Room for a View

In-Between the Rows:
A Conversation with Pete Taliaferro
Lorna Tychostup Interviews Pete Taliaferro

photo by Lorna Tychostup

Pete Taliaferro is the owner and operator of the 32-acre Taliaferro Farms in New Paltz. Taliaferro Farms was one of eight Community Supported Agricultural farms in Dutchess and Ulster counties to win a Distinguished Achievement Award for Environmental Sensitivity from Mohonk Consultations this year at a June 5 ceremony held at the Mohonk Mountain House. The other CSA farms sharing in this award were Polly and Jay Armour’s Four Winds Farm in Gardiner, Andy Radon’s And-Sow-On Farm in High Falls, Phillies Bridge Farm Project, Inc in Gardiner run by Jay Grzanna, Dan Gunther’s Poughkeepsie Farm Project, Sisters Hill Farm in Stanfordville run by David Hambleton, Nathaniel Thompson’s Still Point Farm in Amenia, and Ron and Kate Kholsa’s Huguenot Valley Farm in New Paltz.

Taliaferro Farms is both a commercial operation and a Community Supported Agricultural (CSA) farm, supplying organic fruit and vegetables to the Culinary Institute of America and area restaurants, as well supplying their own 241 CSA share holders with a weekly harvest of fresh produce. One hundred and thirteen of these shares go to agencies such as Food Patch, and Atlantis Foods in Brooklyn, which distribute their shares of organic produce to low-income, inner-city families.

While not planted in a clear-cut family farming generational lineage, the roots of Pete Taliaferro’s passion for farming lie in the nuances of his memory. When he was just six years old and the oldest of the four children, his father was killed in an auto accident. While Pete doesn’t remember much about his dad, he does remember him working in the garden—a tradition Taliaferro took up soon after his father’s death, making sure to plant at least a few tomato and other plants in the family garden every year. And so, a new family farming generational lineage has sprouted from a six year old’s memory of his dad working in the garden.

Working on farms since his early childhood, Taliaferro started on a long journey through the many aspects of farm work, from clearing brush to pruning trees to designing and installing irrigation systems, learning the ins and outs of conventional and organic farming. Taliaferro succeeded in buying land and starting his own farm in 1995.

I spoke with Pete one June afternoon about his commitment to organic farming while he packed and delivered several boxes of mesculun lettuce to a local restaurant while overseeing the packing of 175 CSA shares. Running to keep up with him reinforced the fact that a farmer’s work is unending.

Lorna Tychostup: How did you get involved with organic farming?

Pete Taliaferro: I did an irrigation system for a guy down in Marlboro, NY—Jackson Baldwin. He was 76 when I started messing with him. I met him in ‘93. I went to work for Jack because I liked what he had—a small, intensive, diversified farm that grew a lot of different crops. And he was organic.

I worked for him about two years doing a little bit of everything—whatever it took; built greenhouses, planted, harvested, organized, of course, did all the water. I was still actively looking for my own farm—my own agricultural business opportunity... We looked for a long time and couldn’t find anything. Jack was going to offer me an opportunity, but his daughter interceded and said, “You promised me the farm.” I hadn’t even met her at that point, but blood is thicker than water. And all of a sudden this piece of land came up in my backyard. It had been a satellite farm for the previous owners—a couple acres of apples that were going to hell.

The first price they told me, I almost had a heart attack, but then we worked something out. We bought this farm and I went back to work for Gene [a farmer and previous employer] because I couldn’t afford to start farming. I asked him if he would help me out, loan me some equipment and rent my apple trees. He said yes. He took my crop and in turn he let me work for him; he paid me and I used his equipment to help clear this place and begin planting some cover crops...to prepare for this thing I was going to do.

LT: So you were leading a double life for a while—working for him while getting your place together.

PT: And I was working for Caldor at their big distribution center, second shift. So Gene helped me out. He respected me because he knew I was staying in the industry...I wasn’t buffaloing anyone. You know, these guys are scared...he thought I would take whatever he had.

LT: You all [farmers] seem a little scared...

PT: Yeah. You have to be.

LT: Why?

PT: Because you work so hard for it.

LT: And if someone comes along with a better idea...

PT: And anybody can walk in and give you a deal, and just...boom, you’re done and its gone. It’s highly competitive.

LT: In what way?

PT: The fact that the profit margins are so low. So Gene is helping me out. I’m working here cutting my trees and stuff, and he’s paying me. But he’s taking the apples. They weren’t the greatest apples in the world...this place was in pretty rough shape.

LT: Were you organic at that point?

PT: No.

LT: Did you want it to be organic?

PT: Yes, but I had no choice at that time. I had no money to make it any different, I had three kids and a mortgage on a house and a mortgage on a farm. A thousand on the house, a thousand on the farm.

LT: What does it take to make a farm organic?

PT: I had to change it over in little segments. And I had a buffer area. I started on four acres.

LT: It was totally organic?

PT: Yup. Except for the apples, they were commercial production fruit.

LT: What made the segments organic?

PT: There were two big meadows that hadn’t been used in a while, one was down by the [Wallkill] river. So we immediately started plowing. I bought a rototiller at auction and started tilling and putting cover crops in. Anything we could buy cheap...beans, tons of legumes.

photo by Lorna Tychostup

LT: Why legumes?

PT: Legumes build up the soil and add organic matter to the soil, they fix nitrogen...all this kind of stuff. So we were planting a lot of legumes and then plowing them under. We also saw we had a deer problem...we’d plant two acres of beans and not have enough for dinner! So we fiddled around. We bought the land in September of ‘95, started growing the cover crops in the spring of ‘96, while we farmed the apples commercially. We got the three acres plus some in the back and I pushed out three acres of apples immediately because they were varieties that were no damn good. We worked on those first two meadows that we knew we could certify right away and call organic. The following year I pushed out four more acres, and I just kept doing that. I had my brother-in-law’s bulldozer up here for two years.

