
The farmstand at Foxtrot Flower Farm in Stanfordville is closed up for the winter.
Kate Farrar
The farmstand at Foxtrot Flower Farm in Stanfordville is closed up for the winter.
Signing up for a CSA is one of the most effective ways to support small farms and help community agriculture thrive
STANFORD — International CSA Day is Thursday, Feb. 22! So what is a CSA, and why should you sign up for one?.
Like any good idea or innovation, the CSA (community supported agriculture) model was created out of a vast shared need: the economic survival of small farms and farmers.
A CSA is a subscription service. You subscribe to a local farm’s CSA for a fixed cost, and the farm regularly provides you with its produce and/or products for a set period of the year.
The concept is that local customers invest in a farm when the farm needs it most: up front, before a farmer has any produce to show for themselves or with their investors.
Without the CSA model, farmers work, pay and invest back into the farm year-round but only make their income seasonally.
I founded Foxtrot Farm & Flowers in Stanfordville three years ago, after working for eight years in agriculture. I built Foxtrot around a CSA model because in my experience it’s financially effective, time efficient, and most rewarding for a farm of my scale to sell directly to their community, building relationships over the years.
A year on the farm
At Foxtrot, the year of expenditures on the new crop begins now, in mid-February, when I begin to sow, tend to and heat — with propane — this year’s crop.
Apart from the CSAs, my income doesn’t start to trickle in until the blooming of narcissus and tulips in April, followed by a small seedling sale in early May. Then there is a gap during heavy planting season until around mid-June, when my annual and perennial flowers start to bloom.
Come July, August and September, I’m hustling, harvesting for retail and wholesale outlets, designing flowers for weddings and special events. Money is coming in and I feel buoyed, but come mid-October, reminders of frost are just around the corner.
When the frost hits, so does the financial crash: the flowers burned and browned, and the cyclical crunch season begins again.
A little economic boost comes around the holidays with wreath sales and the like, but so do the holiday expenses, so it just about evens out. The bank account that I felt accomplished and proud of in November starts to look less shiny come January, after three months of — hopefully — paying myself a wage, without income.
Come January and February, I’m ordering seeds and supplies for the next growing season, I’m making expensive improvements on any number of things — to date: building a walk-in cooler ($5,000 plus operation costs); a germination chamber ($1,000 plus operation costs); a lean-to for farm storage ($7,000); a farm stand ($2,000); and a growing tunnel ($23,000).
In March and April, self-employment taxes are due. I’m starting seeds and experiencing financial security-induced panic attacks.
The breakdown
A Foxtrot bouquet might cost $30. To break that down, let’s borrow Lennie Larkin’s “The Flower Dollar” framework and apply it to a bouquet from Foxtrot:
— $3.50 into infrastructure and machinery (money to reinvest in machinery).
— $4.50 into land costs (mortgages, taxes and rents).
— $4.50 into farm supplies (seeds, plants, bulbs, compost, fertilizer, irrigation).
— $4.50 into administrative costs (insurance, permits, bookkeeping, accounting and utilities).
— $6 into employee payroll — fair, living wages for farm workers. A quick note on wages: many farms struggle to keep up with the ever increasing living wage in the area. Most local farms are able to offer their employees between $18-$22/hour, while the true living wage in the Hudson Valley is now $24.75/hour.
— $7 into profit — a hopefully living wage for me, and reinvestment in capital expenses.
Most farmers hope to make a profit, but often we just about break even.
I’ve worked in agriculture for the last 11 years, as a crew member, a manager and as a farm owner. I’ve had second jobs and third jobs to stay afloat.
Only this year as a business owner — going into year three at Foxtrot — have I started to be able to pay myself a year-round wage and that is largely due to the CSA model that I’ve built Foxtrot around.
The money that my CSA members invest in Foxtrot from November through April enable me to keep the business afloat. In return, once the flowers are blooming, I share them generously with my members.
There is good value in a CSA for its members — most farms position their CSA pricing between wholesale and retail value in gratitude for the upfront investment on the part of their CSA members (a $30 Foxtrot CSA bouquet might be valued at $40 elsewhere).
