Page 25 - The Valley Table - November/December 2020

t
t
e
KYLE JASTER
“Atticus Farm | West Shokan
Atticus Farm started six years ago. It’s a regenerative farm. Primarily, we sell pork and some chicken. We have a CSA. We have a farm stand on weekends. We sold a lot to restaurants, including The DeBruce, Silvia, and the Catskill Pines
Obviously, the restaurants all shut down. I was pretty worried about that, but people have become a lot more passionate about local food and knowing where their food comes from. So, we haven’t seen any drop in demand. Now, what we were selling to restaurants, we’re selling [directly to consumers].
Restaurants are starting to come back, which is great. We want them to be successful and open up, but we’ve found there’s been no slowing of the demand. We’re at a point where, everything we’ve had for sale, we’ve sold. We’re just going week by week. As soon as we have product, we’re able to sell it very, very quickly.
I don’t know that it’s been better or worse. Personally, I love working with restaurants. It’s really fun to talk to chefs, but I’m also really happy that there’s been such an increased interest in the quality of food, that people are cooking more, and becoming more adventurous cooks. I hope that stays. I hope that people continue to value really high-quality, local food because it’s so important for our community.
I’m also the chief operating officer at a company called Harvie, which helps small-scale farms sell their products online to local consumers. That company has seen 500 percent growth in the last six months. People have wanted to buy local food online, and now, because of COVID, farms are figuring out how to make it work when, before, they weren’t incentivized to. I think we’re going to see that [continue]. Now that local farms are online and consumers know where they are, they’re going to expect that.”
TYLER DENNIS
“Alewife Farm | Kingston
We grow just about every vegetable you can grow in the Northeast. We mostly sold directly to restaurants and through farmers’ markets. Last year, we were doing four weekly markets, all in Manhattan, including two days at Union Square.
This year, with COVID, things have shifted pretty dramatically for us. I made the call to reduce from four markets to just Union Square on Fridays. Even after places in the city started outdoor dining, many of our regular customers were [not] open, let alone in a position to be buying much.
We’re working a lot more with wholesalers and home- delivery services. I think, at the end of the year, our total sales will be down by about a third from normal, which I actually consider to be not that bad all things considered.
I’ve been running a smaller crew this year. A lot of that is just because it takes a lot of people to staff the markets, so now that we’re only doing one market instead of four, that’s a much smaller team. And, we’re doing a little less on the farm because we have fewer sales.
ed
d
t
to
ob
b
u
uy
y
l
l
o
oc
e
e
i
c
O
a
a
V
V
it
t
w
I
I
l
l
f
D
D
w
fo
,
,f
o
fa
o
or
o
o
ar
r
d
d
Going forward, I’m still evaluating options, but I think
it’s likely that we will continue on the path that we’re on now, which is a lot less emphasis on our farmers’ markets in the city. I’m debating whether or not it makes sense for us to keep doing that at all. Even before the pandemic, I’d seen the purchasing power of chefs who shop at the market decreasing because their cash flow was getting more and more constrained.
b
be
ec
c
a
a
u
u
s
se
eo
o
f
fC
CO
r
k
k.
m
m
.
If we [stop doing markets] our crop plan can totally change. The market, it’s sort of like a CSA, we want to have a diverse set of offerings every week to put on the stand. But if it’s just wholesale, it makes more sense to focus on a smaller list of crops that we can do really efficiently in wholesale quantities. We might go from 40 different crops to 12 or 15.”
s
s
h
h
o
ow
wt
t
o
om
ma
ak
k
PHOTO BY TYLER DENNIS
NOV – DEC 2020 VALLEYTABLE.COM 23