Eleanor Blakeslee-Drain
December 2, 2020
When toilet paper and flour disappeared suddenly from New York supermarket shelves this spring, I realized how completely I take for granted that, in “normal” times, the American food system mostly works for me. Hunger is a pervasive issue in this country and yet, for the most comfortable of us, the consumer panic induced by the first shelter-in-place orders was shocking and unsettling (and, ultimately, fleeting). The pandemic has made it clear just how alienated many of us are from the food sources we rely on.
As I drive around upstate New York, where I’ve lived part-time for years, I feel the disconnect between food and place most acutely when I pass dairy farm after dairy farm on my way to Price Chopper, where I buy nice butter and blocks of cheddar cheese that are trucked in from other states. So much about my diet is divorced from geography and seasonality. Food seems plentiful and cheap, from nowhere and everywhere at once. I understand the ethical and environmental imperative to eat organic and eat local but, even as a privileged person, reconciling those dictates with the economics and logistics of modern life is vertigo-inducing. What is this byzantine food system we’ve inherited — dominated by industries with crushing lobbying power and abetted by huge federal subsidies — that transports milk produced nearby far away, leaving vanishingly few local products accessible and affordable to those who live here? Why do so many farmers struggle to make a living? Why do supermarket vegetables from huge outfits in California cost less than those grown five miles down the road and sold at the farmer’s market by my neighbor?
One answer is simple: at the most basic level, small farming is really, really hard. Add globalization and unfettered capitalism and inadequate government support to the pure challenge of just getting plants to grow and it is a wonder that there are any small farms at all. So who does farm? And why? Eleanor Blakeslee-Drain runs Berry Brook, an organic vegetable farm, with her husband Patrick not far from where I live in Delaware County. When I see her at the farmer’s market, she always seems like she’s having a pretty good time, even when she hasn’t had a day off in months and her kids are underfoot and a new pest has appeared to threaten her broccoli. For the past few years I’ve watched with true awe as she gets shit done at Berry Brook, building it with Patrick from a scrappy upstart to a beloved resource, keeping her customers in lettuce, bok choy, and kale even through the darkest winter months. I wanted to know how one ends up an organic farmer in the 21st century when it seems like it would be so much easier to just … not do that. I asked and she explained: it takes a lot of grit, some luck, and, in her experience, not insignificant white privilege. Eleanor was as funny and charming as she always is, sitting down for a rare moment to explain the minutiae of crop planning to a civilian, glad for any excuse to play hooky from the fields during the high summer harvest. I’m so grateful for her candor.
This interview took place in July 2020. It has been edited and condensed.
Georgia Hilmer: I know that you went to Smith for college — I’ve been wondering how you got from Smith to farming. This project is often about that distance between Point A and Point B. I see people with jobs that I don’t understand or don’t know the mechanics of and I try to imagine how they got from where they started to where they are. What did you study at Smith?
Eleanor Blakeslee-Drain: I majored in women’s and gender studies. I lived in a vegan co-op and I worked at the community garden and food justice was in the air that we were all breathing. I knew I liked working outside and doing physical labor so I got a job at the Hampshire College farm my first summer after graduation. I fell in love with it.
I’m aware that there has been a big change in American eating in the past few decades: there are more greenmarkets and local organic food is a big thing. But vegetable farming still doesn’t get billed as a “sexy” job or one that kids grow up dreaming about.
You definitely don’t dream of it as a kid. Maybe in your twenties you start thinking about it. I was like, “I have no marketable skills and I’ll probably be a barista so why don’t I just try farming?” I had plans to move with my girlfriend to Louisville, Kentucky where she was from and I thought I would just farm for the summer. The great thing about farming was that I could pursue it — not as a career in the first couple of years, that’s a strong word — as something to do without any more schooling. You could farm and figure it out as you went; it was challenging and really interesting and you could learn on the job. So I worked on a farm in Massachusetts and then a farm in Kentucky and then I tried my own thing at my aunt and uncle’s place here in the Catskills. It was successful enough. Then Patrick and I teamed up and that was a little more successful.
What was your aunt and uncle’s set-up that allowed you to experiment with farming?
They own three hundred gorgeous acres in a totally magical place. I can’t even describe it. I lived in their 1960s camper. They had some fields and in one of them I built a garden that was a third of an acre. At the time I could have seen building a future there but then I met Patrick and there was not enough open space for two people to make a living — most of the land was wooded, it wasn’t very flat, it was pretty rocky.
How does the first year go in a new, un-farmed tract like that? How much of the time are you digging up rocks and how much are you planting?