Let’s just say, a farmer remembers these customers.
A labor of love
Farming is a labor of love, and that’s no body’s burden but our own. But ultimately, most career farmers must work with a bottom line, and operate without another means of income or a large security net.
If we value small farms as a community, we must ask: How could the task be made easier?
The CSA as an economic model is an answer to this financial dilemma. It creates a small but critical seasonal security net for working farms and farmers, and a built-in, community-driven customer base for a farmer’s harvest.
Joining a CSA isn’t a donation. It is a subscription model similar to so many that we rather passively participate in these days — Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, and Blue Apron, to name a few. The difference is that a CSA is a subscription to your neighbors, your community, your local economy, your landscape in exchange for something that is tangible, important and life-giving in return.
I have had the pleasure of being a part of the leadership committee for the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, a network of over 120 farms whose aim it is to advocate for the CSA model.
Visit Farm Search as a part of the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition’s website, hudsonvalleycsa.org, to explore the CSAs that are available in your community.
A few other local farms’ CSAs include:
— Rock Steady Farm, Millerton: produce, with partner farm add-ons available.
— Chaseholm Farm, Pine Plains: beef, pork, dairy and cheese.
— Foliage Botanics, Pine Plains: a seasonal apothecary of plant medicine.
— Sisters Hill Farm, Stanfordville: produce, with pick-your-own add-ons available.
Kate Farrar is the farmer and florist at Foxtrot Farm & Flowers, 6862 Route 82, Stanfordville. For more information email foxtrotfarmflowers@gmail.com.
Joy Brown installing work for her show at the Tremaine Art Gallery at Hotchkiss.
This year, The Hotchkiss School is marking 50 years of co-education with a series of special events, including an exhibition by renowned sculptor Joy Brown. “The Art of Joy Brown,” opening Feb. 15 in the Tremaine Art Gallery, offers a rare retrospective of Brown’s work, spanning five decades from her early pottery to her large-scale bronze sculptures.
“It’s an honor to show my work in celebration of fifty years of women at Hotchkiss,” Brown shared. “This exhibition traces my journey—from my roots in pottery to the figures and murals that have evolved over time.”
Co-curated by Christine Owen, Hotchkiss ceramics instructor, and Joan Baldwin, curator of special collections, the scale and scope of the exhibition was inspired by a recent Ed Ruscha retrospective in Los Angeles. “I thought it would be incredible to showcase all these different aspects of Joy’s work,” said Owen, who has known Brown for over 30 years.
Brown’s father, a Presbyterian missionary and medical doctor, opened a hospital in Japan where Brown grew up and cultivated her love of clay. Her first apprenticeship was in Tomba, a region in Hyogo Prefecture known for its ancient pottery kilns and Tambayaki pottery. “There are thousands of years of continuous history of clay there and I was working with a 13th generation potter.” Brown recalled that as part of her early training, her teacher handed her a sake cup and said, “make these.” With no extra instruction given, Brown proceeded to make thousands of copies of the cup. Never fired, she realized that the pieces were an exercise. She explained, “You’re not really making something, you’re participating in a process that these things emerge from.” From there, she embarked on an apprenticeship with master potter Shigeyoshi Morioka. As part of the process she learned from Morioka, Brown has built a 30-foot-long wood-firing tunnel kiln on her property in Kent, Connecticut, where she fires her work once a year in an intensive month-long process. The fire’s natural interaction with the clay creates unique earth tones and ash patterns, highlighting the raw beauty of the material.
Natalia Zukerman
“I learned not just pottery but a whole way of life,” she recalled. “The work is a continuous process—like practicing a signature until it evolves into something uniquely yours.” Her figures, initially emerging as playful puppets, have since evolved into large-scale sculptures now found in public spaces from Shanghai to Broadway to Hotchkiss’s own campus.
