June 20, 2011
John Gill is surveying his fields after last night’s heavy rain, and it doesn’t look good; the stream that borders his property was clear yesterday, but this morning it’s brown from the topsoil that’s washed off his land. His fields are riddled with muddy puddles that have wiped out rows of corn seedlings, and Gill worries about the strawberries planted behind the family farm stand. “If they sit more than 24 hours in water, they’ll die,” he said.
Gill is part owner of Gill Corn Farms Inc., 1,200 acres of mostly sweet corn, supplemented by 60 acres of vegetables, covering a big swatch of the Hurley Flats, just south of Kingston. The first thing I learn while riding around in his truck this morning is that the unpredictability of the weather is just one of the wild cards Gill has to factor into his bottom line.
Thousands of years ago the Esopus Creek inundated the floodplain as gently and regularly as the Nile, but in recent years the floods have been more violent and destructive, said Gill, speculating the cause might be related to the water piling up behind the dam of the Ashokan Reservoir and an El Nino effect that’s more extreme. In 2006 he lost 400 acres of land to flooding. Every year, flooding, loss of acreage due to erosion, destruction by pests and other problems result in a 10 to 25 percent loss of his crops, Gill estimated.
A blunt-spoken guy wearing shorts and a tee shirt, Gill has been working on the farm full time since graduating from college in 1977. He still gets input from his 89-year-old father, Jack, and is assisted by his 29-year-old son, John, and brother-in-law Artie. The family’s two farm stands, one located on Route 209 and the other on Hurley Mountain Road, are operated by his wife, Loretta, and mother Charlotte. Among the items for sale are the baked goods of his daughter Danielle, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.
Besides weather, profits are dependent on the whims of the market: two salesmen sitting in Gill’s office sell the corn daily, working with a truck broker. Last year, because of a surplus, “we all lost our butts,” Gill said. “It’s supply and demand, and I can only store my corn for a week. We left 50 acres in the ground we couldn’t sell.”
On the other hand, in years where there’s a dearth in the Midwest caused by drought or other calamity, he’ll sell his corn as far west as California; he’s even shipped it across the ocean to England. But most of the 375,000 boxes of corn, 47 ears to the box, that’s packed onto pallets and loaded into trucks in the farm’s refrigerated packing house is shipped to points on the East Coast, Gill said. The proximity of New York City gives the Hurley Flats corn growers an advantage over corn farmers elsewhere in the Northeast, enabling them to ship their product to a major market at lower cost.
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 3,000 acres of the “Hurley Flats,” as the Rondout Valley is informally known, are under the plow, the majority planted in sweet corn. It’s a crop ideally suited to the local conditions—and one that’s been here for hundreds of years, counting the maize fields of the Native Americans, which were supplanted by the farms of the first European settlers in the early and mid 17th century.
Hurley sweet corn is nationally famous, thanks to the high nutritional capacity of the soil—Gill said his fields still have 10 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 3 to 5 percent—require farmers to constantly 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, noting that 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 reduced the six pieces of equipment required for the job to just two. The shift was made possible by his zone tiller, a massive machine whose multiple moving parts loosens the soil and creates 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 said one advantage of his newer equipment is that it’s 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. 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, his fuel bill skyrockets, as the process consumes 500 gallons of diesel a day–a cost of $2,000.
Another important aspect of his job is determining how much pesticide is needed to kill pests—namely, the corn borer, ear worm, army worm, and aphid. Gill sets pheronome 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 out of 100 are infested with eggs; a count of more than 10 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 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.”
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 in Syracuse, 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 209, and notes he’ll plant certain varieties upon their request; the assortment of ethnic cuisines served at Hudson Valley restaurants is reflected in the vegetables he grows. For example, his 12 varieties of eggplants include the Kermit eggplant, a staple of Thailand that 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.
Talking about his vegetables, Gill acknowledged that he “could be real happy with 100 acres and six to eight people, growing mostly vegetables sold at a farm stand. 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 cost that puts him at a disadvantage in the global market, where he’s competing with countries that pay a fraction of his wage. 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 of these seasonal workers are Mexican, half of whom have been working at Gill’s for 17 years (at other times of the year they are picking crops in Florida, Texas, Georgia, and New Jersey). They get free room and board at the farm, said Gill.
Gill checks all the paperwork of his workers and hopes it’s legit, but whenever the Immigration and Naturalization Service 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 of U.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.
His other biggest challenge is urban encroachment. People who moved to the area from the metropolitan area and are not accustomed to living near a farm constantly call the DEC and state police to complain about the noise from his machinery and spraying. He said the situation has improved after he embarked on a public relations campaign, inviting people for flying demonstrations and otherwise sharing with them aspects of his farm.
During the winter months, when his fields are planted with rye, wheat, and other grains designed to fix nitrogen in the soil, he lets snowmobilers and mountain bikers onto his land. (When the farm is in operation, he tries to keep people out, for safety reasons.) He also welcomes agri-tourists in the fall, having set up a pumpkin cannon and corn maze; the annual concert by Levon Helm is a big draw. Agri-tourism is becoming ever more lucrative, and Gill said he plans to expand on these attractions.
So can we trust that Gill’s and the other farms on the Hurley Flats won’t someday disappear under the bulldozer, their fields turned into shopping malls and houses? Absolutely, said Gill. “This land will never be developed,” he said, noting it’s located on a floodplain. From a financial standpoint, should the margins for sweet corn ever get to the point of being unsustainable, he has a back-up plan to grow corn for livestock, which requires less expense in growing and handling.
But he doesn’t think that will happen. Indeed, Gill said that ten years from now, when another 250 million people in China move into the middle class, farming might become the linchpin of the American economy. As it is, farmland around the world is rising in value, with the Chinese buying up the soy from farmers in Brazil, to cite one example. “There’s a saying of my father’s that’s so true, which is ‘we’re not making land anymore,’” Gill said. Truly, the future of the Hurley Flats is bright.
Sidebar/Looking to 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 planted mostly with sweet corn that he shares with his brother Barth. A pair of Davenport cousins, Doug and Bobby, farm another 500 acres, all descendants of Isaiah Davenport, who began farming here in the 1840s. But today, Davenport isn’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 got a boost with the awarding of a $159,000 planning grant from the Local Economies Project of The New World Foundation, a New York-based charity dedicated to social justice. The money will fund a feasibility study for the creation of a thriving, 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, said Davenport. 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. (The Davenports are 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 seasonable foods might also play a role, said Davenport.
“We’d like to have a little bit of everything, although it doesn’t pay to be that diversified today,” said Davenport. “My idea is a community of farms, with all food being produced and processed here, as opposed to getting milk from California and cheese from Wisconsin.” 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,” Davenport said. “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, Davenport said the RVGA is also planning to hire a grant writer, as well as construct an ag 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 11 million 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 and New York City,” Davenport concluded. “We need to prepare ourselves for the future.”