It feels like so long ago. That’s three locations ago. I can’t even remember. It was surprisingly successful. I was really happy because I ended the season with the same amount of money in my bank account as I had when I started.
That’s a win.
[Laughs] That felt really good. Living there was great. I felt more myself there than anywhere else I had been. Growing up and visiting my aunt and uncle, the place was a bunch of old hippies and lesbians. I wasn’t exposed to much of that in Baltimore City. I would come up here and it was a very soul-satisfying place for me to be. When I left it was because I really wanted to be with Patrick. I didn’t expect to ever feel that way again. In the last couple of months living here, though, I have felt it again.
That’s amazing. Between then and here you farmed in two other places?
In 2012 I did my thing at my aunt and uncle’s and Patrick managed the vegetables at Stonycreek Farm in Walton, NY. In 2013 I moved to Stonycreek Farm and we did the vegetables there while keeping a few things going at my aunt and uncle’s place. I got pregnant that spring so I was pregnant for that season. We got married that fall at my aunt and uncle’s place, it was the best wedding of all time. Then we found our place in Delancey that year and plowed it and prepped it. The next year, 2014, was our first year over there. We were living on Main Street in Hamden. Then the trailer next to the farm went up for sale so we bought that in the winter of 2014. 2015 we were living on the farm again. We had a one year-old. That year was really tough. It nearly killed us.
Because of the one year-old?
Yes. It was the year we started making a decent amount of money. It was a big production jump, we didn’t have much help. We almost died. In 2016, 2017, and 2018 we were at the old farm in Delancey. Then in the fall of 2018 we found out about this farm being for sale. We ended up buying it in March of 2019, last March.
What was the learning curve when you started to double and triple your production?
It all feels like a blur. It was really difficult to farm over there because it was really rocky. My aunt and uncle’s place was rocky, Stonycreek Farm was rocky, and our first farm was twice as rocky as those places.
Why does anyone farm in this area?
It’s crazy. I guess there’s nice valleys and you can put your cows out to pasture on the hills. But it is so rocky.
It must be such a pain in the ass.
This year we feel like we are on vacation because we are farming in proper soil. Right now we call it “The Julys” because we’re burnt out a little bit, it’s hot, your spring and summer crops look like crap but your late summer crops haven’t come in yet. Other than that, it is so much easier to farm here. You’re not fighting the ground all the time.
That seems really hard. You had to wait for a good tract of land to come up for sale before you could improve your situation.
Finding this place was so lucky. There are very few universes where we should be here right now.
What conspired to make it possible do you think?
It was mostly luck and white privilege, honestly. Obviously we work hard but a lot of people work hard and never get this lucky. This farm is spectacular. It is a showpiece of a farm. The house is beautiful. The barn is beautiful. It’s the barn on the label for Behr paint “Farmhouse Red.” There’s a gorgeous view. There’s eighty acres of pasture and fifty acres of farmland and a creek and a pond and a river. There are all these outbuildings. It does flood in hurricanes but knock on wood that won’t happen for a few years. This is not at all what we expected for our future.
Buying the farm was the hardest thing I’ve ever done — the actual acquisition. It’s a long story but our bank backed out at the last minute for no good reason, just that they’re anti-farmer, it turns out. Half of our mortgage is with the Farm Service Agency, which is a part of the USDA. That’s at a very good interest rate. The other half is at a commercial rate with a farm co-op bank. After stringing us along for weeks, Wayne Bank, where we had a whole bunch of money saved, decided they were going to pull-out. A week after that I got pretty stick. It turns out that I have Epstein-Barr, which is like mono. I was sick chronically for a year because the situation was so stressful. But it worked out.
Are you part of the broader farming community in this region? Or does organic vegetable farming constitute its own mini-culture apart from what is mostly dairy farming around here?
We are sort of a weird hybrid. We were not really understood by dairy farmers until recently. Now that we’ve been here a few years they see that we are also always working. I think there is a common perception around here that we’re gardeners? I think people assume, because there’s a history of people around here having dairy farms and subsistence gardens, that this isn’t quite a farm, it’s not the money-making part. But I think we’re kind of accepted now.
Can you describe what a year at the farm is like? Your workload and what it feels like — and which part sucks the most?
Winter is forever. It feels like the whole year here. We have caterpillar tunnels that aren’t heated that have all our spinach in them. We have four unheated greenhouses and one heated greenhouse that we keep to 33-34 degrees and we just have lettuce and bok choy in there. We have to pay a lot for fuel, so we probably don’t make any money on it. We go back and forth on it, whether that one greenhouse is worth it. Our customers like to have lettuce and bok choy but we could fill the whole thing with spinach and kale and not heat it. We have those fresh crops throughout the winter and then we have some storage crops.
