Did you know that the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture also hosts a farmers’ market? 

After seeing and experiencing what is grown and raised at Stone Barns, on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays starting on May 1^st, you can purchase fresh fruit and vegetables that were recently harvested on the property:  it’s like taking a little piece of Stone Barns with you to enjoy at home.   In addition to products grown at Stone Barns, the farmers’ market will feature several other farmers and outside vendors.

* Vendors are to be determined, so check back here and on our Main Market Page for a final list soon. *

During the winter season, Stone Barns has a once-a-week farmers’ market.  The final off-season market is scheduled for April 18^th.

Summer Market Schedule

Friday: Dooryard Garden: 1-2 PM for members at the Seedling level and above; 2-4 PM for the general public.

Saturday: Courtyard: 1-4 PM for the general public

Sunday: Dooryard Garden: 1-2 PM for members at the Seedling level and above; 2-4 PM for the general public.

Items being sold will include most of the following:

·  A wide variety of pastured meats (lamb, chicken, cuts of pork, sausages, eggs, and grassfed beef)

·  Fresh produce from the farm

·  Dried and fresh herbs and cut flowers.

*Check back here and on our Main Market Page for a complete list soon.*

Spring Plant Sale

When: Sunday, May 9, 16, 23 and 30 from 1-4 PM.

What: The farmers at Stone Barns will be selling a wide range of plants from their greenhouse.  These plants, including peppers, herbs, and tomatoes, are perfect for transplanting into home gardens (or window boxes, pots, etc).

Mother’s Day at Stone Barns

The May 9^th Farmers’ Market takes place on Mother’s Day. Stone Barns has planned a selection of fun activities for families to help them celebrate the special day.  Activities include ‘pick-you-own eggs’ and sheep moving demonstrations.

See the full schedule here, as some of the programs require pre-registration!

To close off our Stone Barns Series, we want to encourage you to plan a visit to beautiful Tarrytown and Pocantico Hills! 

If you live in or around Manhattan, Tarrytown and Pocantico Hills(home to Stone Barns) is a 40 minute train ride from Grand Central Station—snag a window seat for stunning views of the Hudson Valley.

You could make a day of it…or if you really want to relax…spend the weekend!  Downtown Tarrytown is close to Lyndhurst, Sunnyside, and Kykuit.  Downtown Tarrytown features fun spots for a bite to eat or drink including Coffee Labs, Horse Feathers, Lubins and Links, and Main Street Sweets.

Happy Marketing!

-Meaghin

The pigs at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture truly live the “good life”.  They play, eat, and rest in the woods, taking advantage of both the shade and the mud.  The Berkshire pigs we saw on our “Insiders’ Tour” were happy creatures; in rest they seemed content, and those who were awake had no qualms greeting us or playing with each other.

Stone Barns raises Berkshire Pigs.  By the time of slaughter, after 5 and ½ months, the pigs weigh about 280 pounds.  Berkshire pigs are known to be fantastic pigs for smaller farms:  they are hardy and do well in outdoor environments.  Berkshire pork is lauded for its flavorful, juicy dark meat.  Many restaurants in NYC have caught on to the power of its flavor, including Momofuku with its infamous pork buns, and Union Square Café’s featured Berkshire pork lasagna.

Craig Haney, the head livestock farmer, took us all around the Stone Barns’ woods and then to the barn where the younger pigs were resting.  In the woods, there are 17 sows, divided among groups by portable electric fences.  Each group of pigs usually has a “boss sow”, who is inclined to dominate.  There is one boar, Bubba, who breeds with the sows year round, producing about 8-10 piglets per litter.

Some pig farms using farrowing crates and gestation crates during the sow’s pregnancy and the piglet’s infancy.  Craig Haney’s job is to ensure the each pig lives as natural a life as possible.  So, instead of choosing the location and bedding for the pregnant sow to lay on and eventually give birth, Haney steps back as the sows make their own farrrowing beds (farrowing means to give birth).  After the pig has made her bed, a hut is placed over her chosen bedding, at an angle, so that Craig can reach in and aid with the birth if necessary.

Piglets are only 1-2 lbs when they’re born; they are weaned at 8 weeks.  As is the case with natural birth, complications do sometimes arise from a prolonged labor.  Haney reports that a 10-15% loss is natural.

To learn more about Craig Haney, download this superb article from the University of Michigan

Coming up: The Stone Barns Farmers Market kicks off its warm weather season on May 1^st. Learn all of the details here!