Brown’s seven-foot “Sitter with Head in Hands” was installed near Ford Food Court in October, followed by “Recliner with Head in Hands” near Hotchkiss’s Main Building in November. She welcomes interaction with her sculptures, encouraging visitors to touch them and even dress them with scarves or hats. “These figures transcend gender, age, and culture,” Brown noted. “They’re kind of like when you’re 4 years old and you didn’t know or care what you were, you know? All of us meet in that field and I think people resonate with that.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, Hotchkiss will host a screening of “The Art of Joy Brown,” a documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, followed by a panel discussion with the artist and filmmaker on March 6 in Walker Auditorium. Brown will also serve as an artist-in-residence, collaborating with students on special projects.
On being part of the celebration of women at Hotchkiss Brown said, “Fifty years ago, I was deep in the mountains of Japan, immersed in clay.” With a soft spoken and almost childlike quality, Brown spoke about and interacted with her pieces with curiosity, reverence and wonder.
“The practice of working with clay for all these years is grounding and centering for me. It challenges me,” she said. “The work forces me to put myself out there. It’s not just the making of the pieces that make me more whole, the pieces themselves become more present.”
Brown reflected on the retrospective nature of the show and shared that putting it together has been like looking at a family album. “It’s kind of like I’m seeing my whole life in front of me,” she said. “It’s humbling and makes me think about why I do what I do. It comes back to the idea of those thousands of sake cups, you know? We’re just here, being as present as we can be. We’re not making things, we’re participating in a process of being more present, and all that spirit is reflected in the work.”
“The Art of Joy Brown” opens Feb. 15 and runs through April 6. For more information, visit www.hotchkiss.org.
A special screening of “The Brutalist” was held on Feb. 2 at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington. Elihu Rubin, a Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Yale, led discussions both before and after the film.
“The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as fictional character, architect Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect. Toth trained at the Bauhaus and was interred at the concentration camp Buchenwald during World War II. The film tells of his struggle as an immigrant to gain back his standing and respect as an architect. Brody was winner of the Best Actor Golden Globe, while Bradley Corbet, director of the film, won best director and the film took home the Golden Globe for Best Film Drama. They have been nominated again for Academy Awards.
Laszlo Toth goes to work in his cousin’s furniture store when he arrives in New York, living in the storeroom and helping his cousin build up the business. When his cousin’s wife falsely accuses him of making a pass at her, he ends up living in a homeless shelter.
A would-be patron tracks him down, finds him working construction—the only job he can get—and asks, “Tell me, why is an accomplished foreign architect shoveling coal here in Philadelphia?”
Eventually, Toth gains a commission but faces prejudice as a foreigner and Jew, even though he and his wife, who he reunites with after she’d been in the concentration camp, Dachau, are both highly educated—she is an Oxford graduate and an established writer in their home country of Hungary.
Rubin began his discussion before the screening by saying, “I am thrilled this film has brought architecture to the forefront. There is something so fascinating and robust about the space Brutalist architecture creates.”
Brutalism is known for using “raw materials,” such as brick and concrete in ways that leave them visible. Rubin said that concrete is “incredibly expressive. It comes to the building site as mud and becomes what it is poured out as.”
“At first,” said Rubin, “optimism was associated with Brutalism.”
Brutalism came to the forefront of architecture in the 1950’s when it was used to reconstruct housing in the United Kingdom after WWII.
Some prime examples of Brutalist architecture include Boston City Hall, Rudolph Hall at Yale University, and the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven.
Rubin commented, “Brutalist architecture became the de-facto language of government and institutional architecture.”
Rubin said Brutalism began to fall out of favor in the 1970’s when it began to be associated with urban decay and totalitarian governments, who used it extensively.
Rubin asked the audience to consider two questions as they watched the film: “Why is the main character an architect… what does it bring to the emotional core?” and, “Who or what is the Brutalist in the film?”
After the screening, Rubin commentedtha Brutalist architecture is about “Getting an object to, ultimately, stand by itself.” Rubin explained that Brutalism “Throws off shadows of the past. No extraneous detail is left.” Audience members discussed how this could also be true of the character of Laszlo.
