You grew up in a typical suburban environment in New Jersey but ended up going to a high school where farming was an integral part of your education. You eventually went on to study sustainable agriculture in college and pursue a career in farming and education. Can you talk about those early experiences and how they impacted your career decisions?
As a young kid in the suburbs of New Jersey I had no exposure to agriculture, but my mom had a brilliant green thumb and a beautiful perennial garden that she tended meticulously. On the weekends she would work in the garden and I would haul debris down to the curb for pickup. I thought it was normal that you put your plant prunings and weeds out in the street to be carted away.
Fast forward just a few years and I was spending my summers helping family friends tend their prolific vegetable garden in Pennsylvania, and the school year in Connecticut at a boarding school where the compost bin was the first step in clearing your plate after each meal in the dining hall. The 287-acre farm that the school owned and operated was providing a significant amount of produce to the dining hall, and being a member of the “farm team” was coveted by many students. Although I was never a part of the farm team, my world was opening because I was finally beginning to see first hand how it was all connected.
You took over as Farm Manager at Hilltop Hanover Farm in Yorktown Heights just a few years ago right at the start of Covid. After living in several different places around the country, working in varying types of farm settings, what led you to this area and specifically to the opportunity at the farm?
In my line of work we talk about the farming bug, and I was bitten pretty early on. I wanted to soak up all the knowledge and experience that I could, which meant trying on lots of styles of farming in different geographical locations. I have farmed all over the country, from driving self-guided tractors on a thousand-acre organic grain and hemp farm in upstate New York, to a handscale urban farm surrounded by factories in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, to growing custom crops and microgreens for chefs in Malibu and West Hollywood. I loved the sentiment of the nonprofit farms I worked for with focuses on social justice, solving food insecurity, and creating community, but I also loved the bustle and pace of production farms committed to quality and efficiency.
In coming to Hilltop Hanover, I wanted to keep farming but with a production mindset at a nonprofit farm. I found that private production farms were too singularly-focused and rigid, without a lot of community, and less personal impact; and that most non-profit farms operate more as demonstrations, not productions. I also have a background in education, so my ideal non-profit production farm would have a focus on education, and HIlltop Hanover Farm is the meeting of those things. Plus, the farm is close to many of my family and friends in New York City and COVID made us all prioritize what people it was important to spend time with, so it felt like a homecoming.
Hilltop Hanover Farm is unique and special for many reasons - one is that it is almost entirely run by women. You told me that was not intentional, that it just happened that way. What does it mean to you to manage a team of women farmers and why do you think women are not more generally drawn to the field of farming?
I think women are naturally drawn to farming, because of the mothering, nurturing capacity many women embody, but it’s such a male-dominated profession that it’s hard to find your way in, and if you’re not willing to fight for it, you can be pushed out. When I started farming I loved machines and mechanics and I really wanted to learn how to operate large machinery. That role is stereotypically held by men, and time and time again men around me were chosen for those positions and women are relegated to stereotypically female roles, like washing and packing produce, staffing a farm store, doing administrative work.
What it means to me is to very purposefully create a safe space for female-bodied people to find a work environment where they are able to try the skills they want to learn, and feel empowered to ask to learn the things they’re interested in – like using power tools, driving large tractors, and fixing tools and machines – because they see another woman doing it with confidence who is willing and able to share in that responsibility.
The farm is nine acres but has one of the largest native plant programs in the east coast region - can you share a little about that program and how it came to be? Why is it so important that we cultivate native seeds and plants?
I was awakened to the idea that, as a culture, we have become focused on gardening in a way that excludes wildlife: we work really hard to seek deer-resistant plants, for example. So what I was re-awakened to, and it makes sense, is that wonderful landscaping should invite wildlife in, to a degree; that a garden with lots of birds, bees, pollinators, and small animals passing through is in service to more than just myself. We know that certain plants, like some roses, have been bred to a point where it's hard for pollinators to actually feed from their flowers: they’ve been bred for beauty, not to support pollinators and other wildlife. When you plant natives, you’re planting food for very specific species of insects and pollinators who are the foundation of our entire ecosystem, and are essential to our entire food system.
A few years ago, the
Rusticus Garden Club provided grant funding to help start the Native Plants program, and since that time, the program has grown astronomically due to the demand (and lack of supply) of specifically local ecotype seed propagated plants. Now, I’m lucky to work alongside a team of women who work very closely on this at the farm, and my involvement is to help them to scale up quickly using many of our practiced agricultural practices and mechanized techniques to be able to plant, weed, and ultimately produce seed and plants, at scale, with less labor stress on the team. All of this is happening inside the nine acres of growing fields, which, just four years back, was exclusively for food production. My favorite thing is seeing the different pops of vibrant colors among the crops and the pollinators buzzing busily on both native plants and vegetable plants.