Two weekends ago, the What is Fresh team visited the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.  Since then, we’ve been sharing highlights of our visit and helpful information in our Stone Barns series.  In our first post, we provided an overview and history of Stone Barns.  In our last post, we explored the plants Stone Barns grows, as well as the methods employed in their growing.

In this post, we will share pictures and information about the variety of animals Stone Barns raises.

Stone Barns’ Philosophy

Twenty-three acres of Stone Barns’ eighty acres are dedicated to pasture.  On first glance, this may seem like a large percentage of the land, but because Stone Barns raises each animal humanely, the twenty-three acres of land require much sophisticated juggling and planning.

Stone Barns raises all of their animals—Berkshire pigs, Rhode Island Red hens (both meat and layers), sheep, geese, turkeys, and bees—according to each animal’s “natural instincts”.  Thus, each animal exists in relation to the land and to each other, requiring much more space than if they were simply raised in a barn or feedlot.

Maintaining healthy animals is instrumental in cultivating a successful, thriving farm.  The methods Stone Barns employs, including rotational grazing, grass-feeding, and maintaining natural refuges for birds and wildlife, have yielded telling results.  Along with the lauded taste and noticeable contentment of the animals, Craig Haney, head livestock manager, reported that he couldn’t even remember the last time they had to use an antibiotic on a sick animal.

As we were touring the farm and getting an intimate look at Stone Barns’ animal welfare practices, it was apparent how much respect each worker has for the animals and for their daily lives.  Stone Barns clearly illustrates the ideal that Nicolette Niman, author of  Righteous Porkchop, espouses:

We owe our animals the highest level of existence.  They deserve to experience joy.  For me, factory farming is wrong not b/c it produces meat, but because it robs every animal of every shred of happiness 1

Rotational Grazing

From April until December, Craig Haney and the other farmers engage in the elaborate dance of rotational grazing.  Rotational grazing involves moving animals among several pastures, allowing each pasture to have a grazing period and a resting period.  This practice not only prevents soil erosion, it allows the animals to do what they do best:  work within their biology and (though they don’t know it) with each other. 

Standing near the pasture a few weekends ago, it was easy to picture that in a few more weeks, the grass will be about 6 inches long, primed and ready for sheep to wander the pasture and graze on the grass.   According to Rebecca Sherman, the Marketing and Communications Manager at Stone Barns, the sheep should be out to pasture by the end of April.  The exact date depends on both the grass and when the ewes are finished giving birth.

After the sheep eat the grass down, the pasture becomes home to the egg laying chickens (about 1,000 of them!), followed by the meat chickens, both of which eat bugs and grubs and spread manure.  Each kind of animal spends about two days in the pasture, fertilizing it with their own manure.  Turkeys join the rotation in the late summer, after their feathers have grown in and they are big enough to move quickly to protect themselves.  Finally, in the middle of December, the remaining animals are returned to the barn, and the pasture rests for the winter.

Maintaining a Smooth Operation

Despite Stone Barns’ bucolic image, the reality of life and death go hand in hand with the happily grazing and sleeping animals.  Because Stone Barns practices rotational grazing and believes in animals living in as natural a habitat as possible, the farmers are constantly monitoring the presence of predators.  The sheep are guarded by Stella, a 4 ½ year old Maremma sheep dog.  Stella has been with the sheep since she was a 10 week old puppy and guards the sheep against any outside threat.  Even as we were standing by the barn, Stella stood alert and ready to protect her flock.  The Stone Barns property has a constant coyote presence:  just last year, coyotes killed about 30 turkeys.

Beyond natural predators, it’s important to remember that the animals at Stone Barns are being raised to be eaten.  All poultry is processed on site, averaging to roughly 180 birds a week.  Due to USDA regulations, most of the sheep and pigs go to a processing facility in the Palisades.  Lately, there has been much discussion surrounding the lack of processing facilities for small farms.  It’s frustrating to the farmer that their ethically raised animals often have to travel many miles to be processed with other animals.  For more information on the shortage of local slaughtering facilities in New York, check out these articles in Edible Manhattan and The New York Times.

 Interesting Facts & Farm Vocabulary Words

I thought I’d share a few extra facts I learned, along with some new vocabulary words.

Sheep

At Stone Barns, sheep are divided between the yearlings and ewes.

Yearling = an animal one year old

Ewe = adult female sheep

The ewes had one of two colors on their backs:  blue and yellow.  The two colors signify which rams are the father. 

