June 7, 2007

Shared land
Taliaferro Farms prepares for

summer market

by Mike Townshend

Pete Taliaferro drops a thick stack of papers on the table in his work shed. Each of the 30 or more pages of the "little thesis" is a form the farmer must fill out for organic certification. When he sees the packet, Taliaferro makes a face.

It'll be a long day.

When Taliaferro and his wife started Taliaferro Farms in New Paltz in 1995, they faced a plot of land mostly covered with poison ivy and wild growth.

"There was nothing there," he says. "Now we're growing 18 1/2 acres of vegetables."

As he walks through the fields, Taliaferro uses a PDA to keep track of his crops. He opens an Excell spreadsheet with a breakdown on each row of plants. The readout tells him what grew there the year before, exactly where he planted everything and, most importantly, what kind of organic seeds he used.

"You have to be able to do an audit trail from point of seed to point of sale," he says. "You have to have all this stuff."

With organic farming, every step needs to be documented. If a farmer wants his chickens to get the USDA label, he needs to prove that everything -- even the food the birds eat -- is organic. Taliaferro's poultry, while grown in a natural way, are one of the few things on the farm without the organic certification.

The farmer smirks and cracks a joke -- certifying those chickens would almost double that paperwork.

According to Taliaferro, there's only one thing that's kept the farm going: "There's no way we could do it without CSA."

Taliaferro Farms, at the corner of Cedar Lane and Plains Road, is one of a handful of community-supported agriculture farms around New Paltz. CSA's allow people to buy a membership in a local farm. In return, they get a certain amount of fresh fruits and vegetables during the growing season.

Independent farmers use the system to get a different source of lending to help them buy supplies and make it through the year.

For banks, lending to a smaller farm means risk. The weather could turn bad, pests could ruin the crops or the farm equipment could fail at a critical time. Since all of those represent a variable the bank can't control, "it's really hard to borrow money for an agricultural business," he says.

Many banks will tend to favor large-scale operations that, through economy of scale, have an ability to guarantee a larger return.

Despite the fact that Taliaferro's food might reach 5,000 families each year, "we can't really show that we're a real going

concern, even though we feed a lot of people," he says.

So the CSA helps, because the take on the risk that a bank might not.

For instance, the farm usually gives out a special early harvest of crops in the spring to its shareholders. But because of recent flooding and a record-setting and strangely weathered, the CSA members won't get the spring crops this year.

Unlike some other farms, Taliaferro uses a farmers market approach to distributing their crops. Each weekend during the summer people enrolled in the CSA, and anyone who happens to stop by, can pick from a selection of 20 to 30 different foods.

While they have a general amount of food they can take, the people who've bought a share in the farm CSA aren't locked in to a set package of food. They have more freedom to swap for different foods.

"It's been good for us and good for them," Taliaferro says.

During these weekends, the farm also has stands featuring foods from local dairy farms. In effect, what he wanted to provide was one-stop shopping for locally grown food.

Taliaferro Farms grows about 70 different kinds of crops, including mescluns, peas, strawberries, bell peppers, melons, greens, tomatoes, apples, asparagus and garlic.

Besides the weekend market, foods from the farm also head to local restaurants, including the Village Tea Room. They also supply food to the new online "virtual farmers market" at www.mypersonalfarmers.com.

Maryanne Hedrick, president of the website, said she started the site to help farmers, such as Taliaferro, that have a different way of distributing their crops. My Personal Farmers takes orders online, picks up fresh food from the farms and delivers it at people's doorstep.

According to Hedrick, the recent trends of CSA and people using the Internet to research local farms has definitely helped farmers.

"In more general terms, farmers are having a difficult time financially because they are forced to reduce their prices," she says.

The company, which started in March and so far only delivers in Westchester County, aims to reimburse farmers with a fair price for their crops.