Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes: More and more often, of late, we are approached by interested parties who want to know why and how we got into farming. Some of them seem more than interested; in fact, they seem tempted to repeat our experiment. So, I’ll try to describe how we found our way, but I do so realizing that what has worked for us may not for others. Each of us, as gurus always point out, must find his or her “own way.” We did not begin with a plan. Not even a decision. But when, eleven years ago, we began looking for a new country house, a pattern emerged. While we thought an old farmhouse with maybe 10 or so acres would satisfy us, we gradually found ourselves rejecting places unless they had more land, better land, or a barn and outbuildings. While it did not seem so to us at the time, we obviously had something more than a summer house in mind. Maybe we should have known better. At our previous summer place in Sag Harbor, we had only one acre, but it was intensively planted with flower, woodland, and large vegetable gardens. Because we did most of our own planting and care-taking, some of our fellow Hamptonites jokingly said we lived like “Korean peasants” and questioned why we didn’t, like everyone else, have the “little brown men” do our work for us instead. It apparently seemed strange to them that we actually took great pleasure in doing the work ourselves. Leaving the resort world of the Hamptons for the farm country of Columbia County was another only partially-understood decision. When, after a year of looking, we found our present house, it seemed ideal in all respects: It was old, and though rather muddled, it had lots of potential, was set back far from a quiet road, and came with a barn and outbuildings, though they were in a ruinous state.
But the deal almost came a cropper over acreage. Initially, the owner would only sell the house with 10 acres, the remaining 30 usable acres behind the house having been slated for subdividion into five-acre building lots (some, of course, with “Catskill views”). When we realized that we wanted more land, we began withdrawing from the deal. The owner, anxious to sell, quickly relented and worked out an arrangement with us so we could also purchase the additional 30 acres. On closing, we found ourselves with a 40 acre derelict farm, and no clear idea as to how we would use most of it. But I did have a clear vision for the house and the land immediately surrounding it, and set to work with Bob Fleury, an architect friend, and a host of carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, and landscapers to bring the house back to something like its original appearance. I also tried to recreate the gardens, the product of 16 years of hard work, that I had very reluctantly left behind in Sag Harbor. The newly renovated house soon was set within a large island-like, deer-fenced compound. To the east, on one side of the house, there was now a large oval lawn surrounded by perennial borders and fronted by a fish pond; to the west, a kidney-shaped pond (for swimming) surrounded by a meadow; to the south, the front of the house, a long lawn with huge maple trees,was surrounded by a white picket fence, and to the north, the rear of the house, a rock garden, a shade garden, and a very large vegetable garden. For Mark, vegetable gardening had become a passion that could not be denied. With this nucleus, essentially a country house not that different from a lot of others, I began to think of the whole, of how we should use the surrounding acreage. An idea began to percolate in my mind, not an original idea but a very ancient one going back thousands of years: the idea of the villa. Unfortunately the term “villa” has been cheapened in modern times, has acquired a sometimes pretentious, sometimes tacky sound. But I was thinking of the historic Roman villa.
To escape the noise, odors, crowds, and squalor of one of the earliest great cities, Romans of means resorted to establishing estates, as retreats, in the surrounding countryside. What fascinated me was that these often elegant establishments existed not only as a quiet place of repose, a place for contemplation, study, and the appreciation of nature, but they were also seen as working establishments, as farms and vineyards producing food and drink for the owner and his household, and sometimes, secondarily, as a source of income. As elegant as the villa might be (and very elegant they became in the time of Palladio), the house was in close proximity to the barns and stables, the storage barns, the cottages for the laborers, the pastures, and fields. For the Roman patrons, the villa served as both a place of pleasure and productivity. At first, we were not willing to go much beyond the very large vegetable garden and chickens—further seemed daunting. We toyed with the idea of hiring our back thirty acres out to a nearby farm family and collecting the 40% school tax reduction but, fortunately, that came to nothing. But we knew something had to be done. It bothered us to think of the pastures growing up in junk trees and brush.
A visit to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival set us to thinking about sheep, in particular the Karakul breed, a fat tailed sheep from Central Asia. Sheep seemed like an easy-to-manage grazing animal that would keep our pastures open. And there would be lamb and wool. In our reading, we had already come across the same warning several times: “Start small, make your mistakes on a small scale, learn from those.” So we began with four yearling ewes, who took up residence in a tiny sheepfold built on the side of our picket-fenced front lawn. Our barn was still in ruins and none of the pastures were fenced. We were in no way ready, but with the acquisition of Marina, Bridget, Kybele, and Mira, we had crossed the Rubicon. Caring for them was no problem for the first summer, since I was in residence. But what was to happen in the fall, winter, and spring when I had to return to my gallery and Mark to his office? We had not really thought this through. As September, 2001, approached, we began looking into pet-and-farm sitters, someone who would come by on weekdays when we were away, to feed and water the flock. The prices asked for these stop-by caretakers seemed exorbitant, and four ewes did not seem to merit the expense. Things had still not really been resolved when I returned to New York City on September 10th, and woke up the next day to the horrors of the 9-11 attack across the street. With our residence and my gallery in ruins, the building uninhabitable for a year and a half, and business at a virtual standstill in the city, I found myself becoming a full-time resident at the farm. And it was largely through this fateful event that we very quickly found ourselves becoming farmers. Having a full-fledged farm was something we had, until then, seen on the distant horizon. At some point my idea of the villa ran together with our understanding of the way small family farms once operated in this country—they raised the full range of foods required by the family, selling off the excess for income. This, instead of specializing in one or two cash crops, say apples or corn. We would raise the full range of vegetables, far more than our needs, and market the excess. And thus began our customer base.
Our ewes required a ram to produce lambs, and thus came Ryan. With the excess ramlings, we soon had lamb for ourselves and others. A small flock of 15 heritage turkeys, beautiful Royal Palms, supplied our Thanksgiving table our second year, and those of near neighbors and friends. Heritage turkeys would become our signature product and considerably widen our customer base. We started raising enough meat chickens to fill our larder and with no difficulty marketed the rest. We felt the need for pork. With our first five piglets, we started supplying ourselves and a growing list of customers with pasture-raised pork. The desire to have goose for Christmas led us to Toulouse geese only after, that is, taking a wrong turn with raucous Chinese geese.
The really big hurdle was our desire for beef. Learning to manage huge beef cows seemed insurmountable, but we again started small, with five motley mixed-breeds, and eventually working our way up to a half dozen nasty black angus—another wrong turn—finally ending up with gentle, people-loving British Whites, who produce delectable grass fed beef for us and our customers. Last year, following the dictates of economics, we moved from the expense of annually buying feeder beef cows, to breeding our own. This involved another hurdle: adding Tommy the bull, who has so far, with his gentleness, allayed our fears. At this point, Mark delivered the edict: “No more species.”
But I missed having duck so we began raising ducks. And Mark, because of a taste for guinea fowl we picked up on a trip to northern Italy, broke his own rule and decided we would add meat guinea fowl to our menagerie-charcuterie. As we have discovered, once you begin raising your own food, you become reluctant to buy anything. Lately, I find myself with a hunger for rabbit. (Mark interjects: “You can hunt.”) And so we found our way to a plan which is both complicated and simple. Caring for and learning to care for so many forms of livestock is rather labor intensive, but being able to market a whole cross section of products to the same small pool of customers greatly simplifies things. —Peter Davies
