Genesee
County’s northern tier, a zone of rich soils well-positioned between the Lake
Ontario plains and the hill country to the south, has that touch of bigness.
Open fields stretch hundreds or thousands of yards back from the road. A
Montana-style “Big Sky” draws the eyes to infinity. “Big” weather rolls in day
and night, often with tall, imposing, even intimidating cloud formations.
           With this kind of atmosphere, it’s
no surprise that Porter Farms, a family-owned operation just north of Batavia,
is not small. The Porters — father Jack, sons Steve and Mike, other family
members, and maybe a dozen migrant workers and local employees during the
growing season — cultivate 550 acres. That’s more than 20 percent bigger than
Monroe County’s Ellison Park.
           As a wag might say: With family
farming, everything is relative. Next door to the Porters is one of New York
State’s largest farms: 10,000 acres and counting.
           But Porter Farms — which produces
mountains of organic green beans, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, squash, onions,
peas, turnips, potatoes, grains, beans, and other foods — stands out on its
merits. Not for size, as such, but for the type of farming in relation to size, and for the basic business arrangements that
keep the farm going.
By melding
three strategies, the Porters have resisted a tide that’s engulfing all but
the largest farms today.
           First, they’ve increased their
acreage to become more competitive in an era of agricultural consolidation.
           Second, they’ve opted for organic
farming, a method too often associated in the US only with “boutique”
operations and gardens.
           Third, they’re growing a particular
social relationship between farmers and consumers: a form of “Community
Supported Agriculture” (CSA for short) in which the farmer makes direct weekly
deliveries of produce to mostly urban and suburban customers who’ve paid up
front.
           All the Porter land is “certified
organic” by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, says Steve
Porter. The certification process, regulated by the federal Department of
Agriculture and conducted by independent groups, assures the land is free of
synthetic pesticides and herbicides and is cultivated with “chemical-free”
methods. (Organic, though, doesn’t mean only what’s not there: It means using natural ways of adding organic matter to
the soil and encouraging beneficial micro-organisms. “It’s just as important to
feed the soil as to feed the people,” goes a saying common in the trade.)
           Jack Porter, now 73, founded the
farm around 1950; he pioneered the organic side of the operation, too. Now the
whole extended family is involved. You can still find Jack running some of the
farm’s heavy equipment. He devotes a great deal of time to public
presentations, as well, like a recent one in Brighton with the Rochester Area
Vegetarian Society.
           The farm’s first organic field was
certified in 1990. A brochure shows the transition to organic methods was
largely a matter of philosophy — a commitment to grow and distribute
“wholesome, fresh, and safe food in a socially and environmentally responsible
fashion.”
           The farm is actually a collection of
contiguous farms the family acquired over the years. But — reflecting another
trend in agriculture today — the Porters also rent land miles from their home
base. Some of this acreage is located a bit further north in Orleans County,
where temperature-sensitive crops can thrive near the moderating influence of
Lake Ontario.
It’s certainly
unusual that the Porters are farming 500-plus acres organically. It’s remarkable, too,
that the Porters sell far and wide; some of their organic soybeans, for
example, have gone to Japan for tofu-making.
           But things might not fly so smoothly
without the CSA. Why? Basically, the CSA assures a stream of income. “People
pay us a set fee, $290 for 23 weeks” from late June to November, says Steve
Porter. In return, the customers/members get weekly deliveries of whatever the
farm is harvesting at the time. “Signing up for a full share entitles you to an
average 10-12 pounds of produce per week,” a Porter Farms brochure explains.
Two-dozen types of vegetables are in the mix. (The farm mixes a little animal
husbandry into its operations, too, apart from the CSA. There’s a small flock
of sheep — attested not only by the pens but by a mountain of
backpacker-tent-sized plastic bags, each stuffed with unsold wool.)
           The Porters make the deliveries
themselves. They don’t deliver to individual members’ addresses, however, but
to designated drop-off locations in Buffalo and Rochester and their respective
suburbs. The CSA began mostly with Buffalonians, says Steve Porter, but it’s
expanding eastward, especially in Monroe County. Last year, 200 households took
part, he says. That’s up from 100 in 1996, the first year of the “subscription
service,” as the brochure calls it.
