Local News from Marbletown, Rochester, & Rosendale
Arrowhead Farm Agricultural Center at 5941 Route 209 is a very interesting place. Five different businesses lease parts of this former dairy farm, now owned by a nonprofit. One of the five is called Treadlight Farm, owned by Matt Dell and his wife, Irene Berkowitz; they grow organic flowers. "A new farm business can't afford a property this big with the pressures of real estate being what they are today," commented Dell, meeting a reporter at the entrance to the property. "The idea was to make it more accessible. You got the Community Compost Company, there's a vegetable farm up here, there's another vegetable farm down where we're going, there's a guy who has beef cows. All in all, there's over 50 people working daily on this property," he explained while driving down a little gravel road leading to Treadlight's flower fields.
Dell spent five years as a cut-flower farmer in Delaware County. He moved that business to its present location in 2019. "Now we are also a nursery. We harvest stems for people to make arrangements with, but we also sell plants for planting... mostly wholesale to garden designers, landscape installers, other nurseries that then pot them up and throw them into bigger containers. All of our retail is done online.
"What makes us unique is that we are certified organic. There are almost no other companies that are growing either nursery plants or cut flowers and are organic. Usually, when you find organic flowers, it's an organic vegetable farm selling some flowers on the side. Certified organic does not mean you have to use organic seed," Dell clarified, "but you have to use organic seed when it's available commercially... the only rule is that it can't have been treated with any synthetic chemicals, but that's mostly an issue for commodity crops. It's not as widespread in ornamental plants.
"So this is the beginning of our leasehold here," he explained, as he parked next to several greenhouses and fields of multicolored blossoms on flat Rondout Creek bottom land. "We manage about 22 acres; there's probably an acre and a half that just doesn't really get used. We leave it for the pollinators." Instead of worrying about getting their plants pollinated, like vegetable farmers, flower growers have the opposite problem. "Pollination causes plants to drop their petals and start making seeds. We try to harvest most things before they're fully open, but that being said, we can't keep up with everything, so we share our plants with many, many pollinators, a great deal more than most farms, because we always have stuff blooming. We have about a half acre of greenhouses, two acres of perennials, and then the rest of the field space is for our annuals and biennials. That person out there on a tractor is killing weeds in our early annuals," he explained, as a small tractor moved slowly down a field. "There are implements that go onto tractors to help break up the soil around the plants that you're trying to grow... This is not driven by computer or satellite or anything. This depends on the operator. It's a little bit like a video game, you see the plants underneath you and you're trying not to kill the good ones...we do have to go out with hoes and hoe around plants, but I try to avoid that as much as possible, because it's very expensive. We currently have about 11 people on payroll, plus myself and my better half, Irene, who owns the business with me." (Their one-and-a-half-year-old son is not on staff as yet.)
"We are certified organic and we grow a lot of native plants – that’s not so unique for the nursery business, but it is for our cut flower business. There isn't a very large cut flower industry anymore in the United States. There used to be in the past, but NAFTA killed off most of the cut flower industry in the United States. Most of the bigger companies left for Central America, where they can grow flowers year-round with much cheaper labor. We're close to New York City, so we can compete. Basically, our competition is the international flower trade, which is controlled mostly by the Dutch. The Dutch have farms all over the globe." Organic flowers are a very small sector of the business as yet, Dell said. "There's very little demand for it... I don't think people really knew to buy or request organic vegetables until they started seeing organic labels on the shelves or in the farmers market. They've never seen flowers packaged as organic."
However, Treadlight is not hurting for business. "We have more customers asking to get on our availability list than we can handle, so we don't have to work very hard to sell our flowers."
What's the particular challenge of growing flowers as opposed to vegetables? "It's still farming at the end of the day," Dell replied. "Margins are very thin. It's a very expensive business to be in, and you can't really control your prices." Compared to vegetables, "our product is more expensive to grow. Everything is hand-harvested. We can't just send a machine down the road to chop all the flowers and bunch them and keep them in nice condition.
"We have to get everything to a flowering stage, as opposed to a vegetable grower. You grow a carrot, you don't need to get that plant to flower. You grow greens for eating, you don't need those plants to flower. In fact, you don't want them to flower. We have to get almost everything we grow to flowering stage." Also, Dell added, “Harvesting cut flowers requires a lot more training, it's all visual, so things have to look perfect."
Propagating flowers is also an exacting science, he said. "Vegetables have been bred by humans for thousands of years to be vigorous, to germinate quickly and to grow bigger. That hasn't been the case with most ornamental plants. Getting them to just germinate can be much, much trickier. Sometimes we put them in the cooler for several months. Sometimes we have to nick the coating of the seed to get things to sprout, or use a boiling water treatment."
Irrigation is a necessity. "It requires a lot of energy to make a flower... and a lot of water, so if we want these things to grow nice and big and robust, then we have to pump them full of water. During the summer they're drinking it up as fast as we can put it down. We start harvesting very early in the morning as early as 5 a.m. for things that are very sensitive to the heat. The quality of flowers is much better, and it's more comfortable for everybody to be working in the cooler hours of the day, so we do that as much as possible." Then, of course, they must be kept cool and delivered quickly. Dell opened the door to a refrigerated truck container full of tall bunches of flowers waiting to be transported.
He doesn't try to crossbreed, but he likes to try new things; fireweed, for example. "It springs up after a fire. It has beautiful pink flowers. We're testing it to see how well it holds up... and the best harvest stages. Because every plant has an ideal harvest stage."
"This is where we start seed in these trays," he said, walking into one of the large greenhouses. "Because we're certified organic we have to start everything from seed ourselves." The giant fans and the heating systems are powered by propane. "I'd be happy to use more solar if it was available or affordable," he commented. "We have an all-electric delivery van."
"Here we have cover crops starting to germinate," he explained, walking into a field. "Cover crops help keep the weeds down, they also create organic matter and provide fertilizer in the form of usable nitrogen. It's very efficient."
How many flower farmers are there in the Rondout Valley? "Oh, several dozen," Dell answered. "We're one of only a few, though, that do it at this scale. The vast majority are not farming at tractor scale, they're mostly walking behind rototillers, or they're doing kind of a no-till thing, [on a plot] the size of a large garden. Most of them offer a service, though. We don't offer any services, just grow products, that's all we do. So, for us, volume is of utmost importance; for those smaller growers, most of them are also arranging, doing weddings, so by providing those services, they make a living."
Making a living farming is hard enough – why choose something so difficult? "It's interesting! I would get bored doing vegetables... you're limited to 50 or 60 species of plants year after year. We grow hundreds of species, and we keep a lot in rotation. We try new things every year. As long as the stem with foliage or a seed head or a flower looks nice in an arrangement, and we can sell it, then we can grow it."
"To have enough you have to have too much," he said, commenting on a row of still-nice blue delphiniums due to be plowed under. A lucky BSP reporter left the farm with a bunch of them.
To learn more about Treadlight Farm, visit treadlightfarm.com
