FARM STANDS FORCED TO WITHSTAND CORONAVIRUS PRESSURES

As a crowded line of families with strollers and small children waits by the entrance of White Post Farms on Old Country Road, in Melville, NY, round stickers are spaced along the concrete six feet apart.

The farm’s storefront stretches for about a half mile. Large statues of giraffes and farm animals, pink perennial flower displays of garden phlox and round concrete mosaic tables line the grand entrance. To the right side there’s a green overhang that reads “White Post Farms,” with “flower and farm market,” “fall festival,” “animal farm,” “pony parties,” and “plants” listed beside and below. 

Inside, Robert Brigati sits on a tall wooden stool next to the cash register, as he checks out a customer who just bought a fall-themed wreath of leaves. 

He’s 49, wears a mask and a black collared shirt with White Post Farms embroidered across his heart. When he steps out from behind the counter, he rises to about six feet of staturet. On the other side of the counter, he pulls down his mask to take a phone call. Robert manages and tends to the farm daily, but he’s just one half of the Brigati family farm legacy. He and his twin brother, Richard, inherited the animal farm from their parents. 

 Following an almost three month shut down due to COVID-19 state-mandated quarantine, the animal farm has just reopened for the first time since March. 

“Parts have done amazing and parts have been killed,” he says, gesturing the wiping of a slate. “White Post Farms as a whole, birthday parties, completely gabashed. We lost Easter, April, May, June, all the way up to July 11— gabashed, killed.” 

White Post is one among 604 of Long Island farms that have been forced to change and adapt as a result of the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit Long Island in the spring of 2020, Suffolk County farmers were forced to open early, sell new goods and sell online or curbside to stay in business.   Some small business owners adjusted to new markets and business models with unexpected success, while others were unable to recover from the physical and economic burdens of the pandemic. In fact many Long Island farms became alternative solutions for shoppers, as opposed to crowded grocery stores. 

“I think people didn’t want to go to large places,” Brigati says. In the past months, his farm saw an increase of customers looking to buy their groceries from local farm stands. “That was the number one thing. They didn’t want to stand in line at Costco for an hour.”

Each and every one of  Suffolk County’s 604 farms and farm stands were at risk of closure when the coronavirus pandemic hit their hometowns, and the region quickly became the epicenter of an outbreak in early March. Governor Andrew Cuomo placed an executive order that mandated non-essential businesses to cease operations, forcing a state shut down until May 15. For Long Island farmers, this meant the reduction of their most active season, already shortened due to the unpredictable summer climate. Cuomo’s order also forced them to venture into new ways to bring business in their way. Surprisingly, many produce and plant farmers experienced unprecedented booms due to social distancing measures, while others inched close to permanent closure, shook by the financial hit of temporary lock downs, layoffs and product surpluses.

Brigati looks excited as he gestures at the lines of people waiting to access the main attraction of his animal farm. But it wasn’t always like this. Things looked especially grim at the peak of COVID-19. The farm serves not only as an attraction for birthday parties and family outings, but White Post also has an in-house deli, bakery, produce market, garden center and gift shop, all of which were still in business from March to late July. And Brigati had to lay off quite a few employees from each department because business wasn’t quite the same.

 “Our payroll is way up. It’s so much more expensive to do business this way,” he said. “It’s the worst. We’ve spent almost $5,000 on hand sanitizer.” But Brigati credits the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to have helped them get through. The PPP was established by the federal government during the coronavirus crisis as a loan to help small businesses keep their workforce employed.

In order to create an additional source of income during the store and animal farm’s closure, Brigati began selling cleaning products to local customers and businesses when large box stores ran out of stock. The farm had a surplus of hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies,  typically stationed at and around the petting zoo. With no people to pet the animals, hand sanitizer was of little use in the farm. 

“We had Clorox the whole time when nobody had it,” Brigati said. “It was absurd. We were selling a truckload every two days of sanitizing stuff. Everything! Hand sanitizer, toilet paper, paper towels. Everyday I would start at 5 in the morning, my first three hours of everyday,”  For months, Robert was working 14-hour days.

“We came out of this really well. Our numbers were way up in here, but they were totally different. We were doing 500 to 600 orders a week shipping out just breads and cookies,” Brigati said. Their plant sales were also booming due to more people staying indoors with more time to spend on home projects and landscaping. 

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Long Island, New York has a rich farming history that dates back to 300 years ago. But the current market doesn’t look anything like it used to.

“We’re actually unique here because of our situation and it goes back to the type of farming that we have because of economic pressures,” said Robert Carpenter, the administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau. “Farmers here have had to transition to focusing more on higher-end retail directly to consumers and for us, it's made a big difference. In normal times it has actually caused us to be a little bit frustrated because dealing with the restaurant trade, high-end markets, it's not always the easiest thing to do. But farmers have been forced to go that way because of economic pressures.”

In order to help relieve the financial pressures placed on farmers during the pandemic, numerous state and federal assistance programs like the PPP loan were put into place. 

