Conley had started out in Washington, D.C., slinging burgers, and found her way to Berkeley, California—first to the kitchen of Fourth Street Grill, then to Bette’s Ocean View Diner. In 1989, she moved to Point Reyes, bringing with her an impressive amount of experience in restaurant operation and marketing.
Her life began to change when she read John Hart’s Farming on the Edge, which told the story of MALT. Like Ellen Straus, Conley is a natural activist, and she itched to join the movement. The goal was for farmers to become financially viable by adding value to their products: Instead of selling milk for 11cents a pound, they could make cheese and sell it for $20 a pound. She would not only encourage the farmers to make the new product, she would help them sell it. This was the inspiration behind her Cowgirl Creamery and Tomales Bay Foods.
Conley began to show farmers how to market their milk to restaurants and fancy foods stores. (Albert Straus was one of her first clients; Ellen Straus became a friend and a marketing tool.) And Cowgirl Creamery began to make cheese: crème fraîche, cottage cheese, and eventually aged cheeses, using milk from local farmers. But there were other local products worth showcasing—organic vegetables, olive oils, oysters, meats—which she did via Tomales Bay Foods, a fancy foods store and carryout. “All of these businesses are very small, so it is very important to work together,” she says. Along the way, Conley was named to the MALT board. As Ellen tells it, “Sue has taught everybody around here how to market their products. She made them profitable.”
While marin farms date back only to the 1850s, New York’s Hudson Valley is a living textbook of the nation’s early years: farm after farm is as old as the Constitution. But the sweep of the river, the majestic mountain ranges, and the breathtaking views—overlooked by some of the nation’s grandest estates—make this region very attractive as a second home for city dwellers and as fertile ground for developers.
The motivation to develop is intense, and the results are sadly visible. In Marin, farmland preservation took hold before developers could start carving chunks out of the scenery. New York completed its first agricultural trust purchase in 1977, but another 20 years slipped by before the state followed through with tax credits and grants to support more purchases. For some farmers, help arrived too late.
Adding insult to injury are the region’s unique agricultural issues: In Marin County, the dairy farmers struggle to find profitable markets; in the Hudson Valley, it is the apple growers who find themselves in desperate straits. Not only is New York’s growing season a mere 145 days—about 75 short of Marin County’s—but apples from China are flooding the market at prices New York farmers can’t match.
Rose Hill Farm, in Red Hook, had been in Dave Fraleigh’s family for 200 years when, in 1998, he was offered the adjoining farm and a purchase of development rights to make it affordable. The acquisition enabled him to expand his wholesale apple business and pay off most of his debt. But the next few years brought disastrous weather, increasing competition from Chinese growers, and chain markets too big to buy from family farms. Fraleigh adapted: He cut labor costs and trimmed production from 90 acres to 10. He added berries and soft fruits in order to lengthen his retail season. He commissioned neighbors to make jams and pies to draw customers to his farm stand. Farmers around here call such adaptations “entertainment farming.” As Fraleigh puts it, “Nobody comes all the way from New York City just to buy apples. They’re buying entertainment, and the twenty dollars’ worth of apples is the entrance fee for a pretty and quiet place.”
Despite financial struggles, Fraleigh is grateful: “With the pressure for housing developments, I’m glad there’s twelve hundred acres in Red Hook that aren’t going to be built on.” Land trusts, he says, “are not a panacea, they’re part of the puzzle in promoting farms and keeping them where they are.”
John Hardeman also grew up in Red Hook, on a farm his father managed. He took it over for a decade and then bought his own place in Columbia County. Eleven years later, in 1997, his childhood farm came on the market, but the price was too high. A local land trust agency, Scenic Hudson, came to Hardeman’s rescue with the money to purchase his development rights. Like Fraleigh, though, Hardeman found that the farming economy was changing for the worse. And, like the other farmers, he complains that “entertainment farming” takes time away from what farmers do best. He wonders whether he should be selling at a Greenmarket in the city rather than placing all his bets on a farm stand.
Ken Migliorelli, a vegetable farmer in Tivoli, has made the opposite choice. He loads his truck at 3 a.m. and sells his 40 types of vegetables, mostly cooking and salad greens, directly to consumers at New York City’s Greenmarkets. “When you put in a crop,” he says, “you’ve got to make sure you can market it.”
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