Cabbage and potatoes?
Yeah, we’ll have potatoes, carrots, beets, and daikon radishes until May or June. We usually have somebody stay on part-time through the winter to harvest and prep for market and help with any projects we have. Usually I have one office-y project a year to do. Like buy this house or apply for a grant. There’s always something. Every year you have to apply to all your markets, which is not hard but is a thing to do. And we have to do our organic farming certification, which gets easier every year but still takes a week to figure out. And then there’s all the planning that we have to do. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. We have to do our seed order, which I do by the first week of January, but to know the quantities we have to have our whole crop planned and to have our whole crop planned we really need to know what all of our markets are going to be. It’s always a bit of circuitous plan: everything depends on everything else.
Are those seeds you’re ordering measured by the pound? How does that work?
It’s all different. Different companies have different nomenclature and even different nomenclature within their offerings. It’s very frustrating. Sometimes they’re sold by the ounce, sometimes by the seed, sometimes by the “m,” which is a thousand seeds.
So just as an example, how many broccoli seeds are you buying for the year?
Well, broccoli is a hard one. This year we upped our broccoli because everyone loves it. And this year we’re seeing a new pest called the sweet midge that’s only been around for a few years. They’re going crazy, they’re going to eat all our broccoli. But we usually spend about $13,000 in seed, that’s an easier way for me to measure it.
That’s a lot of seeds.
It is a lot of seeds and I think it’s higher than a lot of other farmers but I don’t know how to change that — you’ve got to grow the plants. We don’t have a lot left over usually. We try to be really good about ordering it all in the winter or else it’s July and we don’t have it. This past year was our best attempt at that. The crop plan is a big thing but it gets easier every year, it just becomes tweaks.
Is that you sitting down with highlighters and pieces of paper or is it all on the computer?
Spreadsheets. I can show you. It’s right here. [Opens laptop] So this is alphabetized by crop. You have the date it gets seeded and the date it gets transplanted and how many trays are seeded and all the different varieties. I translate that into the seeding order, how many seeds we’re going to buy, if we have leftovers, where they are from because we need to keep track of all our seeds for our organic certification. This is the weekly schedule. I transcribe all of the data by crop so we have a snapshot, what at a glance we need to do.
And these dates are all based on the math of, “I know I planted it x so I will need to transplant it by y?”
Yes. When we first got started we used different calculators online where you plug in your first frost date and then, through trial and error and more researching of other methods, we figured out all of our dates that we use. And then it’s sort of just feel. If you go to the crop plan, you can see, for example with the salad mix: for the first outdoor planting we seed those on February 24th so that they can get transplanted April 6th. We seed it seven weeks earlier than we want to transplant it because things grow so slowly in the spring. In the next planting, we seed it five weeks earlier than we want to plant it because things speed up. The next one is four weeks earlier. The reverse happens in the fall, where you have to cram more and more seeding into fewer weeks because it takes longer for things to reach maturity. So that has just been trial and error and getting a feel for it.
And error just means you go, “Oh shit, all of this stuff is coming in at once?” Not so much that things are dying?
Yes, it’s that the timing of things is not optimal. You’re constantly trying to optimize so that you have the perfect amount of food every week. It’s always a process towards perfection, we’re obviously not there. Right now, with the heat and other factors, all of our salad and lettuce mix is super unhappy so we’re just not going to have enough for next week, which sucks but that’s how it is. Every year we get better at having more variety and more consistency but there is always something that we mess up or that the weather messes up.
Okay so we’ve gotten as far as the first week of January. So much has happened, you’ve spent $13,000.
[Laughs] Okay so the first week of January! There’s a lot of office-y stuff that is happening. I do most of that. It used to be split between me and Patrick but as we’ve had kids I have started doing more of that. We could be full-time through the winter, both of us, but since we have kids, one of us needs to be around when they get home from school (usually me). Then we start a whole bunch of our seeds in February. By March our greenhouse is totally full. In April we start going to more markets and we have more food, new food coming from our greenhouses. In April we start planting outside.
What are you planting outside in April?
In April we do all of our lettuce and kale. We cover it all with row cover, this thin fabric that keeps it warmer. We have moveable hoop houses, that’s one of our cooler systems, that have lettuce and salad mix in there through January. Then we clear that out and seed carrots. We move the hoop house off the carrots in late March into a new spot, we let it heat up for a week and then we plant summer squash. In May we take it off the summer squash and put in our tomatoes. In the fall we plant our salad mix outside, not under the hoop house, and then when our tomatoes are done in October we move it onto the salad mix. Then that’s on our salad mix until January and we start the whole thing over again. That’s the coolest part of our farm, that little system that works out.
