Mark Firth, a Brooklyn restauranteur through and through, has become a farmer in The Berkshires.
“After mixing martinis for 12 years, I feel like this is why we’re born. Every one of those plants is a child that you tend and then you eat it. It’s just full circle. It’s nothing to do with iPads, the city, what suit your wearing, the shoes you’re wearing or who made your bag. But it all pales in insignificance comparing to planting a seed and worrying about it. And watching it bear fruit. It’s something we’ve been doing for thousands of years.”
Sourcing products from local purveyors is no longer the next big thing. In fact name chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Peter Hoffman of Savoy, and Dan Barber of Blue Hill have all been working with local farmers and producers for more than 20 years. A trend identified two years ago by the National Restaurant Association — local sourcing — is here to stay.
What is unusual is to find a restauranteur inspired by the farmers he meets (or perhaps a mid-life crisis) who decides to take up farming. For the last 13 years Mark Firth has been a successful restauranteur in Brooklyn’s demanding food scene who turned recently to farming in The Berkshires, a bucolic part of Western Massachusetts where Dan Barber also hails from.
Not everyone encouraged him to head down this path. A German chef at a Slow Food event said: “You’re taking two businesses with the lowest returns — farming and restaurants —and combining them. I think that’s a bad idea.” Mark took that as a challenge. “You know everything we’ve done people have told us is a bad idea so I said let’s do it. But I wouldn’t underestimate the amount of work raising a garden and maintaining a restaurant that is consistently good.”
When you think about greenhouse farming you probably get the image of hothouse tomatoes. In fact there is a giant greenhouse in Madison, Maine run by Backyard Farms that year-round produces many of the tomatoes eaten on the East Coast. We no longer need to settle for hard pink tomatoes—picked green in Florida and shipped by truck, that taste like cardboard.
Greenhouse farmers are exploring new types of growing, including hydrodynamics and the vertical greenhouse farms that Backyard Farms employs. Theoretically, a greenhouse farm can be located in the desert or on the roof of an office building in midtown Manhattan.
Greenhouse Farming a Business and an Art
Jack Algiers of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY has a stunning greenhouse with plants bedded in soil. The level of analysis and detail that goes into running his operation is extraordinary. It has to be: Of 22,00 square feet in the greenhouse, he can farm on just 13,000 square feet, or less than a quarter-acre. To make the most of this land, Jack harvests twice a week year round. He calculates the output of his greenhouse down to the square foot., andhe’s ready to share this information with other farmers to give a full sense of the productivity for this type of farming.
It helps that Jack is selling to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s fabled restaurant. But Blue Hill is only one of many buyers Jack needs to satisfy at a price that consumers and restaurants can pay. To meet Jack and view the greenhouse and farm visit the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.
Mark Firth, one of two founders of Brooklyn restaurant mini-empire, was once quoted as saying “We don’t like new.”
When he and partner Andrew Tarlow restored a 1927 Brooklyn diner the dilapidated ambience, talented kitchen under chef Caroline Fidanza and lively everyone’s-a-friend ambiance created an instant hit that in many ways inspired the Brooklyn food movement.
A big driver for Diner’s success was Fidanza and her Greenmarket sourcing. When farmers started delivering direct to Diner, Fidanza said “I could never go back to working with other ingredients. It just wouldn’t be worth it.”
Now each week Firth travels three hours from a Berkshire farm down a long dirt road in Monteray, Massachusetts to Williamburg, Brooklyn. In the process he swaps a T-shirt and rubber boots for a suit and martini glass. With incredible style and charm he manages to pull it off.
I was very much opposed to solar power, because it just doesn’t make sense economically. But then we got a grant of $40,000 on a $61,000 system, or $21,000 net cost to us. Then it becomes very hard to say no.
Generally, the model for solar systems effectively requires you to pay your electric bill 25 years in advance. But that doesn’t really make sense.
In this program the system is leased to us for $87.00 per month plus $16.00 per month for the meter. That’s never going to change. Essentially you lock in your electric use at 50% of what it now costs and push it out 20 years. Will rates go up? More than likely. In that case we’ll really be in great shape.
One issue with this system is that there is no storage. We feed directly into the grid and draw from the grid. If there is any overage it becomes a part of the grid. So far, about 20% of our power is going out to the grid each month.
In fact, we haven’t had a negative month yet. At first, it was hard to sort out what happens with surplus production, but now we understand that we accumulate credits for repairs or modifications.
This is residential rather than a program for businesses. Basically we have zero dollars in—plus the $110 cost of conduit from the house to the unit. (Well, actually we ended up building a barn rather than a freestanding structure for the panels. If I’m going to build something, I want to get some other utility out of it.)
This program is funded on money collected from utility bills—each customer could check that you want to support renewable energy. Something like $200 million was collected over five years. Now the money is being pushed into the general fund for the State of Connecticut. But there is still time to apply.
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