Purchased from Hodgson Farms at Wednesday’s Union Square Market.  Hodgson Farms has every color tulip imaginable:  a dozen for $7.00.  Find them at the market and buy some to brighten up your apartment or office!

Though there are still plenty of pears and apples to be purchased, a quick visit to Union Square Market also brought colors that I haven’t seen at the market for several months:  vibrant yellows and purples.

We’ve entered into that middle period that is March:  winter is slowly ending and spring is starting up.  I could feel a renewed sense of energy at the market and an excitement for what is to come!

Happy Marketing!

-Meaghin

My husband distinctly remembers his first interaction with DiPaola Turkey Farm. He was at the McCarren Greenmarket for our Garden of Eve CSA pick-up and wasn’t planning on buying anything turkey related. It was a freezing, raining Saturday morning and most people just wanted to get through the day as quickly as possible.  He stopped by DiPaola’s tent for a quick look and the farmers were so welcoming and gregarious that my husband returned home with several pounds of turkey links.

Many market-goers will quickly tell you about how friendly DiPaola Turkey Farms is and how well they treat their birds.  The positive comments led me to seek out DiPaola Farms for a one-on-one interview.  On a frigid day in late January, I chatted with Dan Deleo, husband to one of the DiPaola cousins.  The cold didn’t seem to have any visible effect on his friendliness.  Despite the chill, we ended up talking for more than an hour.  DiPaola’s market and business philosophy can be summed up by this statement by Deleo: “If my customers are happy, I’m happy”.

Deleo became involved with the family farm in 2002 after being layed off from his job in customer relations.  DiPaola Turkey Farm was started in 1948 by the father of the current owner, Art DiPaola.  After the war, Art’s father worked as a potter and decided to buy a piece of property in Hamilton Township, NJ.  This 5-acre piece of property became DiPaola Turkey Farm.

The number of turkeys raised on the farm varies by season. The lead-up to Thanksgiving is considered “in season”, when they’ll raise about 15,000 birds.  It takes the turkeys 10-14 weeks to reach an average market weight of 12 pounds. The turkeys are your classic domestic large breasted white turkey, and have access to food (primarily soy and corn) and water at all times.  The birds are quite capable of walking around (unlike the reports one can read about confined birds being unable to move) and go outside to “peck around” daily.  “You can hear them all hours of the day and night clucking!” says Deleo.

Because DiPaola is a small, well-regulated farm, the turkeys are raised on the property from birth to death, with all of the processing done on-site.  Dan Deleo works on that processing line, as the grinder.  In one day, he can grind anywhere between 3,000 pounds and 7,000 pounds of meat.  “When [customers] ask me about the ground meat, I know what goes into it.”

After I heard Dan’s market day schedule, his friendliness and knowledge base became all the more impressive and humbling.  He gets to the farm at 4:20 a.m to load the truck.  He arrives at Union Square Greenmarket around 6:20 to set up and he starts breaking down the stand around 6:00 pm (“unless I sell out”, he adds).  He’ll get back to his house around 9:00 pm, only to wake up at 4:00 to start the cycle over for the Saturday market. “I just do it—I don’t know,” says Deleo with a shrug.  In addition to working at the farm (and his exhausting hours), Deleo is also back in school, studying marketing and finance.  I spotted a textbook near the cash register which he was planning on reading when things were slower.

The long hours don’t put a damper on Dan’s firm belief in the value of treating his customers with warmth and respect.  Deleo compared buying a product at a farmers’ market to trying to buy a car.  “What makes me crazy as a car buyer is to deal with a salesman who [doesn’t] know squat about the car,” he says. “I made a point to try and learn everything about our product.”  Dan recognizes that if he treats a customer poorly at the market, they may just walk right by next time and head to the heated Whole Foods.  DiPaola Farms recognizes that in everyone’s busy day-to-day lives, there’s real value in the customer connecting with a warm and friendly person.

—————————

Q: How do you determine the price of your turkeys?

Dan Deleo: “Feed—feed prices are driven by the price of fuel.  When the price of diesel spikes, the price of feed goes up.  A fuel surcharge…drives your price structure.  The feed is from a company in Pennsylvania.  Art [DiPaola] is very specific with his feed:  no growth hormones, no antibiotics; at times he’ll pay more money to get what he’s looking for.”

Q: What is your favorite way to prepare turkey?

D.D.: “I have access to all of these products, but the only thing I bring home are thighs.  If you ever come to my house, I pound them into cutlets and serve them up.”

Q: What is the best part about selling at a farmers’ market?

