CSA farmer hat one of many worn by the Ridgways

This is part two in a series of articles on Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) in the Tri-state region. 

Farmers have always split their time and combined their work on the land with other occupations: Farmer/Parent, Farmer/Builder, Farmer/Emergency First Responder. Gordon and Jayne Ridgway hold all of the above titles, and one more: Town Government Officials. 

Gordon has been the first selectman of Cornwall for 28 years and Jayne is Cornwall’s Democratic Registrar of Voters. 

“The cell phone helps,” says Gordon as he shuts a greenhouse door with a bag full of fresh-cut overwintered spinach in his hand. “I can be available to the farm and the town at the same time. I started up the maple syrup evaporator at 6 a.m. this morning, had a TV news interview about the town at 9 a.m. and then several meetings, and I was back at the evaporator by noon.”

The Ridgways tapped about 1,500 maple trees this season and boiled the sap in an enormous wood-fired evaporator. 

About 12 miles of pipe zig-zags through the 20 acre sugar bush at the back of the Ridgways’ farm and they collected about 24,000 gallons worth of sap this year, which boils down to about 600 gallons of maple syrup. 

They sell the syrup at their own farm stand, the farmers markets in Kent and Cornwall, at area grocery stores — and through their CSA, a subscription program through which customers pay ahead of time and then pick up weekly shares at the farm or at farmers markets.

“We supplement the CSA vegetables with maple syrup in June to round out the shares,” says Jayne. “People really like getting to customize. Most of what they get is vegetables but there are options to add, including our syrup, pork and beef.”

The Ridgways started their Community Supported Agriculture Program as a way for customers to get all of their summer produce locally. 

The Ridgways sell to non-CSA customers at the Cornwall Co-op market on the Cornwall village Green each week, May through October, and have seen participation in the market expand in the couple of years since it was started. 

“There will be nine [up from seven] Cornwall farms at that market this year, all of whom were not selling farm products locally 40 years ago,” says Gordon.

In addition to selling their produce, the Ridgways send some of their vegetables to food pantries. 

They have a small grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation that builds on their history of working with Mothers and Others, a community group that started in the late 1990s in Salisbury and became a national organization aimed at increasing access to organic food.

Of organic certification, Gordon says, “We were one of the first certified organic farms in the state.” 

They still use the same practices today that they did then, but have decided to drop the certification. 

“Everybody knows who we are and how we grow. We decided that we didn’t need to bother with the paperwork,” which is famously extensive and laborious.

Having farmed in Cornwall for almost four decades, the Ridgways have observed a great deal of change. 

“The vegetable season has gotten longer. It used to be that there was a hard stop for growing vegetables in September. Now we’re going into November with them,” says Gordon. 

Most vegetables are annual crops but things have changed for the production they do with trees as well. 

“The shorter winters mean that the maple trees don’t have as much of the pressure that forces the sap up and out of the tree.”

But on the positive side, “We can grow peaches now where we never could when I started farming.”

While he’s been farming here for his whole life, Gordon notes that he’s a relative newcomer to Cornwall agriculture.

“Many farms in this area go back for generations. Our farm was a very prosperous dairy when the railroad came through here and many of our maple trees were planted shortly after the Civil War. 

“This area is always refreshed by new people but old timers give a framework.”

To learn more about Ridgway Farm and the CSA, check out their website at www.ridgwayfarm.com.