As we toured the farm together, you shared with me that you experienced a deep loss when you were younger and that there was something about being close to the land - witnessing the natural cycle of life, death and rebirth of plants that you found comforting at the time. How has your relationship to the land and farming served you overtime and how have you seen it help others?
Farming brings out a deep softness and a deep hardness in you; it’s not either/or, and it can change from moment to moment, but farming vegetables can be quite unpredictable, just like life. We have a saying in farming, that once you’ve farmed on a piece of land, the course of the land will forever be changed, which is a very powerful truth to know. But it has an irrevocable effect on the course of your life and your being, too.
We’re coming up on the anniversary of my dear friend Trudi’s inexplicable, unexpected passing that shook me so long ago. With farming annuals like vegetables, you see that cycle of birth and death and success and failure, quite literally, every single year. It’s the same with people. Losses can happen unexpectedly, quickly, for no reason of your own doing, and so can successes. While you’re dedicating your life and your soul force energy towards this thing wholeheartedly, many things are still out of your control. Some things have nothing to do with anything, they just are, and you have to accept that. Any interaction you have with people will have an effect on both you and on them, and that’s true for working with the land, too. Working with land brings into focus the naturalness of such a process, and having regular exposure to the reality of life helped me really become friends with that process in all parts of my life. There is always coming and going.
I know so many people who've come into farming at different stages of their lives, and when I’ve asked them, “why now?” few people have a good, clear, tangible or constructed or planned answer. It’s something that comes to you as you come to it, and you enter into a relationship with farming knowing that it’s going to take a lot from you, but it’s going to give a lot, as well. I think people come and go from it in their lives and careers because we confront these realities constantly and yearly. It gives this massive dose of perspective: humbling, uplifting, connecting.
We talked about regenerative farming and how it’s not so “new” or “cutting edge” but in your opinion it is really the only way to farm that makes sense. Can you expand on that and offer some advice to others who may grow plants or have home gardens on a smaller scale and how they can adopt some of the same principles of regenerative farming?
Before big, industrial agriculture, and cheap and refrigerated transportation, farmers and communities grew for themselves what they needed to eat, which meant a wide diversity of crops and grains. Because their subsistence relied on taking care of the (usually smaller) amount of land they did have access to, they were really in tune with any environmental changes, but also the changes and impacts they were having on land and growing conditions. So to me, regenerative farming means to grow a wide diversity of crops, and know that some will do better than others, some years will be better than others, especially as things (the climate) continue to change. When things were done on a small scale, you could pay attention to every single plant you grew in a day or a week via a field walk – now, on big farms I’ve worked on, we used drones or ATVs to assess crop health because we couldn’t literally get to all of them.
My advice would be to learn about the land that you have by observing it. Get a wildflower and grass ID book and let part of your land “go”, see what comes up, and learn to identify the plants. To learn about your soil by identifying plants in your surroundings. To become more in tune with your surroundings so you can observe longer-term changes to them. My pleasure in gardening – I have a perennial garden and native garden at home – is in seeing those types of plants thriving, and noticing what’s not doing so well. A combined benefit and drawback of big agriculture is the prescriptive approach to soils. I prefer the observational approach: plants are telling us so much about weather, soil, sunlight, and day length, so in my garden, I prefer to learn about my land through keen and intentional observation. Gardening is about healing, and is more holistic than taking a soil sample, sending it off for analysis, and receiving a soil prescription to apply ‘x’ amount of ‘y’ to it.
Another unique aspect of Hilltop Hanover Farm is its food donation program which partners with local food pantries, food banks and community centers to fight food insecurity in our area. Whereas some farms may donate around 10% of food waste, Hilltop Hanover Farm is able to donate closer to 20-25% of its produce each year. Part of what makes that possible is the efficiency in which you run the farm. What makes that possible and why is it so important to your success?
Food has really been this invisible thread that connects all of my life experiences, and I’m aware of that because I’m in the food production industry. I’ve never lost gratitude for each and every vegetable and piece of food I've grown and gotten to eat, and I know there are people without, so when I look at plants, I see food. An apple tree on the side of the road, a pumpkin (winter squash) on a doorstep, a cucumber: food.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, food is central to everyone’s story, so it’s really important to me that no food goes to waste. This means partnering with a wide range of organizations, some that are looking for harvested-that-day, ultrafresh donations of produce, and some that specialize in taking ugly or damaged produce and turning it into top-quality recipes for distribution. We have a special partnership with
Second Chance Foods, where they coordinate a group of volunteer gleaners every Monday through the harvest season to harvest what we don’t.
Also, there’s this misconception that farming is weather dependent. In reality, we’re very scheduled and regimented, and with the exception of lighting, we work regardless of the weather on the scheduled task for the day so we don’t fall behind and so crops thrive. This means harvesting four times per week (3 by the crew, 1 by gleaners) so no food goes past its prime before it’s harvested.