           Many CSAs — like Wayne County’s
Peacework Organic Farm, associated with Genesee Valley Organic Community
Supported Agriculture — have a work requirement for membership. That is, they
ask you to come down to the farm a certain number of days or hours through the
season to pitch in with chores, planting, and harvesting. The requirement has a
basis in social philosophy: It gets people young and old to work together as
almost a larger “family.” It also teaches basic ecology and forges links, even
mutual dependencies, between rural and urban dwellers.
           The Porter CSA has no work
requirement, however. This feature, or lack of one, may attract people who are
testing the waters; or those whose interest in a CSA doesn’t go beyond having a
supply of first-rate food; or those who simply don’t have the time for trekking
out to the farm.
           Perinton resident Mark Sandler is
one veteran local member. He and his wife, Carrie Gaynor, run the Yoga Wellness
Center in Perinton and the city; the couple’s been connected to the CSA since
1997, and their home serves as a drop-off point. The CSA, says Sandler, “fits
well with us, because we’re interested in the health of the community.”
Scheduling plays a role, too: Sandler says he works six days a week with his
yoga group and thus doesn’t have any time to spare. Nonetheless, he has more
than a casual interest in the farm, though he says he’s never actually been
there. (The Porters say members are welcome to come out and visit.)
           One more local connection: The
Porters have occasionally given a hand — practical advice and some crops —
to Greater Rochester Urban Bounty, a project with a mini-farm and CSA in the
city’s northeast quadrant. GRUB’s specialty is bringing locally grown foods to
people in low-income neighborhoods.
As he gives a
tour of the farm, Steve Porter doesn’t dwell on attitude or economics. He talks
about land itself.
           “Not all farmland is created equal,”
he says. He explains that some of his fields have low, wet spots and other
features that moved previous owners to keep them out of production. But this
turned out to be a virtue. The fields that hadn’t been worked in many years
were free of synthetic chemical residues.
           Moreover, new methods — or rather,
truly traditional ones now enjoying a
renaissance — helped things along. Like crop rotation.
           Porter scans one field near his
barns. “When we plant this,” he says, “we’ll grow clover as a cover crop.” The
clover will be cut and baled and fed to the sheep, he says. That will produce
manure, which will be composted and spread. The clover has its own
“direct-distribution system,” too: Through nitrogen fixation, it draws natural
fertilizer from the air down into the soil. In due time, the field of clover
may be converted to vegetables. Or a grain like barley could pop up some year.
Here variety is more than a spice.
           Above all, the land isn’t stressed
by overproduction. “Vegetables are grown on only about 20 percent of our
ground,” says Porter.
           Rotations like these are as old as
the hills. But Porter says the method is less common than it used to be. He
points out that the famous Elba muckland — a zone of deep black soil from
former wetlands — produces bumper crops of onions year in and year out. But
the muckland farmers can do this, he says, only with intensive use of
synthetics to control pests and diseases that thrive in an unbroken
“monoculture.”
           Mike Porter makes an appearance, on
the run between the barns and some lambs that have slipped through a fence. He
does a reality check. “You can have all the social issues you want,” he says,
“but you have to make it as a business.” How about large-scale organic farming
in this respect? “You’re not going to find much of it where we live,” he says,
referring to Genesee County’s surfeit of large, highly mechanized operations.
           Brother Steve has another
perspective, though. He first acknowledges that organic farming isn’t all
gravy. For one thing, it’s labor-intensive. Rotations, non-chemical weed
control, planting, and tilling: all require many more days of work than some
“traditional” methods.
           But there’s a pay-off here, too.
           Steve recalls a conversation with a
fellow farmer. The man told him it’s a lot easier to do corn the modern
industrial way: plant, spray, sit back till harvest time. (The point was maybe
too reductive; every kind of farming requires lots of hard work.) Porter
answered that, yes, organic means more time on the tractor. But switching from
industrial to natural “inputs” — fertilizer, etc. — brings costs down. And
the crop can fetch two or three times the ordinary wholesale price.
           There’s more. Add in the direct
sales to CSA members, says Porter, “and you’re getting closer to a retail
dollar.” This, he says, is a better deal than even farmers’ markets. Yes, the
farmer gets the “retail dollar” at the farmstand. But sales there can plummet
when, for example, wet weather keeps customers home in front of the TV. That
sort of thing, says Porter, made his dad stop putting in time at farmstands
near Rochester.
