Thinking of the past as LI's last duck farm hangs on

Fourteen-month old white Pekin ducks roam inside the breeding barn at Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue in August 2018. Credit: Randee Daddona
The news hit hard: Bird flu had struck Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue, forcing the well-known supplier to euthanize all 99,000 of its ducks.
It was a devastating reminder of the many ways one can measure loss.
Most immediate was the impact of the necessary dismissal of dozens of the farm's workers, with more layoffs possibly to come. The awful ripple effect on all those families will be both financial and psychological. In an operation like Crescent, longtime employees, as many were, become like family.
Also looming was the fear of future loss. Bird flu is highly contagious, as we have seen elsewhere in the country. One wonders whether this will be an isolated event in our region, or a beginning.
But another part of the potential future shock is the prospect that Crescent Duck Farm might have to close. It is sad when any business has to shutter. But Crescent isn't just any business. It's been operating since 1908, and is the last duck farm on Long Island, the last link to an industry that once defined the region as much as most any ever did.
The withering-away of duck farming has parallels to other Long Island staples that have been disappearing. Our vast potato fields. Our bountiful shellfish.
Change, of course, is an inevitable part of human history. But much of that change we bring on ourselves. Long Island's farmland, beginning in western Nassau and moving east, was paved over and built over, which has increased our appreciation for what remains. For decades, we overfished and polluted our waters, which also have been warming, leaving us longing for what we once had.
And now, it's the ducks.
In 1940, there were 90 duck farms in Brookhaven, Riverhead, and Southampton towns, with total annual production reaching nearly 8 million ducks by 1959, according to a Suffolk County Department of Planning report. And those Long Island ducks were known worldwide, prized by chefs and their customers for their tenderness, juiciness, and mild flavor. At one point, Long Island produced some two-thirds of all ducks eaten in the United States, according to the Suffolk report, which made the industry as valuable as the entire commercial fishery in New York.
Shortly after that peak, the industry began to wither for familiar reasons. Development brought homeowners and summer residents to the rural areas that hosted most of the duck farms, and they did not like the odor or the waste. The expense of subsequent pollution controls forced many smaller farms to close. Taxes and utilities kept rising, and grain to feed the ducks had to be imported from the Midwest as Long Island's farms vanished. Many duck farmers cashed in on the residential development boom by selling their waterfront properties.
Crescent is the last one standing, and now it teeters.
Its fate reminds one of an exchange in a Hemingway novel where one character asks another, "How did you go bankrupt?" The response: "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
The book was "The Sun Also Rises," which would be a nice metaphor for Crescent's future as the farm swims against a mighty tide.
It's too early to know whether Crescent has produced its last duck. Farm president Doug Corwin has said that the worth of his business is its genetics. Preserving the gene line of his ducks is imperative. His hopes hinge on 10,000 quarantined eggs that must be sanitized in chlorine and pass testing at various stages, including after hatching, to be sure they don't have bid flu. Those eggs are the slender thread from which hangs the future of duck farming on Long Island.
If this last-gasp gambit does not work and Crescent is forced to close, the region will lose a lot more than a viable business. Long Island also will lose one more piece of what once made us Long Island.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.