On Strengthening Local Agriculture with MX Morningstar Farms
MX Morningstar Farms is situated on 62 acres of fertile soil in the heart of Copake, NY, 100 miles north of New York City. I interviewed Max Morningstar, the farm’s owner and namesake, about some of the insights he’s obtained from 14 years of farming and the ways in which local agriculture needs to adapt to stay competitive in a global produce market.
Michaela Elias (ME): How did the farm get started?
Max Morningstar (MM): I spent the bulk of my professional career outside of Boston and then moved to Copake in 2014 to start this operation. So we’ve been in business since then, a bunch of iterations of it. We started out as a CSA with wholesale accounts, restaurant accounts, and a farm stand doing retail markets down near the city, and then slowly moved away from doing that. Now we’re almost entirely a wholesale based operation. We attend one farmers market in Great Barrington, Massachusetts but it’s grown to a wholesale farm specializing in the production of roots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. We grow other things too but that’s the bread and butter.
ME: What made you decide to farm?
MM: I cooked in kitchens throughout my high school years. I wanted to become a cook or a chef and I was thinking about going to culinary school but I got burned out working kitchens and working at night. I was looking for something else to do that maintained a certain level of intensity and connection to food but that had better hours…or different hours. I wanted to work during the day and be outside. A friend of mine knew about this educational program in Western Massachusetts and suggested I give that a shot. So I did and that was the start of farming for me. That was in 2004 and I’ve been doing it ever since.
ME: Once you started farming was there anything that really surprised you?
MM: I don’t think there was any great shock at any one time but the whole career choice was a little bit of a surprise. I think when I started farming I really thought I wanted to be on more of a homestead scale — kind of a smaller subsistence farm. I didn’t really go into it with the mentality of becoming a crop production farmer and so the surprise was that I didn’t actually want to have an active homestead or subsistence farm, I wanted to run a larger scale mechanized commercial vegetable farm.
ME: Why was that?
MM: I think to a certain extent when getting into it there’s a little bit of idealism stemming from not knowing what you’re talking about. I grew up in the suburbs so I didn’t know anything about farming. I had an image in my head which was a smaller subsistence style or homestead style operation. And so the surprise was getting into it and finding out I really liked the work and the nature of creating a more commercial vegetable operation.
ME: What are some of the vegetables you’re growing at the moment?
MM: Well it’s February so nothing is in season really, but we’re still selling a variety of root crops and potatoes right now that we put up in storage. So a couple different kinds of potatoes and some winter radishes, carrots, rutabagas and turnips. That kind of thing.
ME: When are you going to start planting for this upcoming season?
MM: We’ll fire up the greenhouse end of this month or early March and that’s when we’ll start on the production of celery root and a couple other things that need an extra long start in the greenhouse and then we’ll be out doing direct seeding and transplanting in the field early to mid April ideally. It depends on the season but somewhere between the first week of April and the last week of April we’ll be out in the field.
ME: Do you have a favorite fruit or vegetable to grow or to eat?
MM: For growing it’s a toss up between carrots and potatoes. And I don’t think I could pick one vegetable that would be my favorite to eat. It varies wildly with the season. Maybe spring potatoes… the first potatoes in the spring when they’re still really delicate and sweet and haven’t developed the starches yet. That’s one of my favorites.
ME: Do you have a favorite part of farming or favorite time of the day?
MM: My favorite time of year is spring time. There’s a certain natural excitement that happens in the spring with everything waking up and you can start to feel that ebb and flow of coming out of winter and getting excited to go out and do it all over again.
ME: Is there anyway in which you have seen agriculture change or the way people interact with agriculture changing?
MM: Yeah. This is going to be my 14th year farming, 15th production season, and I think that when I started — the local food scene was not necessarily in the early stages but even within that 15 years, to look at all of these different companies that have popped up trying to increase access is really pretty wild. I haven’t been at it long enough, there are a lot of growers who are still doing this who got started back in the 80s and for them it’s a different world. But it definitely reached a point where people are starting to wonder what the limit is to how many farms, how many distributors, how many customers…you know? That’s the question a lot of growers are starting to ask now is what’s going to happen as more and more people get into it.
ME: It seems like there’s still a lot of room to grow though.
MM: Yes but I think that the room isn’t necessarily going to get filled by just adding more farmers and adding more distributors. There’s a certain economic reality that’s going to kick in eventually where for us local guys in New York who want to compete with California, there’s a price question that’s going to have to be addressed. If you add another 20 farms to my county and they’re all growing inconsistent field grade carrots and wanting 2 dollars a pound for them, that’s not going to increase our competitiveness with the bigger distributors. All that’s going to do is cut up the low hanging fruits into smaller and smaller pieces. So there’s still a lot of room but a certain amount of that space is only going to get taken up if we find a way to start producing a competitive product because right now the majority of us are not producing a competitive product.
ME: And what is needed for that? More mechanization?
MM: I think a certain amount of mechanization, a certain amount of scale and a certain amount of cooperation is going to be a key feature in the future, especially in the Hudson Valley. I have been talking to several other growers about the possibility of starting a growers coop much like the one in Vermont or Pennsylvania because that’s going to be another piece. We also don’t have the land and ag infrastructure — speaking to vegetable farming here of course — that they do in California so we’re going to have to create a little bit of that for ourselves. We’re going to have to start that from scratch and collaborate in a professional way with a common goal.
