Blue Heron Farm carries on a local legacy

By Kristie Snyder, GreenStar Staff

In 2016, Birgit and Erik Landowne were looking to buy a farm. With over 15 years of experience running Pennsylvania’s first community-supported agriculture farm, the organic Kimberton CSA near Philadelphia, they weren’t interested in starting from scratch. They wanted a large and well-established vegetable-growing operation. At the same time, Lou Johns was looking to retire from the farm he’d started in 1987 with his late wife, Robin Ostfeld, who passed away in 2015. As one of the area’s oldest organic vegetable farms, Blue Heron needed experienced farmers to take it on. The match was made, and in the fall of 2016 the Landownes purchased the farm and moved north with their daughter, Maja, now a student in Germany, and son, Elias, who will attend Cornell in the fall.

Perched a short walk from the eastern shore of Seneca Lake outside of Lodi, the farm is difficult to take in at once. The farmhouse is clearly occupied by people who love to grow things, festooned and surrounded with hanging plants, houseplants, and ornamental gardens. A few farm cats laze about. The rows of hoop houses and greenhouses are readily apparent in the back yard, but most of the 30 acres under cultivation are invisible from the farmhouse, tucked into smaller parcels surrounded by hedgerows, ponds, and 80 acres of woods and wild areas.

The farm was designed by Lou and Robin to be biodiverse and extend the upstate New York growing season as much as possible, and Birgit and Erik are continuing those efforts. Rather than till entire swaths of field into bare soil, they leave grass rows between long, narrow crop beds as a means to reduce compaction and erosion (important on a slope where everything wants to run into the lake) and to increase biodiversity. The soil is protected beneath blankets of white or black plastic, the color chosen according to whether the crop grown on it likes cool or warm conditions. The plastic protects the soil from becoming waterlogged in wet years and retains moisture from the drip irrigation system beneath it in dry years, allowing the farm to maintain productivity in the face of a changing climate characterized by weather extremes.

The Landownes plan on being as deeply rooted at Blue Heron Farm as their predecessors. “We wanted to find a place of our own where we could live and work on the farm,” says Erik. “It’s a place our kids, who are interested in agriculture, can come back to and create their own enterprises.”