Hawthorne Valley Farm Store
From Our Hands to Your Table A natural foods store featuring organic breads, pastries, cheeses, yogurt, raw milk, sauerkraut and other foods made fresh on our farm!
Fresh • Organic • Local • Delicious Open 7 Days FARM STORE | www.hawthornevalleyfarm.org 327 County Route 21C, Ghent, NY 12075 | 518-672-7500
Nonprofit groups connect farmers to land and support them by way of sharing resources. Catskills FarmLink isn’t the only upstate group trying to preserve farmland and attract a new generation of growers. A site with a similar mission, Hudson Valley Farm Finder, helps farmers and farm-owners find each other in other parts of the Valley, like Orange, Albany and Washington Counties. Catskills CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) works with Farmhearts, Pure Catskills (a “buy local” campaign and resource guide), and the Watershed Agricultural Council to prepare new farmers for the industry, providing knowledge that gets lost when children don’t take over the farm from their parents. Catskills FarmLink’s impact is modest, but growing. There have been two official links so far. Tuff-a-Nuff Farm in Walton found 500 acres of land through Catskills FarmLink, and 10 acres of fallow land with its own farm stand in the Ulster County hamlet of Mount Tremper was rented through the Catskills FarmLink Land Listings page. Forster says there is e-mail every week from folks who are already farmers in spirit, if not in practice. They ask her things like if the land is still available, if she can connect them with the owners, how the quality of the soil is and if there’s a barn or a living post. What they get in response is often a list of questions themselves. “Because there are so many factors that go into successful farming, you really have to ask them what kind of farming they plan to do. Some land is more suitable for livestock; some is better suited for growing things.” Perhaps most importantly, FarmLink asks potential farmers about their marketing channel—how are they planning to sell what they grow or raise. Farmers’ markets? Wholesale to the city? Their own farm stand? “We ask what they want to grow and how they want to sell it,” Forster says, “and that can help you understand if a piece of land is right.”
Ronnybrook. So life tastes better. FRESH • ALL NATURAL • MADE ON OUR FARM
518.398.6455 www.ronnybrook.com upstate HOUSE
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