Only One Organic Farm in Bergen County, New Jersey? Here’s Why.

Look around.  There used to be a whole lot of farms in Northern New Jersey.  Now there are hardly any, much less Organic.  None in Alpine.  None in Demarest, Cresskill, Tenafly or Englewood.  In fact, there’s only one Organic farm in Bergen County and it’s in Closter on Closter Dock Road: the aptly named Closter Farm & Livestock Co.   If you haven’t been, please pay us a visit – our Farmstand is open to the public!

So why is the next closest Organic farm a 60 mile drive?  It’s the same reason that less than 1% of US farmland is certified Organic:  Its Hard!  Don’t get us wrong.  This is not a woe-is-me post.  We love what we do and would not do it any other way.  It just requires a bunch of steps that most people don’t want to, or can’t take. 

Organic certification is the first hurdle.  The certification itself requires intensive paperwork, recordkeeping, and dealing with a small community of organic vendors for all the seeds, feeds and other organic material that come through our farmgate.  This is not insurmountable, but it requires an added layer of administration that a lot of farmers don’t make time for. 

Organic Practices are next.  The biggest issues here are weed and pest management.  Our primary strategy is to rotate crops intensively to confuse weeds and pests before they take hold.  When they do take hold, we manually remove them and/or cover our crops with translucent gauze-like cloth to physically exclude them.  Conventional farmers have an easier solution.  They generally buy seeds that are resistant to herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides, and then spray herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides – much of it derived from petrochemicals.  Easy and effective but not what we want on our dinner plates. 

Our Chickens are moved daily onto fresh outdoor pastures supplemented by fresh organic feed and a salad buffet of our crop residue.  Mass produced chickens?  You have the picture.  Confined, crowded and worse.

Community is the last hurdle, and it should have been discussed first to emphasize it’s importance.  Without an engaged community of people who believe in what we are doing and make to visit our Farmstand none of this matters.  A big thanks to you. 

While these hurdles are high we choose to leap over them with joy, sometimes wearing overalls.  On the flipside, the extra effort means we are working in dirt free of synthetic chemicals.  We, our families, and yours are not eating synthetic chemical spray residue when we thought we were just eating a cucumber.  We are not running synthetic phosphates into surrounding waterways.  In short, we are working with nature, growing food as it has been for thousands of years and we hope it will be for thousands more.  Stop by the Farmstand if you agree.