Anne Kennedy pulled up into our driveway at Goatfell Farm one afternoon last summer and watched me from the seat of an old Mercedes station wagon as I walked in from our field. When I was within earshot, she called out.
“You have a restaurant in the city, yes?”
“We do.”
“Well, we should know each other,” she said.
We chatted for a few minutes then, long enough for me to learn that she farmed not far from us and sold pigs to a few chefs in the city, where she lived part of the year.
It was late fall before we made it over to Old Field Farm, where Anne and her husband, Peter Nadin, raise heritage breed pigs, chickens, and vegetables. We saw their Tamworths and Old Spots, their chickens of every imaginable breed, and sat down in their living room in front of the fire and ate apples and talked about growing and living on the north side of the Catskills.
We checked in with them a few times over the winter, and bumped into them at NOFA-NY‘s winter conference, but it wasn’t until Parish Hall opened that we began working with them in earnest. We started with greenhouse produce at the end of March–herbs & nasturtiums–and began getting eggs from them soon thereafter. As their vegetable operation has grown, so has the variety of produce they send us: lettuces, mustard greens, borage.
The farm is beautiful and diverse, both in terrain and industry: ponds lined with cattails and bobbing with ducks; wooded patches of ginseng, chanterelles, nettles, and berries; raised beds of tender greens and impossibly high wooden poles for training long vines of hops. Their pigs spend their lives wandering in and out of the woods eating apples and duck eggs and rooting in the rich mud of the Catskills.
Some photos of the farm in all its early-summer splendor:
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- Abe the boar has a tough job, siring all the pigs that are born at Old Field, but he doesn’t complain.
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- One of the two collections of beehives at Old Field
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- Chicken tractor, human tractor
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- Where the chickens and pigs live when they’re not roaming the woods.
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- Chickens who don’t feel like hanging in the hen house gather in the shade of a bush.
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- The greenhouse has automatic openers for the louvers to let the heat out on steamy days.
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- Greenhouse on the left, studio (with walk-in cooler for vegetables & meats) on the right.
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- Destined for our menu, but living the high life for now.
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- Home base for the chickens when they’re not roaming under the bushes or out in one of the chicken tractors
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- Nicotiana, kale, tomatoes, limes, nasturtiums, herbs
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- Snoozing sow
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- Raised beds, hops poles, sculpture bases