           By contrast, the CSA is dependable.
Its contractual sales cover the whole growing season and give the farmer a
steady cash flow.
           Based on their success so far, the
Porters are now trying to take their CSA to the next level. They’ve just hired
a former New Hampshire couple, Kathy and Dave Rice, to manage the project.
           Kathy Rice seems pleased to be here.
“We can actually make a living and farm,” she says. Land in New Hampshire, she
says, was simply too expensive.
“I think
farming is the only business where you pay retail and sell wholesale,” says Pat
LaPoint, a community educator with the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Batavia
who has CSA experience herself. (She and her husband ran one south of Batavia
with 47 member households, “mostly teachers and their kids,” she says.)
           LaPoint speaks of global
developments, too. On a recent “farmer-to-farmer, women-to-women” visit to
Ukraine, she found popular resistance to a “mafia” that’s trying to take over
the food system. “In Kiev,” she says, “there are CSAs where farmers are taking
produce into the office buildings.”
           Why such wide interest? Most
farmers, says LaPoint, are forced to pay top dollar for the supplies and
equipment they need; then they must take whatever corporate food processors and
increasingly globalized markets are paying. Sometimes the payments don’t even
cover the costs of production.
           The financial calculus is
make-or-break for an area like Genesee County. And perhaps more so for a town
like Elba, where, according to LaPoint, a single farm is now the top employer.
The secondary ag economy is critical to the region, too. As LaPoint says,
Genesee County is “processing dominated,” with large frozen-foods plants in
Bergen and Oakfield.
           The official data for Genesee County
point in two directions, however. The county has some of New York State’s (and
maybe the world’s) best soils, but it experienced a loss of almost eight
percent of its total farmland between 1987 and 1997. But there’s a seemingly
contradictory trend: From 1987 to 1997, Genesee County’s harvested cropland increased almost 12 percent. A recent study from the New York State Department of
Agriculture and Markets attributes this increase to Genesee County’s
“agricultural economic successes.”
           But other numbers indicate that
consolidation is at work. Between 1992 and 1997, the number of Genesee County
farmers whose principal occupation was farming dropped from 334 to 300; the
total number of farms dropped likewise, from 545 to 516. (Nationally, between
1982 and 1997, the number of Americans whose principal occupation was farming
dropped from 1.2 million to 960,000.)
           Given these facts, where should a
farmer turn? As we’ve seem, CSAs have potential. But is there fertile ground in
the grocery store, or its modern equivalent?
           Steve Porter — who, incidentally,
sits on the board of the Santa Cruz-based Organic Farming Research Foundation
(www.ofrf.org) — is eyeing the produce departments of supermarket chains.
That would open up quite a customer base. Sometimes, he says, it’s possible for
a farmer to make a deal with an individual store. But chains like Tops, he
says, demand that farmers work through the company’s distributors, and that
puts the independent small farmer at a disadvantage.
           Buffalo-based Tops spokesperson
Stefanie Zakowicz says her company’s stores are already doing right by local
farmers. Throughout the local harvesting season, she says, Tops supermarkets
are stocked “100 percent” with New York State produce. The offerings, she says,
run from early crops like strawberries to late ones like squash. But she adds
that suppliers must be able to supply sufficient quantities and meet in-house
“quality standards.”
           There’s no meeting of the minds on
this point, obviously, and the Porters and Tops will probably keep to their
different paths. The chain’s direction is clear. According to a company
backgrounder, Tops began in the 1920s with a “small neighborhood grocery store”
in Niagara Falls. Today the chain, owned by Ahold, a Netherlands-based food
retail conglomerate, runs 159 supermarkets and 214 smaller stores in three
states.
           The Porters could easily have gone a
traditional route, too. Steve Porter says the family could have put more time
and land into the sheep operation instead of building up the CSA. But that
would have meant shearing a human connection. “My biggest worry when I got
started was how I was going to deal with 100-plus people,” he says.
           “But within a week I was hooked.”
For more
information: Porter Farms, PO Box 416, 5020 Edgerton Road, Elba, NY, 14058,
585-757-6823 or 757-2475.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2003.