D.D.: “I really enjoy this; it’s the most fun job I’ve ever had…in my entire life…because you get to deal with people.  I worked in New York City for IBM and I was one of the 21 million people who commuted here but I had no concept that people actually lived here.  The coolest thing with the market is that you’re dealing with people who live here.  This is their park.  Getting to know people on that level versus breezing by them on a subway station is really interesting.  You also deal with the farmers.  If you were to interview each one of these people, everyone’s got a story.”

—————————

Where to Buy: 13 markets this season, with an additional 2 in the warmer months

Farm Address: 883 Edinburg Road Hamilton Township, New Jersey 08690

In May, I’ll be visiting the farm to see the newborn chicks and get a better idea of how the farm operates.  I’ll be sharing many pictures and a brief write-up after that visit.

Happy Marketing!

-Meaghin

Samascott Orchards is one of the Greenmarket ‘originals’, selling at the NYC Greenmarkets since its opening in 1978.  A working farm since the early 1900s, Samascott Orchards demonstrates an understanding of its customers and an ability to change with the times, while maintaining a seasonal connection to the land.  Today, the orchards are a third generation family-run farm, with the entire Samascott family working together.

Last week, I had a chance to talk with Jake Samascott, head owner Gary Samascott’s son, while we were both huddled near a heater at the Union Square Market.

Jake’s grandfather helped turn Samascott Orchards into what it is today.  The land was originally used for both a dairy farm and orchards, before Jake’s grandfather decided to focus solely on the orchards.   In forty years, the orchards have gone from selling five varieties of apples to over sixty!

Apples are Samascott’s biggest crop, taking up 100 acres of the 1,000 acre farm.  But there’s no need to feel too overwhelmed:  all 60 varieties never make an appearance at the market at once. Instead, the Samascotts rotate varieties in and out depending on the time of year.  The varieties that you’ve seen during these chilly winter months will be here throughout the rest of winter.  These apples were harvested in the late Fall and are put in cold storage throughout the winter to preserve their freshness.

Samascott Orchards “does a little bit of everything… blueberries, sweet and sour cherries, strawberries, lots of vegetables [like] tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn”. The first new produce of 2010 will be May’s asparagus.  Besides apples, there are many other fruits and vegetables to choose from including potatoes, pears, and butternut squash.  For a complete list of what Samascott sells, check out their website and What is Fresh’s list.

Samascott has diversified from a relatively small orchard when it first began to a large multi-crop producing farm, with plans to continue to diversify (beef and eggs could be future additions to their market stand!) While Jake didn’t use the word ‘biodynamic’ to describe the farm and orchards, the orchard clearly recognizes the relationship between soil, plants, and animals.  They use animals for fertilizer and they try to limit spraying their crops as much as they can.  “A lot of the vegetables we can get away with not spraying too much; we try to keep things as natural as possible.”  

No farm is immune to the unpredictability of nature.  Jake told me that in the past few years, “there have been some pretty bad hail storms where all the apple trees got cut and sliced and then the apples weren’t very ‘marketable’”.  When asked how the orchard handled the situation, he explained that they picked through the crop and focused on reassuring the customers that the taste was the same.  “The benefit of being at a market is that you can explain to [customers] why an apple looks the way it does.  Once they taste them, we sell them.”

————————-

Q: Can you offer advice on how to select an apple (or any product with multiple options), if a customer is overwhelmed by the selection?

Jake Samascott: “[It] depends on what the customer is looking for; a lot of people will spend a lot of time reading all of the descriptions.  They’ll ask what’s good for baking.  Some people want a soft apple; some people want a sweet apple.… A lot of people aren’t aware that there are this many red apples.   A lot of people try different varieties each week.”

Q: With the increasing focus on single crop mega-farms and government subsidies, what is the future of family farms?

J.S.: “We do a lot of pick your own and get a lot of local people coming in to pick.  The best way to sustain the farm is catering to the local community and [being at] the market.  For sustainable agriculture it’s really hard to grow just one crop—you’ve really got to diversify and have some animals and manure and keep everything in a system…cows, goats, chickens.”

Q: What is the best part about selling at farmers’ markets?

J.S.: “Seeing all the people; it’s good to talk to them.  People like to know where their food is coming from:  I can explain it better and show them what it is and where it came from.”

Q: It’s been said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking in their fridge and on their bookshelf. So, what’s in your fridge and what’s on your bookshelf?

J.S.: “Not much…I’m not home very often!  I’m in New York City a couple days a week.  [I’m reading] ‘Food Inc’; I’m almost done w/the book and will have to check out the movie:  it’s interesting to see what other people are learning about.”

————————

When and Where: Click HERE for their Market Schedule;  Beth’s Farm Kitchen’s jam

Restaurants: Gramercy Tavern, Blue Hill, Union Square Café, Craft (to name a few)

Farm Address: 5 Sunset Avenue  Kinderhook, NY 12106

Happy Marketing!

-Meaghin