Carpenter said that Long Island farmers don’t traditionally utilize federal programs, but the pandemic was a unique situation.

“For the pandemic, farmers did use a couple of the federal programs that were emergency funding particularly what they call the PPP and some did use the EIDL: the Economic Injury Disaster Loans,” Carpenter said. “Some did apply and receive funding for that. So that did help the farmers to some extent either maintain being able to operate and keep things going temporarily.”

The EIDL program was established to help small businesses, private non-profits and U.S. agricultural businesses as a result of the CARES Act signed into law by President Trump on March 27. 

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Pale orange curls drop from under Mary Schneider’s tan baseball cap, frizzy from the 90 degree heat on a Friday morning in early September. The freckles in her arms show under a hunter green company T-shirt.  These skin marks may be testament of decades of work under the sun. Schneider starts her days before dawn. Her home is just a couple hundred feet away on the same busy street in Melville, N.Y. (and only a half  mile down the road from White Post Farms). So getting an early start at the farm is convenient. 

At roughly 9 a.m., Schneider sells her first pie of the morning to an elderly couple. They are regulars. She tends to them wearing a blue surgical mask, behind a makeshift plexiglass window affixed to the building’s posts with just a few screws. 

“Normally we would let out customers come into the farm stand and pick and choose their own produce and items. This year we decided it’s best to keep less contact— that we do that for them,” she says.

Schneider is soft spoken and friendly, and her customers say they like this about her. She and her husband David own and run the farm, of which business mainly gravitates around selling garden flowers, fresh produce and baked goods seven days a week.  Against expectations, these past several months have been their busiest yet. Their business surged to a point where the Schneiders called upon their recently college-graduated daughter and son for extra help with the stand. 

“We kind of had all hands on deck, especially early in the spring,” she says.

This year, the Schneider’s season opened a couple weeks earlier in the Spring to prepare for the changes imposed by the pandemic. Husband and wife witnessed a rapid increase in business and needed the time to accommodate larger orders, both for produce and other goods. But the Schneider’s also began selling milk, eggs, yogurt and orange juice helping their customers avoid unnecessary visits to crowded, and regularly unstocked grocery stores.

But there was another move that helped Schmitt’s Farm Stand on the Sound in Riverhead. Matt Schmitt of the Riverhead farm stand says that during the height of the pandemic they began offering a curbside pickup for all of their items. This allowed locals to shop for their basic grocery items without having to wait on a long line outside of a packed supermarket. 

“When this all happened we were open,” Schmitt said. “Pretty much at that point we were doing curbside only. Because when it first happened people didn’t want to come in and it’s so tight in our store. Then it kind of just kept on going, a lot of people were moving out from the city and they stayed out here, so it’s just been a lot busier on that end. You know they’d rather come here than go to the grocery store, so we were real busy.”

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Since March, over 246,000 people in New York City have filed a change of address request. New York City residents have made their way to suburban Long Island to escape the city’s threat of coronavirus, and find new homes where working from home is more comfortable. This migration out east caused an influx of new customers to local grocery stores. Elizabeth Pugal, an employee of the Southampton Stop and Shop remembers how overwhelmed she was during the early spring. Their stores were already busy with the pandemic, and when a new demographic arrived on Long Island, it was even more difficult to keep up with stocking inventory.

“When quarantine first started, I'm going to say our business was maybe 150,000 a week, and the first week we went up to like 250. By the time quarantine was in full effect by April we were doing almost 800,000. We are a small store,we are a summer store so we were doing summer business in the winter,” Pugal said. 

She described what the mayhem was like during shutdown. “Customers were panicking, they were pulling everything off the shelves,” she says, grabbing the air as if to pull items off shelves. “People were afraid that they were going to get locked into their home and that they weren't going to have food, so they were grabbing everything that they could either freeze or put in their cupboard that would last for a long time.”

But for Long Island farmers, this was a plus. Ferdie Schmitt, of F and W Schmitt Farm in Melville, says 2020 was the first year in decades that he sold every single flower and plant crop they produced.

“I would say that you see a lot more people coming to our location right now because of the virus, they don’t want to go to other markets or they don’t want to go to the big box stores,” Schmitt said. “So they’ve come to us for our flower season, we had a great season, we sold a lot of flowers and we had lines of people outside our business waiting to get in. We had to separate them outside.”

Customers preferred shopping at local nurseries rather than stores like Walmart or Lowes, Schmitt said. Also, given that more residents were quarantined and working remotely, they had more spare time to start at-home projects, including landscaping. While Long Island’s retail industry faced about 52,000 job losses, garden equipment and building material dealers witnessed a 1.3% increase in sales in March. However, this increase in sales is relatively insignificant in relation to the surge witnessed by small business owners. 

This boost in home landscaping was also a good sign for Long Island sod farmers. DeLea Sod Farms witnessed a huge influx of new residential customers this season, along with hundreds of orders from their loyal golf course consumers. Frank Beyrodt, executive vice president of DeLea Sod, says the company got lucky that golfing was one of the only permissible recreational activities during the quarantine period. 

