Long Island farmers supply U.S. Open produce

Take heart as you fork over $14 for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich at the U.S. Open: You're supporting Long Island farmers.

About 40 percent of the produce used at this year's Open will come from regional farms, according to the United States Tennis Association, part of a push to bring fresher produce to the venue's restaurants and reduce the tournament's carbon footprint.

During the next two weeks, Open visitors will consume 3,000 pounds of baby lettuce, 1,000 pounds of spinach and another thousand of arugula from Cutchogue's Satur Farms, which cultivates 180 acres. They'll also find tuna and scallops hauled in by Montauk fishermen.

The fresh initiative is good news for Long Island farmers, said Joseph M. Gergela, executive director of Long Island Farm Bureau, who said that while at least one other major sporting event, the Barclays Open golf tournament, relied on local growers for much of its produce this year, sporting events at big stadiums in the region typically don't.

"They work through the big food companies," he said. "They just buy from the markets whatever's available, wherever it's available."

Often this means produce shipped from California. While smaller Long Island growers with higher production costs usually can't compete with the economies of scale available to that state's large growers, Paulette Satur said the local produce wins out when it comes to taste.

"It's the sandy loam soil," she said. "It's a mineral soil."

Her theory is that a plant here must work harder to suck up nutrients. "Swiss chard tastes more like Swiss chard; arugula is more peppery; and the lettuce -- you wouldn't think lettuce has a smell, but I go into the packing room and I can smell it."

Another factor is soil-to-plate time. California produce might spend a week or longer in transit, she said, versus a day or just hours for her greens at the U.S. Open.

Getting the greens picked and ready for daily or twice-daily pickup, Satur said, will be a "considerable undertaking" for the farm, a multimillion-dollar operation that also supplies Whole Foods, FreshDirect and Gourmet Garage.

Satur said she began ramping up seeding on most of her greens a month ago to prepare for a U.S. Open run.

In coming weeks, Satur employees will run a mechanized harvester through the fields most mornings, its reciprocating blades adjusted just above the soil for lettuce, just below for spinach. As the blades cut, the greens are thrown onto a conveyor belt and basketed.

Within hours, trucks dispatched by Baldor Foods, Satur's Bronx-based distributor, will pick up the greens and haul them into Queens. Many of those trucks already will have dropped off or picked up at locations on the East End, so the pickup will save them from returning empty.

In addition to Satur Farms, Latham Farms of Orient is supplying tomatoes to the Open's caterer, Chicago-based Levy Restaurants.

Long Island fishermen will also benefit from their proximity to the National Tennis Center, with Gosman's fish market in Montauk set to provide several thousand pounds of tuna, striped bass and scallops.

"It's important to me that we can be a part of it," said manager Bryan Gosman. "It might cost a little more, but a lot of buyers are willing to pay for better-than-average."

His distributor, Joe Gumtel of Manhattan-based Gotham Seafood, said initiatives like the Open's were becoming more common. "Clients are becoming more educated," he said.