MacArthur Award winner seeks new markets for agriculture
Sunday, November 28, 2004
BY KATHLEEN O'BRIEN
Star-Ledger Staff
PINE ISLAND, N.Y. -- As the road winds north from New Jersey, it crests a small ridge to reveal land so fertile it jolts the pulse of any farmer.
This is Orange County's famous "black dirt," fine and powdery, the glacial lakebed muckland that for generations has sent the world its onions, lettuce, celery and sod.
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It is here, a hop, skip and an onion field from Vernon, N.J., that the Rogowski family followed that time-honored formula for agricultural success.
And it is here, borne of necessity and nurtured by restlessness, that they changed.
Today, the dirt is the same but not much else. In addition to the 250 varieties of fruits and vegetables harvested, W. Rogowski Farms has produced something unique in agriculture: the first farmer to be named a MacArthur Foundation fellow.
The "genius" awards, which come with a $500,000 grant over five years, are well-known and coveted in academia, where they have freed scientists, poets and artists to write, create or research without financial worry.
Cheryl Ann Rogowski, a 43-year-old fourth-generation farmer, joins this year's crop of fellows, which include an MIT nanotechnologist, a Princeton marine roboticist and a Manhattan glass sculptor.
Since the award was announced during the harvest, she has had little time to dwell on it. There are still crops in the field -- hardy radishes, squashes and gourds, lima beans and all manner of dried decorative plants. All must be attended to before the hard frost sets in.
The only purchase she's contemplating is a used excavator to clear her drainage ditches.
In selecting her, the MacArthur Foundation cited her "re-invention of the family farm," noting that while most farmers focus their efforts on increasing supply -- the crop -- Rogowski has focused on increasing demand by finding new markets.
Instead of selling a single crop to a wholesaler, as her father, grandfather and great-grandfather did, Rogowski sells directly to a pool of 75 families in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This Community Supported Agriculture program has each of those families paying up front for a share of the harvest. During the growing season, they collect their share in Brooklyn each Saturday.
If it's a good growing year, they get lots of fruits and veggies. If it's a lean one, hampered by flood or drought, they get less -- and know the reason why, by virtue of her monthly newsletter.
The process savvily shifts some of the risk of farming off the shoulders of the farmer and onto the consumer. In the spring, for example, when 80 percent of the farm was under water, her customers suffered along with her. "I don't think they wanted to see turnips or watercress ever again," she said.
She has experimented with smaller CSAs for Hispanics, senior citizens and soup kitchens, and established the first CSA for the poor. She mentors immigrant farmers seeking to establish their own farms. She supports literacy programs for migrant workers and public art exhibitions. In short, she has turned what used to be a humble onion farm into what the MacArthur Foundation has called "an engine of community development."
"She juggles all this and still manages to stay one of the warmest, most generous farmers I know. You'd think someone like that would be a classic Type A, all stressed out," said Duncan Hilchey, senior extension associate at Cornell University. He recalls asking her to give him her assessment of three separate city farmers' markets she used. The very next morning, he received a sophisticated profitability analysis spreadsheet by e-mail.
The Rogowskis, like the other Polish-Catholic farmers who settled in this valley just west of Warwick, N.Y., reaped the land's bounty with a single crop: onions. But for all their success, their fate was chained to two unforgiving equations:
Good year for onions equals good year for Rogowskis.
Bad year for onions equals bad year for Rogowskis.
They kept on a sunny side of that formula until 1983, when their land was tainted by some form of infestation. Row upon row of onions mysteriously developed long gaps -- sections where the onions had simply disappeared. "Nobody knew what it was or how to treat it," Rogowski recalled. (The mystery remains to this day.)
The family was left with three choices: fumigate their holdings, rendering them useless for a few years, quit farming altogether or switch to crops outside the alum family in hopes something else would outwit the blight.
The family that specialized in onions was now forced to grow "everything but," as she put it. Their move to tomatoes, potatoes and squashes -- a move made in desperation -- ended up being key to their economic survival, for it began the diversification of which Cheryl is now master.
Ten years ago, getting a little bored, Cheryl convinced her dad to give her 5 acres so she could grow the fancy specialty herbs and greens she saw in gourmet magazines: cilantro, purple carrots, golden beets. It represented the next step in the family's journey to diversification.
On a recent rainy morning, Rogowski gave a tour of the storage building that houses the farm's produce stand. Two of her five full-time seasonal employees were busy dividing dried lima beans into zip-lock baggies for that weekend's Brooklyn run.
Half of the building is being converted into a commercial processing kitchen, where she can make vegetable soup to market to local restaurants. She envisions neighboring farms hiring time in her kitchen for their own processing needs, turning the kitchen into a moneymaker along the lines of a traditional village flour mill.
As she talks, she nonchalantly cracks an egg into a mason jar of flour and spices, then drops spoonfuls of batter into a pan and covers the top with fresh apple slices. There are no measuring spoons, no oven timers, just an experienced cook with dirt under her fingernails making up a warm snack for her workers on a chilly morning.
When she calls them in for their break, she speaks fluent Spanish, a language she learned from the migrant workers she worked alongside in the fields and perfected when she went to college and minored in it.
The MacArthur money comes during a year of changes for Rogowski and her family. When her father died five years ago, her brother Mike took over the farm. Cheryl continued to work at her day job for Sterling Forest, the developers. This past spring, Mike decided he needed to get a steady paycheck, so the brother and sister switched places. She quit her job to become the family's main farmer. (Her mother helps.)
As to what they now grow on their 150-acre spread, well, it would be quicker to list what they don't grow. Where most people see weeds, Rogowski sees the opportunity for "wild foraging" of watercress, garlic and chamomile. They plant a different crop every seven to 10 days -- everything from heirloom squash to hardy kiwi to 40 varieties of chilies. She still reads Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Savor magazines to keep abreast of what is this year's chi-chi recipe ingredient.
The MacArthur call came one morning in late September. She had heard of MacArthur grants, but had no idea how much money was involved. Program director Daniel Socolow first told her it was huge and finally had to resort to the cliché warning that she'd better sit down. She was stupefied, for her definition of "huge" was $10,000.
"The first thing I did was to go to the fields and do a lot of talking to God. Then, when I got home, I went on the Internet," she said.
What she discovered was that this quirky award carries no strings whatsoever. "You will never hear from us again" is how Rogowski said Socolow phrased it. Its recipients do not have to account for the money in any way and can spend it how they choose.
Her only immediate plans are for that used excavator, which will cost about $25,000, and to help get a small museum off the ground to chronicle the Polish-American "black dirt" farmers of this region. (And perhaps to get a laptop.)
Oh, and to write that cookbook she has had knocking around in her head all these years.
Her mind, as fertile as the soil she grew up around, is always coming up with new ideas. How about twilight raspberry tastings in the picnic grove near Pochuck Creek, complete with live music?
As she walks through the cavernous kitchen, whose transformation to a commercial venture is just beginning, she frets about how much work there is yet to do. So far they've scraped by with old equipment bought from churches or school cafeterias.
It has been a wild autumn, completing the first harvest she has been in charge of at the same time she has coped with the instant cachet the MacArthurs confer. Walking through the half-empty kitchen, she worries about turning the grand schemes in her mind into reality. Even though she goes to bed at 11 p.m. or midnight and gets up at 4 a.m., there still aren't enough hours in the day to get it all done.
"It'll come," she says, almost to herself. "It'll come together. Winter is here."
Find out more
Want to learn more about Community Supported Agriculture in your neck of the woods? Try www.csacenter.org for a list of local farms that offer it.