In May we are starting to get busier. In June we are pretty busy. July is tough. You have all the food you had in June, plus any weeds that have happened are now at critical levels and you need to get them out because they’re going to seed. Also we are starting all of our winter and fall crops: a lot of stuff is getting transplanted, the direct seeded stuff is getting seeded. We can also have really crappy hot or wet or dry weather in July, so we are managing that: irrigating or dealing with things not germinating because it was too hot or everything is rotting because it’s too wet. July can be tough and you’re kind of burnt out. Also from June through Thanksgiving, we don’t have a day off as a family. Starting in August I’m like, “Okay but can we just take a day off as a family?” On my day off I have two kids, which is not a day off. If they outnumber me, it is not a day off. July and August are kinda the same. Then in September the kids go back to daycare and school, it’s cooling off a little bit, but then there is a lot of heavy stuff: all the potatoes are coming in, all the winter squash is coming in. Into October all the beets and carrots are coming in. It’s a lot of heavy, dirty stuff. We try to plant our garlic before the ground freezes but every year we are somehow planting it in the snow.
With what? An axe?
Actually yes. We’ll stab rebar into the ground to stick them in. Then the whole thing starts over again.
I’ve got to tell you: garlic has been the biggest question mark in our household. We’re like, “How does it make sense for them financially to plant and grow and sell garlic?” Is it just part of the larger offering where people want garlic so you grow it for them despite its low profit margin? Do you grow it at a loss? We just assumed so because it takes so long to grow.
I think garlic is not a loss for us. This past year we almost tripled our garlic production. For a while we were going to cut garlic because it was all tiny and crap. But every year we would save the biggest and nicest heads and plant those. Every year they’ve gotten bigger and bigger and finally we have gorgeous garlic. We feel very comfortable charging $2 for garlic because it is great garlic. But it is in the ground for a long time. When we didn’t have a lot of space it didn’t make that much sense. And you have to weed it, which is not great. Then you have to find space to cure it and to store it all winter. If they are all nice heads of garlic, it makes sense. But it took a long time and a lot of threats to the garlic, like “You’re gonna get cut!” They listened, they shaped up.
Are there other crops like that where — I mean I know there are mostly only thin margins — the crops don’t feel justifiable? Or others that are cash cows?
Nothing is a cash cow, per se. Things often don’t make the cut and we stop growing them. Brussels sprouts do not make the cut. For a while we thought sweet corn wasn’t worth it but then we just started charging $1 an ear. If you want cheap sweet corn, if it offends you that we’re charging that much, then go anywhere else! I’m not doing it for less because it’s not worth it to me. Some things we grow even though they’re not the most profitable things because I really like growing them, like cabbage. It doesn’t make that much sense. They spend so long in the ground and then if it goes great you end up with these huge cabbages that are $2 a pound, you’ve got a $10 cabbage that no one is going to pay for. Scallions don’t make that much sense. When things don’t make the cut we don’t do them. Or we bring them back a few years later and try to grow them better. Often we’ll keep the crop but change the variety — that variety sucks or it just doesn’t like our farm.
I guess you would really have to have someone farming in the exact same place at the exact same time with fifty years of experience in order to not have to figure out each crop on your own every single time.
People have asked us what we think has led to our success and I think the only skill that Patrick and I have is good intuition about what is worth it and what is not. We don’t just do things because that’s how we were taught or that’s how we think we should do it. Maybe it is just because I want to work less but I will say, “That was not worth it and I’m not doing that again.”
What was going through your head when the pandemic started?
At first, when we didn’t understand the timeframe, I thought maybe we shouldn’t go to market for a couple weeks. But then when Patrick and I talked about it we decided it was way safer to shop at the farmer’s market than at the grocery store. Our customers should come to us and we want to stay open. We put in whatever protocols we had to to make it work. Honestly, our sales have been much better this year. We were able to stop doing a lower-performing market that was kind of far away. We sell directly off the farm from our online store and our other markets have mostly been higher in sales. In the great covid balance, we’ve kind of come out ahead. But it is tricky. You do have to worry about customer perception, customers’ feelings of safety.
Did you feel like your customers started to appreciate you more when covid shut businesses down? Or understood better what role you play in their lives?
Yeah, absolutely, as soon as people didn’t want to go to the grocery store they appreciated us more. Also a lot of people are doing their own gardens now so they’re coming to us to ask for help. It kills me. I don’t garden. I’m a farmer. Other people realize that it is not easy or intuitive and that it’s pretty tricky to grow things.