Pigs

Stone Barns has 17 sows, divided in groups throughout the woods.  There is one boar, Bubba, who breeds year round.  Each litter produces between 8 and 10 piglets. 

Shotes = piglets

Gilts = pigs greater than 100 pounds

Hogs = male pigs

Sows = pigs after their first litter

The typical slaughter weight is 280 pounds, reached at about 5 ½ months.

**The Annual Sheep Shearing is scheduled for April 24^th!  Please see Stone Barns’ site for more information!**

Next up:  A Closer Look at Berkshire Pigs with Livestock Manager, Craig Haney

Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“The mission of this unique, nonprofit, member-driven collaboration is to celebrate, teach and advance community-based food production and enjoyment, from farm to classroom to table.” — Stone Barns’ Mission Statement

While I can’t describe Stone Barns’ importance better than the above sentence, the value of Stone Barns goes beyond the “what” of the organization to the “how” of it. This installment of our Stone Barns series will explore the “how” by providing several examples of what life on a four season farm is like, as well as sharing several methods Stone Barns employs to produce healthy fruits and vegetables in a natural way.

The Stone Barns complex is set on 80 acres, 23 of which are used for pasture (more on that in a future post!).  Our tour took us to a slightly sloped hill, where each season, acres of food are planted, grown, and harvested.  Crops are planted in a different location each year, in order to promote healthy soil. 

Being at Stone Barns in late March meant that we were witnessing the exciting transition from late Winter to early Spring.  As Mike remarked, we could actually sense things growing; it really did feel like Spring vegetables were right around the corner.  From where we stood, we were able to look down to a terraced hill where cut flowers and herbs are grown and up to the many trellises of table grapes.  We watched a farmer in the process of planting parsnips, carrots, and summer squash.

The winter months allow Stone Barns to focus their harvesting in hoop houses (also known as high tunnels) and in the 22,000 square foot greenhouse.  We stood beside the remains of the winter hoop houses; some had been taken down voluntarily and some had come down with the last big snowstorm.  The hoop houses/high tunnels are able to generate a great deal of heat. Our tour guide, Nena Johnson, explained that for every layer of plastic put on top, the interior temperature is raised by 2 degrees.

The farmers and staff at Stone Barns don’t feel that the farm is at a deficit in the winter.  Winter is a time to experiment with hardy winter crops and embrace the flavors that result.  Ms. Johnson shared that Dan Barber thinks the carrots and spinach from the Stone Barns’ hoop houses are some of the sweetest he’s ever tasted, due to the starch to sugar conversion.

Like Polyface Farm and other farms that employ rotational grazing and have a symbiotic relationship to their land, Stone Barns considers themselves “beyond organic”.  They are a diversified farm and embrace nature’s tendencies, without using fertilizer, pesticides, or herbicides.

Example of their Methods

Nearly everything at Stone Barns is compostable!  They make their own compost out of vegetable scraps, kitchen waste, compostable plates (such as what we ate from at the Blue Hill Cafe), and dried kelp. Because Stone Barns doesn’t use artificial fertilizers, the compost at Stone Barns is one of the most important aspects of the entire operation. 

The compost is first placed in large piles so that it can break down.  One compost pile is composed of leaves, grass clippings, and livestock manure:  this will go to the vegetable fields and greenhouse, and for sale to the public.  The second compost pile is made from post consumer materials and animal waste: this is used for pastures, fields, and landscaping.  The compost is spread into long tunnel-like shapes, where a machine blends the mixture, killing any bacteria.

Joel Salatin was quoted in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma as saying: “Transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than regulation or technology”.  Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is “fine without the organic label”, shares Nena Johnson, because everything at the Center is completely transparent. 

One of the farming methods that Stone Barns employs is companion planting, a process in which each crop is planted in terms of its relation to the soil and other plants.  Our tour guide provided a quick example of companion planting: The Corn, Bean, and Squash Method.

Corn has a tendency to strip soil of its nitrogen, but it provides a pole for bean vines to climb. These beans are able to fix nitrogen on their roots as well as help stabilize the corn plants. Squash vines shade weeds and help the soil maintain its moisture. 

Another quick example of companion planting that Stone Barns uses is planting marigolds with tomato plants.  Marigolds help ward off flies, nematodes, and even mice, perhaps because of the smell they emanate.

Coming up Next!

Learn more about rotational grazing and the many roles animals play at Stone Barns.