Everyone who works here, and everyone who contributes to the farm, understands the importance of sharing high quality, dignified produce with community members experiencing food insecurity. When we set our yearly goal of how many pounds we would like to harvest, it incorporates all the vegetables we produce, not just the food we intend to sell. This means that every crop is precious, moving us closer to our goal. I set the cultural expectation around the idea that something is still food even if it’s damaged, and just because we won’t sell it, someone else can use it. Everyone knows that there's an expectation across all areas of the farm that we will use all the food here, and the culture is set early on that if it’s food, it needs to go to someone somehow. Finding the right match for each and every vegetable, not composting a broken carrot, and using that word, food, helps everyone understand. “Produce” is too distant. It’s a reminder: it’s all food.
You were a collegiate hockey player, have there been any lessons from that experience that you find yourself drawing upon as a manager of a team of women today?
One thing that was always ingrained in me in school is that you represent the team wherever you go in the world and in life, and that’s especially true in this tight-knit group of county farmers, growers, activists, food people, climate activists, and more, so it’s really important that I share just how proud I am to be a part of the team with my team. And also pass along constantly the compliments and feedback that I get to be the recipient of on behalf of the whole team – people writing into us, seeing people at a spoon carving who say the farm looks great – I make sure it all comes back to the team here.
Also, I've learned that the team is beyond the personnel and the boundaries of the farm as we become very connected with organizations that have a similar ethos about them –
LMNOP Bakery and
Chaseholm Farm are two examples. We support them fully, they support us fully, and we’re starting to find ‘our people’ outside our insular team, and starting to expand our concentric circles of network, family, team with other organizations, people and farms that get it.
I was really close with my hockey team, naturally, but ultimately my closest friends were on the women’s soccer and lacrosse teams. It taught me that if you keep to your team, you’ll look up into the stands and no one’s there; but if you build these networks across teams and support others, you’ll look up in the stands and the loudest people in the arena are all your friends, the women supporting women.
Can you share a little more about how the Friends of Hilltop Hanover Farm works with the County of Westchester to run the Farm and Environmental Center? How exactly does that public-private partnership work and what advice would you give to others who run similar organizations?
The partnership has been shifting for many years trying to find its footing. At the start of 2023, the county stepped up to take responsibility for the many staff members who work here and a significant amount of operational costs. As our Friends group continues to gain momentum, they are settling into fundraising, networking, and vision-making. It feels like both entities are finally operating at full throttle, and that makes for a very robust partnership together with fewer and fewer holes in the overall system of the organization because both sides are stepping up and stepping into more mature roles. We’ve been in transition for as long as I’ve been here, and I like to think that we are going to continue our ambitious growth and movement forward with more predictability and consistency on an organizational level from both sides with clearer expectations.
The beauty of having two entities in partnership is that they don’t have to have the exact same mission or work, which is beautiful because everyone can identify where their strengths and passions are, and together it makes for a greater sum than the parts. To others running these types of operations, I’d say it takes a lot of self-reflection on the part of each individual and organization to say, “what can each of us bring to the table, and what shared goals do we have?”
Hilltop Hanover Farm is so much more than a place that grows plants and produce, there is an educational component, public programs, volunteer opportunities and much more. What energizes you most about your role at the farm and what are you most excited about in the future?
You never know who is going to walk through the gates of the farm at any moment. I’ve worked at many farms that are tucked away and totally private, and that lends itself to really focused production, but is not always a welcoming environment for creating community and inviting people to come exercise their curiosity. So I’m very energized by all the people: I’ve been working here for three years and I’m still consistently hearing, “I’ve been driving by for years and have never stopped in” from new customers! There are so many people waiting for an opportunity to come, who somewhat know about the farm, so keeping the gates open is so important.
For the future: we are doing a good job of regenerative annual crop farming, and I'd like to see us practice even further climate resilient techniques like integrated fruit and nut trees for shade and soil retention, and to keep expanding our edible offerings. Also, expanded palate and sources of protein and calories from what’s given to us, like more sweetness from certain plants, and more calories and protein from nuts, to support a fuller diet and expanded dietary options.
Lightening Round:
Favorite thing about living in our area:
Living in a log cabin on a quiet dirt road, knowing that I can travel to the city conveniently to visit with friends and family. Best of both worlds!
If you weren’t on the farm where would you be?
Splitting and stacking firewood.
Most favorite dish you’ve eaten cooked with produce from the farm?
Georgia Candy Roaster winter squash, roasted with butter and salt!
One thing you’d like to grow on the farm that you haven’t been able to yet?
Artichoke.
What would you do with one extra hour each day?
Learn how to build wooden furniture using only hand tools.
