sheep are grass-fed and the heritagebreed pigs, chickens and turkeys are pasture raised and fed a grain supplement grown locally. “We never use hormones and will only use antibiotics on a sick animal, for which we will, in turn, find another outlet,” says Robin. The McConaughys own a total of 500 acres, and farm 800 acres, including 200 at St. Michaels Farm Preserve. “All are within 10 miles of Hopewell,” says Jon. They have 400 sheep, 500 pigs, 1,000 egg-laying chickens, and go through about 140 meat chickens a week. Poultry processing is done on the farm with a mobile unit from Pennsylvania. In the old days evoked by the market, it took a village: the farmers, the bakers, the butchers, the dairy workers. In the McConaughys’ farm-to-table business, there are just as many moving pieces: from animal to vegetable farm, processing facility, butcher facility, bakery, creamery and land leased from seven landowners, as well as six tenant farmer houses to manage, in addition to the full-service market and restaurant. It is a complicated arrangement of employee ownership involving real estate, leases, and proprietary elements to the profit sharing arrangement in order to incentivize employees to treat the business as their own, says Robin. While they seek an environmentally
sustainable model, is it economically viable? “In our opinion, if it’s not economically viable, it’s not sustainable. That is the goal, to have a profitable business that supports our mission.” says Jon. “This operation has been capital-intensive to start up, creating a major barrier to entry for someone who would like to replicate it. And right now, farming is not seen as a good investment. Through a profitable, successful business, we are hoping banks and venture capitalists will see the opportunity in a local, closed-loop operation such as ours and will invest in supporting others trying to do the same thing.” Additionally, “we want to share what we’ve learned with other farmers. If others hadn’t helped us it would have taken us longer. The more farmers the better.”
RE-INVENTING THE PAST
For a full two years, the McConaughys hoped to open the market imminently, but there were continuous setbacks. “When dealing with adaptive reuse, you never know what you’re going to find,” says Jon. There were lighting fixtures that took three times longer than expected to be delivered, water geysers from drilling geothermal wells that closed down all construction for days, cheese storage code approval delays, window contractors who disappeared, the sudden need to rebuild a
back building... “Every part of this business is unique, from the cheese aging rooms to our solar and geothermal hook-ups to our hundreds of yards of radiant floor heating, and you can’t go to someone and ask them to build it,” says Robin. “We didn’t want to be in the construction business—we’re farmers, not developers.” “Finding balance between our business and personal life is a constantly moving and sometimes overwhelming, target,” continues Robin, who spends a good portion of her day shuttling kids and at the computer managing human resources, maintaining the website, updating the farm blog, connecting with Lemmerling about market needs and with farmers about scheduling and administrative items. “The key for us has been finding the right people to manage individual business units who can take responsibility and run with it.” Ice cream, yogurt, butter and cheese will soon be manufactured at Brick Farm Creamery in the former Sunoco station on Broad Street. Before all this started, Robin planned to have an art studio in the barn but the space was co-opted by carpenters five years ago and has been that way ever since. She’s learning to say no to more new ideas.
Having read an excerpt from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Robin and Jon McConaughy embarked on a quest to understand where their food was coming from and how it was raised. SUMMER 2013 PRINCETON MAGAZINE
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