At its annual Harvest Hoedown last month, the first since before the COVID pandemic, the Rondout Valley Growers’ Association (RVGA) celebrated its 20th year as an established organization. “It was 45 degrees and raining, but about 150 people turned out,” says Matthew Igoe, who now serves as RVGA’s executive director after about five years as a board member.
What was to become RVGA actually took form in 2001 as a glimmer in the eye of Bruce Davenport and Fabia Wargin – “a Marbletown-based taskforce of two,” in Davenport’s words. “Our mission was help to keep farmland in production by helping to keep it profitable.”
Igoe takes up the historical thread: “It started out as a marketing organization. A town supervisor once told me, ‘Bruce Davenport came in and asked for a thousand dollars from each town, saying that if you give us this now, you’ll never hear from us again.’”
In the not-for-profit world, that sort of initial investment is called seed money, and never was there a more appropriate use of the term. RVGA’s founding attracted the attention of the Open Space Institute, American Farmland Trust, Scenic Hudson and various foundations that were interested in the issue of farmland preservation. As RVGA began reaching out to a broader community with the intent of connecting farmers with consumers, partnerships quickly developed with such entities as Cornell Cooperative Extension, several school districts, Family and a variety of food pantries. In 2013, ten years after RVGA’s founding, another puzzle piece fell into place, as Peter Buffett’s NoVo Foundation bought the former Gill Farms in Hurley and made it the headquarters for the Farm Hub, a frequent collaborator with RVGA.
Legislative advocacy on behalf of farmers was a major concern during the organization’s formative years, along with brainstorming ways to help them resist pressure to sell their land to developers. Land preservation strategies such as agricultural easements and purchase of development rights were a new language to farmers 20 years ago. From 2012 to 2017, RVGA’s executive director was Deborah Meyer DeWan, a powerhouse environmentalist with decades of lobbying experience in Albany who had helped shepherd the organization’s formation. “In the early days there was a lot of focus on intergenerational farm transfer and on farm policy. Deborah was very good at that,” says Igoe.
Nowadays, however, new blood is moving into the farming sector in the Hudson Valley – especially since the pandemic. Of RVGA’s nearly 100 members, a surprising (and growing) number are young hipster entrepreneurs who fled New York City to get “back to the land.” They’re investing in niche products such as microgreens and gourmet mushrooms, rather than the area’s traditional crops such as corn and apples. “Legacy farmers” – the descendants of families who have been farming in the region for decades or even centuries – are also adapting rapidly to the latest challenges of what has always been a difficult way of earning one’s living.
Keeping their land in agricultural production is no longer the key issue for most farmers; it’s diversifying their income streams to build in a cushion against inevitable setbacks such as a crop lost to a late spring freeze or a summer with record heavy rainfall. Agritourism offerings such as pick-your-own operations, corn mazes, petting zoos, hayrides and scarecrow dioramas are part of this complex picture. So are farmstands, CSA memberships and booths at weekend farmers’ markets. More and more farms are hosting day camps and marketing themselves as wedding venues. Farm-based manufacture and sales of hard cider, craft beer, wine and spirits are booming since New York State finally overturned remnants of Prohibition Era legal restrictions. The family farm that does only one thing is pretty much a phenomenon of the past.
So it was that the priorities of RVGA shifted away from advocacy and toward building connections, constituencies and markets for local farm produce. Its four keystone programs are called Farm-to-Food Pantry, Farm-to-School, Farmer-to-Farmer and Farm-to-Community. The Farm-to-Food Pantry program has transferred at least a million pounds of donated and gleaned produce to the hungry via soup kitchens and food pantries. It became especially important during the pandemic, when restaurants weren’t buying produce and farmers were faced with food rotting in their fields, while families dependent on school lunch programs couldn’t afford to feed their kids.
Meanwhile, just as COVID arrived on the scene, RVGA was experiencing a “blip,” in Igoe’s words, with the departure of an executive director, the death of a key staff member and a financial crisis. “We had no executive director for two years and had to rethink. We decided to stick to our core competencies and peeled off what other people could do better than us…. We found out that we’re a farm-to-community organization.”
Part of how that manifests these days is a microgrant program, through which RVGA members can get matching funds for capacity-building innovations and improvements to their facilities. A scholarship fund for local students studying agriculture that had gone dormant is now being revived, thanks to a bequest from the recently deceased Charles Noble, founder of Movable Beast Farm.
The biggest push for RVGA these days is cultivating relationships with schools. This past winter, for the first time, it hired a part-time coordinator to run and expand its Farm-to-School programs. “We never had funding for it before,” Igoe says. RVGA’s pilot program with the Rondout Valley Central School District is currently on hiatus while the district figures out how to restructure its cafeteria program, but outreach to other school systems is growing – including urban “food deserts” where “a lot of these kids have never been to a farmers’ market,” in Igoe’s words. There are now “share table” programs in Highland, Ellenville and Kingston.
At the Fall Market at George Washington Elementary School in Kingston, for example, “A farmer comes for the whole day and lets the kids sample fresh locally grown foods. RVGA buys 400 bags and fills each one with local produce for the kids to take home. They give each a kid a ‘gold’ coin to spend for the bag of food, to establish the idea that ‘Someone grew this and it has value.’ The transaction sits in their brain, so there’s this ‘virtuous cycle’ going on,” Igoe explains. “It changes the dialogue.”
The newest frontier of RVGA’s relationship with the school districts is supplying local produce for preparing cafeteria meals. It recently became an approved vendor to the Kingston Consolidated School District. Strict school budgets and buying protocols tend to militate against local sourcing of ingredients, so the organization has set up what Igoe calls a “delta” arrangement: Using grant funding, it subsidizes the gap between what a family farmer needs to charge and what a school district buyer is allowed to spend. “Let’s say, for kale, the school can pay $16 per case and the farmer needs $30 a case. We’re covering the difference.”
In future, RVGA hopes that such investments will pay off by creating new supply-chain structures that prioritize fresh local food for schoolchildren. “What we’re trying to do is create relationships. If we work with food directors, maybe we can establish a little more stability in the system – more predictability in how much of a particular crop a farmer needs to plant.”
For all its successes, the Rondout Valley Growers’ Association depends largely on volunteer labor and donations. To learn how you can help, visit https://rondoutvalleygrowers.org.
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