As we expanded, we rolled onto ground that we could not certify organic until this year. I had ground that I was still spraying “low-spray” last year but we cleared that and now it’s called “transitional” [according to organic regulations, the previously non-organic land must lie fallow or unused for a specific time period before it can be planted for organic production]. We can’t call it certified organic for two years. So we have four and a half acres that are transitional. We’re growing our apples transitional but the apples can’t be certified organic because we grew them low-spray last year.

LT: You’re growing your apples totally organic?

PT: Totally organic.

LT: And what does that mean?

PT: That means that there are no synthetic materials being used on those apples in regard to crop protectorants.

LT: So how do you keep the bugs off of them? Isn’t that a major problem of apple farming?

PT: There are non-synthetic materials that have insecticidal activity with insects. One is a bacteria which grows in the soil and protects your apples from any lepidoptera or caterpillars. They eat it, it breaks down the enzymes in their stomach, they can’t digest their food and they expire. I’m using a crop protectorant right now called “Surround”. It is basically clay. It creates a hostile environment or area for the insects to crawl on. They don’t like crawling on clay. Their feet want to be sticky. If you were climbing mountains you want your hands dry. The bugs are constantly slipping and sliding because the clay is drying the moisture out on their pads, where they would normally stick and crawl. They want out. It’s not great, but the product works. It does help.

I find the clay also binds up the other materials that we use, in that they are very simple materials that normally dissipate in 12 to 24 hours. I feel the clay is binding them up and holding them for several days.

LT: What type of materials?

PT: You know...fixed copper, which is basically copper oxide which protects against fungal activity. We’re also using soaps—highly refined soaps that coat the insect and break down the waxy tissue on the insect. None of these products will prevent the insect from going through a good part of its lifestyle, but they deter the insect and prevent its lifestyle from flowing easily. And sometimes when they are deterred you don’t get as large a population, but you still get damage. It’s not like when you go in and eradicate them with a poison.

LT: So if you are doing these things to be organic, why aren’t other farmers making the changeover?

PT: It’s way too difficult to do on a commercial scale. I only have four acres of apples. My [customers] are glad to have a few apples which might have some cuts or a blotch or a scab on them. They will work with that. But on a large scale, organic can never be done. It’s not the personality of the United States and the people of America to buy fruit that is blemished. Period.

LT: But your customers are willing to accept a blemished yet organic product?

PT: Yes. A small, niche faction of customers will do that. Let me just tell you something about food in America. I’m one farmer. Who do I feed? Through my farm markets and everything else, how many do I feed? Maybe six or seven hundred families? What the heck is six or seven hundred families? That doesn’t even equal one apartment house in New York City. There are places in Las Vegas that feed a tremendous tourist crowd and they don’t [serve] out a lot because they can’t afford to...they throw out enough to serve you, but it’s not tremendous. There are places out there that use 7,000 pounds of potatoes a week. That’s one hotel. You think they want blemished potatoes?

A good chef can work around this. But what does it cost you and how many good chefs do you need to support a conglomerate which could support the use of organic produce? How do you afford to have an army...maybe 20 of these guys running a hotel that serves 6,000 people a day?

LT:But isn’t that the fashion right now...people want to have more organic produce?

PT: Oh yeah, but it’s not as big as you’d think. It’s big, but it is still small. It takes so much food to feed everyone. Do you know how big the farms are in Texas? There are farms down there that are growing 3,000 acres of tomatoes. It’s unfathomable.

LT: But aren’t they using chemicals on their produce?

PT: I don’t know. I don’t feel that the danger...there is definitely a danger to the environment and health risks with the use of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides...all those synthetic crop protectorants. But the real sin is the destruction of the soils. These things kill everything in the soil—earthworms, microbal activity...it’s not great to have the synthetic stuff on your food, although most of it breaks down with UVs. But a lot of it gets run off onto the soil and is destroying the medium that you grow your food in. That’s the real danger—what do we do 30 years from now when the soils are so beat to death that they are like concrete and you can’t grow anything in them because there is no biological natural activity? I’m not a scientist, I’m a farmer.

LT: Why did you make the switch over to organic? What was the ultimate reason?

PT: I want to be a steward of the land. I want to do the best I can to protect the little piece of earth that I have.

LT: So it’s about the land?

PT: It’s about the land. It’s about health risks too, but it is about the land. If you don’t have the land, you don’t have the health risks...you’re done. Correct?

LT: You made the transition. Did you catch any flack from the conventional farmers?

PT: Not directly. I caught some baloney. Everybody picked on me. They still do.

LT: Why?

PT: You know...that’s the way it is. You cut your hair or cut your mustache off, people say things.

LT: You didn’t scare them?

PT: I don’t know. I don’t want to comment on that. I have a ways to go before I can say that I actually have hold of this thing. I have a tiger by the tail right now. That’s what it is. So I can’t stand up on a soapbox and start saying anything because I don’t feel like I’m there yet. I feel like some people have a different opinion than me. I’ve always been highly respected in the agriculture industry anyway. I’ve always done whatever needed to be done, with trees and this and that. I can also do irrigation, plumbing, all these things came together. There aren’t too many commercial growers in the area who don’t know me. I feel they look at me differently now. I was looked at at times as the guy [who] wanted to say stuff but wasn’t doing it. Nothing means nothing until you do it. You can say all you want. Now I’m walking the walk. I wouldn’t say I’m making it work. I’m still afraid to say I’m making it work. But we’re getting damn close.

LT: And what would you consider “making it work”?

PT: Paying all my bills, putting a few bucks in the bank, taking my family on vacation once a year and maintaining our health—all from farming.