Is farming supposed to get easier over time?
I hope so! At our other farm it was never going to get easier because we were constantly fighting the rocks. But this year we got our fancy Italian transplanter and we have a new finger weeder, that’s helped out a lot. I hope it continues to get easier and easier. But I don’t know what our perfect size is. My ego is wrapped up in it too. I feel like we go to markets where I know I can grow more food than I can sell. But that’s a stupid reason to change your business.
You have two kids. How do you do this with two kids? Especially when there is no school and no childcare because of the pandemic? Did you have people you could talk to about what it would be like to farm with two kids around before you decided to go for it?
It is hard. No, I was just an idiot. I had a very powerful romantic imagination about meeting my soulmate, who I did, and having a child, and how beautiful that would be and how satisfying that would be. It sucks a lot of the time. [Laughs] Obviously, it goes without saying how much I love my kids.
Those two feelings aren’t mutually exclusive!
It can be really challenging. They fight a lot. They whine a lot. They’re also really cute and funny sometimes. But there will be phases — and we are currently in a very whiny, argumentative phase — where it’s tough.
Do you remember not being tired all the time?
[Laughs] No. I haven’t been not-tired since before I got pregnant, I would say.
What is it like managing people?
That was maybe the steepest learning curve, honestly, more than growing anything. I definitely struggled with the power dynamics and not wanting people to think I didn’t value them or didn’t think they knew what they were doing. I overcompensate. People actually do just want to know how I want something done and then they will do it. But our crew this year is really easy to manage — even though almost none of them have worked on a farm before and so their skill levels might not be super high, their attitudes were great.
Is attitude more important than skill level?
Oh absolutely. One thousand percent.
How connected do you feel to what you studied in school? Does your interest in women’s and gender issues factor into the farm? Or feel relevant in Delaware County?
I’d say social justice issues are still present in my head, in the things I read and listen to, what I digest. In school I was surrounded by queer people and mostly women — mostly white people because we were at a Seven Sisters school — but now, living here, I definitely miss being attached to queer culture. Patrick used to live in Japan (he was there for six or seven years, he had a wife) and he talks about that feeling like a distant dream compared to our current lives and the culture we live in. Now that I’m in a heterosexual relationship, I feel some analogous way, though maybe to a lesser extent. I miss having a queer community. But since I’m no longer in a queer relationship I don’t feel like I have a right to be very vocal about that.
Back when I was always dating women I was terrified of falling in love with a man. I’d fallen in love with men before, I knew it was possible. But I was terrified of finding my partner and him being a man and losing that whole queer side of my life. That is exactly what happened. But Patrick is the person for me so there was no choice in the matter. I live here. This area is not a mecca of queerdom. But I want to live here and it is more important for me to be here than be in a queer community.
New York City has so much to offer in the way of diversity of opinion and race and gender. Living between there and here for the last few years, I’ve been weighing the offerings in the city vs. what you experience upstate. That trade-off and the values that a choice to live in one place and not another represents have been on my mind a lot.
I think about the positives and negatives of raising kids up here a lot. I think it is definitely a net-positive and I think the area is very diverse, just not racially diverse. My kids’ best friend’s parents have an American flag, a Blue Lives Matter flag, and a Trump flag. His other best friends are a giant family of Mormons. We could live somewhere more populated and have less of one kind of diversity, live somewhere my kids wouldn’t come home and say, “Hey they said boys can’t marry boys mom. Why did you tell me they could?” And then I would have to explain that, “The Supreme Court said that boys can marry boys. And I’m not Christian so I don’t believe what they believe. You can decide what you believe.” If I had stayed in Western Massachusetts, even though the ideology I fall in line with is dominant there, my kids wouldn’t learn about anything else.
Yeah. I have thought about how in the city, because I can choose to interact with only people who think like me, I lose some of my connection to other ways of thinking. Up here the differences of opinion are in your face more — maybe it’s all the Trump signs — but in the city you can avoid confronting another perspective.
We had friends who didn’t want to raise their kids here because they didn’t feel like it was diverse enough. And I have always felt that there is not enough racial diversity, that goes without saying. But there is so much class diversity, so much political diversity. I really like that. My parenting ethic is like, “This is what I believe. This is what other people believe, there are lots of other beliefs. You have to pick what you want. You can’t hate Trump just because I hate Trump (though I highly recommend it). You’ve got to figure it out for yourself.” That our kids have to interact with lots of different viewpoints reinforces that.
