Long Island legacy farms struggle to survive as pressures mount

Eric Wells returned to Riverhead this month after spending four months planting and cultivating potatoes on the family’s new 1,000-acre farm in Maine. Back home here, his grandmother has a small patch of potatoes in Riverhead, a sea change for this branch of the Wells family that first planted on Long Island in 1661.

“There’s no future here,” Wells said recently from the Riverhead farm where the family still owns about 300 acres, now planted with lower-maintenance oats and wheat. “It’s a big farm, and we don’t have the scale any more to make ends meet.”

It’s not just the finances that drove the Wells family north. Heavy traffic makes trucking difficult, Wells said, while day-trippers have little patience for his tractors on narrow farm roads. “Our heart’s in vegetable farming, but it gets to a point where enough is enough,” he said.

Suffolk County’s more than 30,000 acres of remaining farmland have seen decades of transition. Fifty years ago, the region’s first vineyards began displacing tens of thousands of acres of traditional potato fields. Today, there are fewer than 1,500 acres of potatoes, while wineries, farm stands and amusement-park type farms are quickly changing a region once dominated by working farms.

“My heart is breaking that we’re losing all the long-standing farms because of the cost of doing business or regulation, or there’s a better [regulatory] climate to grow potatoes in Maine,” said Robert Carpenter, director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, an industry association in Calverton.

Many farms are adapting, Carpenter noted. In Cutchogue, Martin Sidor Farms turned a four-generation potato-growing farm into a nationally known North Fork Potato Chips company. "It does get tough," said Maureen Sidor, who manages the family's Cutchogue warehouse and has dealt with extensive new rules for farmworkers that increase administrative work and time.

"I can understand going to Maine, but we would never do it," Sidor said. She said the family is preparing to build a new production-warehouse facility in Mattituck.

Steve Ammerman, a spokesman for the New York Farm Bureau, noted that the minimum wage in Maine is nearly $2 lower than New York's, which is set to increase, while the cost of purchasing new farmland is considerably lower in rural Maine than Long Island's North Fork. "It all adds up," he said of the costs.

The hundreds of remaining legacy farms on Long Island face other pressures, including tougher environmental regulations and an onslaught of competition from across the country and Canada are taking a toll on farmers. In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, the nearly 600 farms on the Island had nearly $230 million in total sales.

“We’re growing food to feed people, but it’s something that’s really not feasible here, to be honest with you,” said Phil Schmitt, whose family farms have spanned five generations from Queens to Riverhead.

Schmitt spends much of his time these days working to squeeze a profit farming sweet corn, spinach, lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower on about 160 acres he owns and another 70 that are leased. “How much longer we’re going to continue like that I don’t know,” he said.

Earlier this month, he took a break from work on a sweltering day to meet with State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who led a listening tour of East End farms. As a representative of state government, DiNapoli got an earful.

“New York state is killing us, killing us,” Schmitt said, noting the minimum wage has doubled in the past decade while increased regulations on herbicides and pesticides have sharply limited his once-staple spinach crop. Environmental advocates point out that new limitations on herbicides and pesticides are the result of new findings on their potential health impacts.

Schmitt also said unionization among farmworkers on the East End “would finish us. It’s close to that right now.”

Worse, while local grocery stores say they love Schmitt’s produce, they also want to buy it cheap.

“All the supermarkets, they all want the local stuff,” he said. Grocers tell him, “Phil, you gotta compete. I can get it for this much [less] from another state, or from Canada,” his biggest competitor, where farmers get a competitive advantage because of a favorable exchange rate.

When Schmitt’s father and grandfather came to Riverhead nearly 50 years ago, they bought four large parcels of farmland on the four corners of Roanoke and Sound avenues. An aunt who owned the farm across from what’s now the Schmitt farm stand sold to a builder, who subsequently sold to a lavender farmer. That property is now for sale, Schmitt said. “This used to be all vegetables and potatoes,” he said. “Potatoes are almost a hard commodity to find now.”

Carpenter, the farm bureau director, said it’s not so much that farmland is being lost to residential or commercial development so much as the well-heeled are selectively buying up tracts.

“What we’re seeing is definitely a change where farmers and farmers’ kids are selling to wealthy people who can come in and afford to spend millions of dollars to buy them up” and invest in the land, Carpenter said. “It’s becoming more of a common practice because I think that’s really the only way you can afford to farm.”

Crossroads AG, which brands its local farms with the Soloviev family name, has purchased more than 1,000 acres in the last decade, including Peconic Bay Vineyards and the former Davis Peach Farm.

“It’s an investment and a commitment we’re making to make it a better peach farm and better for Long Island,” Stefan Soloviev told Newsday in a 2019 interview. The vast majority of the land, he said, will stay farmland.

Financier Randy Frankel in 2021 bought the 66-acre Ruland farm in Mattituck, which traditionally had planted potatoes and sod and features a 1712-era farmhouse. "I'm really going to pretty it up,” Frankel told Newsday last year of the Ruland property, now planted with new vines. It’s the third of his North Fork properties, after Rose Hill Vineyard Mattituck and Croteaux Vineyards (with a partner) in Southold.

In Cutchogue, Joseph DiVello, a member of the Harbes farm family, now spends his days selling farm properties rather than tilling them. The real estate agent said most farmers face daunting challenges here, including competition for property by wealthy conglomerates looking for investments. 

"Everybody wants to be a farmer, but few people want to farm," DiVello said. "It's very difficult to grow crops as a commodity on Long Island. I come from a farming family and I’m not farming."

Market pressures are only part of the equation. David Shanks, a former Penguin Group chief executive who bought a 45-acre property he named Surrey Lane Vineyard Orchard Farm in Southold 12 years ago, recently decided to put the property on the market.

“Basically, I’m just getting up there in age and can’t do it anymore,” said Shanks, 76, adding that he and his wife have been spending more time in Florida.

“There’s a lot of challenges to farming today,” said Shanks, who may hold onto the property if he can’t find a buyer to take it over for the $4.1 million list price. “It’s getting really difficult, and I think it’s getting to be a lost art.”

It’s not getting any easier for Doug Cooper, whose family has farmed in the region for more than 200 years. He, too, is ready for a transition, though he has no intention of selling. After years of growing vegetables on 25 acres in Mattituck, which he allows customers to pick or buy, he said he’s considering “simplifying” operations next year.

“This will likely be my last year with vegetables,” he said. “I’m getting too old for it. Too many headaches. I want to simplify.”

This year, he’s cultivating 150 leased acres of rye, some 20,000 bales' worth.

Cooper said he can understand why farmers such as the Wells would prefer to farm in Maine.

“The government has sucked all the joy out of farming,” he said. “It’s not just my opinion. Talk to any of us, and that’s pretty much the feeling … I hope they do well in Maine. They are a really hardworking family.”

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.