kermit eggplant, a staple ofThailandthat is so sweet you can bite into it like an apple. He plants every kind of sweet and hot peppers, including mini-peppers called “yummies” whose flavor is “unbelievable,” he said.
People come to his stands to get certain specialties found nowhere else, such as lima beans, which Gill said he planted in memory of one of his grandmothers, who served her homemade succotash to the family on Sunday nights when he was growing up. He also carries heirloom tomatoes; their expensive price reflects the fact that the fragile fruit is packed in a single layer in a box, rather than piled into baskets.
Gill “could be real happy with 100 acres and six to eight people, growing mostly vegetables sold at a farmstand,” he acknowledged. “But I’ve got all my equipment bills to pay. You need size to pay these bills. It’s easy to get big, but hard to downsize.”
One of his biggest challenges is labor, his biggest expense, a factor of production that puts him at a disadvantage in the global market, where he’s competing with produce from countries that pay a fraction of the wages he has to pay. From the beginning of April through the end of October, he hires six to eight guys, supplemented with 100 migrant workers who do the harvesting from mid-July through early October. Almost all these seasonal workers are Mexican. Half have been working at the Gill farm for almost two decades (at other times of the year they are picking crops inFlorida,Texas,GeorgiaandNew Jersey). They get free room and board at the farm, said Gill.
Gill checks the paperwork of his workers and hopes it’s legit. Whenever federal agents plan a visit, he worries, like every other farmer. Twelve years ago, he said he was fined after an inspection because some workers had filled out their forms incorrectly. Reform ofU.S.immigration laws would be a good thing, he said, noting that “we all pay taxes” on the workers’ wages. Furthermore, he said it’s impossible to hire locally, since no one wants to do the work.
Embracing the future
Farming is a risky business, and it’s not getting any easier. “We’re competing with places out of the country that pay in a week what we pay in an hour for labor,” said Bruce Davenport, as he drives past vast rows of vegetable seedlings sprouting through black-plastic-covered raised beds. We’re touring the 100-acre farm out in Stone Ridge planted mostly with sweet corn that he shares with his brother Barth. A pair ofDavenportcousins, Doug and Bobby, farm another 500 acres; all are descended from of Isaiah Davenport, who began farming here in the 1840s. But todayDavenportisn’t interesting in discussing family history. Instead, he’s keen to talk about the future — specifically, an initiative that could turn the farms of this fertile valley stretching down from Hurley through Marbletown into a model for the entire nation.
Believing that farmers need to be proactive in finding ways to remain viable and that there’s strength in numbers, he co-founded the Rondout Valley Growers Association (RVGA) seven years ago. In March, the non-profit organization received a $159,000 planning grant from the Local Economies Project of The New World Foundation, a New York-based non-profit dedicated to social justice. The money will fund a feasibility study for the creation of a thriving and sustainable local and regional food system. If successful, the initiative would position local agriculture as a model for what’s possible in the future.
The plan takes a comprehensive approach, saidDavenport. It will address new methods of crop production using minimal pesticides and fuel as well as processing locally grown foods in the area, such as is already occurring on a relatively small scale at the TechCity-based company Farm to Table. (TheDavenportsare using the company to process their tomatoes into jars of pasta sauce, which are specially branded and sold at their farm stand on Route 209; John Gill, who supports the grant initiative, said he’s considering using Farm to Table to package frozen corn.)
Using local growers as suppliers for the schools is another part of the plan, as is a farmer-education program aimed at putting abandoned farmland back into production for dairy and eggs. In addition, educating the public about the health benefits of eating in-season foods might also play a role, saidDavenport.
“We’d like to have a little bit of everything, although it doesn’t pay to be that diversified today,” saidDavenport. “My idea is a community of farms, with all food being produced and processed here, as opposed to getting milk fromCaliforniaand cheese fromWisconsin.” He said there’s a lot of available upland down 209 that would be ideal for pasturing livestock and growing grains, which would complement the vegetables grown in the bottomlands.
“We’d like to brand ourselves as a valley of farms that’s ecologically and economically sustainable,”Davenportsaid. “People will know it’s good, although not necessarily organic.”
To ramp up its efforts to go after grant money targeted to local agriculture, which didn’t exist ten years ago,Davenportsaid the RVGA is also planning to hire a grant writer, as well as construct an agricultural center.
While the plan seeks to further develop and brand the food that’s grown here into a viable industry, the area farms could never be profitable merely serving the needs of the local populace, he noted. Greatly in their favor is the proximity to the many millions of people just an hour and a half south of here, an advantage that will grow as oil becomes ever more scarce.
“When fuel becomes too expensive for trucks to get across the country, we want to be able to feed ourselves andNew York City,”Davenport concluded. “We need to prepare ourselves for the future.”