Beyrodt is also a politician. When he is not running operations at DeLea’s Miller Place branch, he acts as a councilman in the town of Riverhead, and as board member of the Long Island Farm Bureau. He also owns two golf courses and is the father of three children.

 His company, Beyrodt claims, is the largest bent grass supplier along the east coast from Augusta, Ga. to Augusta, Maine. Bent grass is the crop used for golf course greens and home lawns, and DeLea received hundreds to thousands of orders of it during the spring and summer months. This increase represents a significant increase in comparison to years past.

The company was surprisingly hit the hardest by the postponement and cancellation of sports, Beyrodt said. DeLea Sod supplies Yankee Stadium with turf for both the New York Yankees and New York City Football Club, 17 times in a season when the field transitions from baseball to soccer. But this year, the company missed out on 17 sod sales.

Despite small business’ nursery and home garden sales experiencing a boost in the spring, the greenhouse industry was initially met with some major limitations. 

Nora Catlin is waiting in front of a crop testing room at Cornell's horticultural research center (LIHREC) in Riverhead, where she directs the agriculture programs. The heat lamps on the herbs shine through the glass windows, and make her long, dirty-blonde hair appear strawberry. She is wearing a pine green Patagonia half-zipped fleece, the same color as her eyes. Once she sets down her over-the-shoulder bag, she will start guiding me on a tour through the greenhouse. Along the way she points out at different experiments or describes the crops growing behind the steel and glass room walls. The sound of the rain echoes through the hallway. 

We make our way outside the building only to see the leftovers of what proved to be a successful season. Catlin points out at a few left-over petals on a black tarp, which were once hundreds of perennial flowers which were sold during the spring and summer. 

Just past the area there’s another small greenhouse. Inside, two women are testing small pots of greenery. But Catlin directs my attention to the hundreds of acres of land that the horticultural center lends and rents to vineyards and other farms. This extension is used for crop test trials before they are actually planted for commercial use. 

These operations, she explains, were suspended for two months.

 “Even if a garden center was allowed to be open, there’s less foot traffic, there's less people coming in. Or the opposite, the interest in home gardening was skyrocketing,” Catlin says.

The greenhouse industry faced major confusion when New York State listed greenhouses as essential at the beginning of the coronavirus shutdown, but then quickly reneged this decision. In a timeline compiled by Catlin, based on email updates she sent to members of the horticultural and greenhouse industry, on March 24, the Interim Guidance for Horticulture approved horticultural businesses to proceed under the “PAUSE Executive Order.” But by April 5, New York State reversed the order. 

At that point, Catlin and the Long Island Farm Bureau tried to lobby New York State and the Department of Agriculture and Markets to relist horticulture as an essential business during the shutdown. 

“This was a collaborative effort between everyone,” Catlin said. “From growers, of course, the Farm Bureau had a very large part in sort of leading that advocacy, as well as the other trade associations like Long Island Nursery and Landscape Association. So anything from having meetings with different elected officials to help them to understand how it's impacting Growers.”

Catlin’s emails at the time show her confusion and disappointment. On April 1, when horticulture was designated non-essential, with the exception of nurseries or greenhouses that sell food-producing plants, she wrote: “So now we are back in the uncertain territory of not knowing what aspects of your businesses are essential or not. I hate to share this news without providing guidance or answers. I was hoping we'd have some more details today.” 

Thanks in part to Catlin’s efforts,  greenhouses and horticultural centers could reopen to full operations again on May 15. 

The fall time is an additional solace of hope for farmers despite coronavirus restrictions. New York State has classified haunted houses under the Department of Agriculture and Markets, allowing the farms to open their fall festivities with proper coronavirus precautions. “It’s going to be mayhem once the fall starts,” Debbie Schmitt of Schmitt’s Family Farm said back in September, estimating an increase in business with sales of pumpkins and other fall crops and activities. 

Similarly, F and W Schmitt Farm experienced their busiest time of year in October, as it is home to Long Island’s #1 haunted house. Schmitt’s Farm Haunt had sold out every weekend of October. Ferdie Schmitt says the farm has adjusted the house to have wider hallways, smaller groups at a time and distanced queues. Schmitt’s fall festival even replaced their annual bounce house attraction with Halloween-themed mini golf to ensure COVID-friendly fun. 

Robert Brigati has also adjusted the mechanics of his animal farm to accommodate extra safety precautions, like hand washing stations, and online reservation and ticketing services to ensure a safe capacity. White Post Farms was a hotspot for families this fall, so much so that Brigati added additional parking lots and outdoor waiting areas for the overflow of visitors. 

While the springtime brought hardship and uncertainty for some Long Island farmers, the next few seasons have returned some sense of normalcy and success. These small business owners were able to brainstorm creative ways to reopen while obliging to COVID-friendly precautions.