Rubin explained that architects face the challenge of “how to express themselves through someone else’s commission.” Discussion involved how Laszlo finds a way to achieve this.
The audience agreed that the film brought up some timely issues about immigration, class awareness, and acceptance, while asking them to consider how Brutalism applies to these subjects. The movie is at times, as rawly constructed as a brutalist building.
Breece Meadow
Chances are you know or have heard of Jeb Breece.He is one of a handful of the Northwest Corner’s “new guard”—young, talented and interesting people with can-do spirit — whose creative output makes life here even nicer than it already is.
Breece’s outward low-key nature belies his achievements which would appear ambitious even for a person without a full-time job and a family.The third season of his “Bad Grass” speaker series is designed with the dual purpose of reviving us from winter doldrums and illuminating us on a topic of contemporary gardening — by which I mean gardening that does not sacrifice the environment for the sake of beauty nor vice versa. There are two upcoming talks taking place at the White Hart:Feb. 20 featuring Richard Hayden from New York City’s High Line and March 6 where Christopher Koppel will riff on nativars. You won’t want to miss either.
An investment manager by trade, Breece and his wife Sabina rented a weekend house in Kent in 2011 just after they had their first child.Soon after he began to volunteer at a nearby farm and then started to cultivate a small cutting flower bed.Breece’s insight — that it is a rare farmer who is great at both growing and selling — led him in 2020 to aggregate demand and supply for cutting flowers by creating a monthly flower market at Kent Barns in collaboration with RT Facts. Coinciding with Covid, the outdoor market became, in many ways, a respite during a challenging time.
Covid provoked Breece and Sabina to move full time to Salisbury.Soon after, he met Page Dickey who had just published her book “Uprooted.” Had it not been for this book and his friendship with Dickey, Breece admits that his front yard would have been landscaped with a version of boxwood and liatris and the existing grass lawn would have been maintained at great expense.Dickey introduced him to organic landscaper Mike Nadeau and a meadow was born.
Meadows.I have written quite a bit about them in this column, in part because a meadow can be a wholesale solution to the lawn issue.It is by no means the only solution but, for a large expanse, it can be extraordinary to behold.The creation of a biodiverse native habitat where there was only a version of grass and weed is a sensation-filled wonder, but it does take a while to achieve this graceful state unless you have the wisdom of Nadeau — and his machinery — behind you.Now going into its fourth year, the Breece meadow has evolved as new native perennials and grasses show up.“It is beautiful to look at from the house but is best experienced from its interior where you can see, hear and feel the life around you.”
While his world view on gardening has changed, Breece doesn’t think of himself as an advocate of native habitats.But he is.The proceeds from Bad Grass this year will go to its 2025 partner project, Steep Rock Preserve’s “Holiday House” project to transform the space into a “ruin garden,” preserving its historical significance while enhancing its natural beauty and restoring native vegetation.
The spongy moth infestation of 2021 and 2022 feels both a long time ago and like yesterday.Walking in the woods, as I did this morning, the effects of spongy moth are more visible than they were last year; the winter winds have blown off the dead limbs from trees that succumbed to the voracious moths’ leaf-eating appetites.On our property we were able to save many trees using BtK and trunk wraps.But most of the truly glorious giant oaks – some well over 70 feet tall and almost as wide - succumbed.Now, several years later, these limbs are taking down smaller trees as they fall to the ground.There is not much to do about it right now unless you can safely relocate a fallen branch that has landed on and distorted an otherwise living tree. Events like this are a reminder of how many young tree recruits we need to ensure the viability of a woodland. This spring there will be quite a bit more light reaching the woodland floor as a result of the dead trees. The open canopy means an opportunity for growth.It is up to us to decide what will grow in these spaces as, without our intervention, they will be overgrown with invasives, prohibiting native trees from growing and destroying a previously viable habitat.Look for these spaces and pull out the invasives as they grow in.For more on the topic go to www.theungardener.com/articles/the-over-under-a-bet-on-the-future-of-the-woods
Dee Salomon ‘ungardens’ in Litchfield County.