Green Gone Wrong. Heather Rogers
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and we drive north out of town. As we cross the Hudson River, distant Independence Day fireworks decorate the gray night sky.
Windfall Farms is located on the edge of the small town of Montgomery in Orange County, New York, sixty-five miles from the city. Pitts has been planting its soil for twenty-seven years, all of it as an organic farmer. His family inherited the property unexpectedly when Pitts was a child. An uncle who’d passed away willed a neighbor the right to use this farm until he died, at which point ownership reverted back to the family. Pitts’s father, an engineer, hadn’t thought about the place in decades, so did not anticipate the turn of events and was surprised again when his son wanted to become a farmer. “Ever since I was little, I wanted to grow things,” Pitts tells me. “I transplanted mint in an empty lot when I was three years old, and it took!”
Pitts is in his fifties, isn’t married, and has no kids, but constantly surrounds himself with friends. He’s tall with gray hair and eyes that remain serious even when everyone’s joking around; although Pitts rarely acts silly himself, he deftly draws that quality out in others. Well respected in farming and culinary circles, Pitts has received a stream of good press over the years and is praised by the likes of Alice Waters, the Bay Area, California, chef who is widely regarded as the doyenne of the locally grown organic movement.
The bedroom I’ve been assigned is on the second floor of the rambling farmhouse. In the morning I wander down to the basement, where there’s a second kitchen, an office, and the refrigerated storage and processing facilities for the produce. It’s 9:30 a.m. and Pitts appears just as I walk outside to see what he and the workers are up to. We go back in for breakfast. I ask what they’re doing in the fields, and he says they haven’t started yet. The place is nonstop on Tuesdays and Fridays when they’re preparing for market the following morning. But it’s Thursday so things are relatively quiet.
Over the years Pitts has cleared a path for his business, one that would be hard to duplicate. Before he got into the farmers’ market, he sold produce to restaurants. At first it seemed like a good idea because it meant guaranteed customers. But, as he explains over eggs from his henhouse and toast made with bread and butter he swaps for vegetables at the market, this was not tenable. “Selling to restaurants is basically like making an unsecured loan to a shaky business—no interest—that maybe will be paid someday,” he tells me. After several years Pitts was owed $40,000 by twenty-five different establishments, so he decided to get out. He then managed, after years of wrangling, to secure one of the highly coveted spots at the Union Square market. Centrally located and at a major subway hub in Manhattan, it is the busiest, most profitable farmers’ market in the region. Now Pitts only sells at Union Square, and mostly to regular shoppers; he maintains just a few commercial clients, including the New York Museum of Modern Art (for its restaurants), and chefs who buy from his farm stand. No one ever gets more than a week to pay up.
To grow Windfall’s produce Pitts cultivates only 15 of the 140 acres he inherited. Just after breakfast he takes me to see the 12 acres planted across the road from the house. The air is heavy, sunlight still burning off the morning haze. The field is luxuriant with snap peas, fennel, basil, and Swiss chard. The vegetables grow in distinct parallels at some points, then in other parts of the field they interlace and overlap. Weeds are here, too, blurring the lines between rows; a reminder that the order cultivation asserts is only temporary.
As we walk deeper into the field, green gives way to rich brown-black soil. Here the activity is mostly taking place underground. Short stalks of corn are embarking on their ascent, but won’t be ready until next month. More carrots are planted beyond the corn, and under the dark blanket of earth are kale and a variety of mustard greens that will push their way up for the late summer and early fall. These leafy vegetables are best when it starts getting cold at night; the plants produce sugar as a protective measure, so their taste sweetens. “Just after the first frost is the best time to eat them,” I hear Pitts say one day at the greenmarket. The more distant edge of the large field was recently “disked” (plowed) and will get covered with manure from a nearby horse farm in the coming days. Pitts will then seed the area with a cover crop of buckwheat, which keeps weeds from sprouting, minimizes erosion, and can be turned into the soil to add nutrients, before the next seeds are sown. The horse dung is the only substance Pitts adds to his crops from off the farm, meaning he uses no chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or insecticides.
After walking the big field we head back toward the house to check out the farm’s other three acres, stopping at the potato patch. Here Pitts is conducting an experiment with black plastic fabric that he wants to use to keep the weeds down. He’s planted a couple different varieties of potatoes along the edge of the sheeting to ascertain which will grow around the cover, and which will get stuck beneath it. The tubers that are reaching out, finding the sunlight on their own, are the ones he’ll cultivate next year.
This is how Pitts does things. “Trial and error. I farm through trial and error,” he tells me more than once. To build soil health, avoid using pesticides, and make the labor easier, he does complicated rotations and diverse plantings. He’s deciphered how to outsmart the bugs by growing crops in different places each year. He mixes seeds and tosses them into the path of the rototiller to see what will come up, like rolling dice. (While it may sound haphazard, the method, known as broadcasting, was forged by the Japanese natural-farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka over a half century ago.) By broadcasting one year Pitts discovered he could grow turnips sooner in the season than he’d realized, and by doing that, the harvest would come before a troublesome turnip-eating pest arrived. As with any type of farming, timing is key. Pitts races the weeds, planting certain vegetables so they grow taller faster, then he simply harvests from the upper areas. Planting more than he needs means the workers can pick what is easiest to reach without having to painstakingly search through dense leaves and pull weeds to clear the way. “We plant tons of stuff,” Pitts explains. “Growing it is not that expensive, picking it is. So we try to make that part as easy as possible.”
It’s midday and the laborers have arrived, about ten of them. They’ve eaten lunch but are out behind the house knocking around a soccer ball instead of working because a heavy rain is on the way. Many of these farmhands are from Mexico and have come to Windfall through Hector Gonzalez, who has worked here since 1993. As Pitts tells the story, Gonzalez approached him because he wanted a job at a place that didn’t use pesticides. For years he’d been working on another farm, also in Orange County, that gave him, as part of his wages, a house on the edge of its land. However, when the crops were sprayed, so was his home. Not only did he have to labor in the chemical-laden fields, but he and his family had to live in them as well. A few years after Gonzalez had begun working for Pitts, his sixteen-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later he died.
Gonzalez oversees the field labor at Windfall. They do the harvesting, then wash and pack all the vegetables for market. The produce goes from the field to the customer’s hands in less than twenty-four hours. The converted school bus Pitts loads with vegetables and takes to market runs on biodiesel made from waste oil he collects at restaurants in Manhattan when he goes in each week. The biodiesel also powers and heats the farm’s greenhouses. Pitts is not a numbers guy—he doesn’t keep tabs on how much fossil fuel he isn’t using, how much CO2 he’s not emitting, or how much water he’s not polluting by farming and distributing the way he does. But he’s righteous about it.
Pitts is opinionated about official USDA organic because, in his estimation, it’s simply not good enough. “It’s just a list of things you can and can’t add to your crops. I take a whole approach to farming. It’s not some checklist I tick off,” he says irritably. Since the USDA fully implemented organic standards in 2002—a process that began a dozen years earlier and went through several contentious rounds—many farmers, precisely the type that consumers imagine when they see the organic label, reject certification outright. Growers who practice organic methods—chemical-free farming and grazing, complex crop rotation to build and maintain soil health, fertilizing with green manure (cover crops that allow soil to regenerate), low or no fossil-fuel consumption, and labor practices that are more socially just—now call themselves “beyond organic,” “unconventional,” “real.”
Many of these farmers are also critical of the process of earning USDA certification