The Adirondack Land Trust started working with farmers in 1989, conserving 60 acres of farmland in the town of Essex. Since then, the land trust has protected 7,354 acres at 21 sites in partnership with farmers. Protecting farmland also means supporting farmers by connecting them to customers to ensure the connection between farms and communities lasts forever.

At the Adirondack Land Trust’s Annual Conservation Celebration on August 17, Stewardship & Farmland Specialist Aaron Thomas hosted a panel discussion on the future of farms and communities. He was joined by Shaun Gillilland, proprietor of Ben Wever Farm and Supervisor of the Town of Willsboro, and Josh Stefani, program manager of the Adirondack Food System Network.

The following discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

Aaron Thomas, Adirondack Land Trust: Shaun, I’ve heard your son-in-law say that you think of yourself as a grass farmer instead of a beef farmer. What does that mean at Ben Wever Farm?

Shaun Gillilland, Ben Wever Farm: The beef cows are my employees. They do the work. The grass is what we monitor for the health of the farm. I’m a grass farmer because grass is what my employees eat. They manage the grass by putting nutrition back into the soil and they manage the consumption of the grass, all of it going toward building and maintaining healthy soils. If you don’t protect soil, everything else is moot. So, yeah, I’m a grass farmer. That’s what I look at. That’s what I monitor. That’s why I ensure that we don’t overgraze, and we give adequate rest periods. I practice adaptive grazing, which means it’s not prescriptive. It’s adaptive, depends on the conditions and my objective is to regenerate.

Aaron: And Josh, what is the Adirondack Food System Network and what services can it provide?

Josh Stephani, Adirondack Food System Network: The Adirondack Food System Network started back in 2021. During the pandemic, a handful of organizations came together, including the Adirondack Land Trust. They said, what can we do to not only support our communities, support our farms, and support our markets? How can we build capacity for the organizations that were stretched thin? We provide that moment of collaboration. We highlight what is being done in different counties, and help organizations, farms, communities talk together to share best practices and really advocate for themselves.

The services that we provide aren’t necessarily what you would see when you visit a food pantry or visit a farmers market. Those organizations, those communities, are doing that frontline work, but can’t advocate for policies that directly impact them. We support them two or three steps upstream, where people are thinking about food policy, food procurement, farm to institution, looking at the market streams for consumers and producers. The food system doesn’t end at a county line, and so we’re trying to look at it from a broader perspective. We’re widening that net to really understand what our food system is about. That means talking to conservationists, talking to farmers, to food pantries, to retail grocery stores, and even box chains.

Aaron: Shaun, your farm is part of this food system. What challenges do you face when it comes to getting your product to consumers?

Shaun: Being here up in the northern Adirondacks, we’re kind of boxed in when it comes to access to markets. We’ve got the green wall across the lake over here. Vermont is doing very well; they don’t need our products. Canada is an international border to the north. When you go out west to Lake Placid or Saranac Lake, those areas have possibilities. And then as you go south of Albany, you have a tremendous network of good farms in the Hudson Valley or Mohawk Valley. They’re closer to the big markets, the large cities. So we have a special challenge of moving our products. Working with the food system network can help.

But the biggest challenge in the future, for me, is how to get farmers to come here and have a good living. I’m lucky. I did 25 years in the Navy. I’m on federal retirement. My health insurance is taken care of. Quite frankly, if I don’t make a profit, it’s not going to kill me. But many of my compatriots in farming, if they don’t make a profit, that’s going to kill the farm. So building a network of market confluence to move and promote the products, move and promote our brand up here, gets us access to much larger markets. And from an economic point of view, it’s important to juice up demand for Adirondack farm products.

Aaron: Josh, what are some of the barriers that make it hard for local people to not only purchase but consume these local foods?

Josh: Markets is the answer, right? We need to think about the affordability of local products and incentivizing that for consumers, which then means the fair value of the product is given to producers.

And we should look at the state level. What are the opportunities to increase funding to make it more doable? How can we advance CSA shares so that we can use New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets or Department of Health funding to reduce some of the barriers to spending on local products? And then also supporting local retail outlets. Because for individuals who have to travel long distances just to get to a grocery store, those transportation costs are some of those biggest challenges that we’re seeing for communities.

And for farmers, it’s about making sure that they can meet costs. About 90 percent of farms in New York State are less than $100,000 in revenue. How do we incentivize those products with fair prices for those farmers so that they can continue to operate? That means bolstering the ways we can increase spending directly with those farms, creating those avenues for communities and individuals who live in the Adirondacks year-round to spend close to home.

Aaron: Shaun, what does success look like to you as a farmer, and why did you decide to work in partnership with the Adirondack Land Trust to conserve your farm?

Shaun: Success for us is being able to farm, being able to produce a healthy and good quality product. And do that without sacrificing the natural beauty or the ecosystems that also share the land with my farm.

Since becoming farmers, we learned more about grassland birds. If farmers wait till July to cut hay it could increase the survivability of threatened species. That got us thinking, maybe we should take that into account and do that. And we did, and now we see lots of different species of grassland birds on our farm. The grassland birds seem to almost work into the grazing pattern, which is very heartening.

The other thing that we became familiar with was the landlocked salmon issue. I worked very hard as the Willsboro Town Supervisor and was successful in being able to take down a dam to see if Atlantic salmon would come back, an extraordinarily unique type of species that could be reintroduced and hopefully become a self-sustaining population. That fascinated us and we wanted to be a part of that. With all the work the town was doing with the salmon restoration, Chris Jage [Conservation Program Director for the Adirondack Land Trust] and I had developed a relationship through that. And we were looking at trying to get these conservation easements up and down the Boquet River to help protect it from agricultural runoff. That was the next big problem for the salmon, because we get too much runoff and it destroys the salmon redds [‘nests’]. I said, I’d like to get involved with that. So we did.

The nice thing in working with the Adirondack Land Trust, or from our point of view, was when you looked at the what the “restrictions” were for the conservation easement and what we do on the farm, it meshes very well. We’ve had the conservation easement in place about a year now, and it’s had no effect on our farm operations whatsoever.

The Ben Wever farm goes back to 1829. We took over the farm from Ben Wever himself, who had had it in his family for many generations. My wife Linda and I said, well, everybody knows it as ‘Ben Wever’s place,’ so we’ll name it the Ben Wever Farm. We wouldn’t have been here without Ben, and we wanted to honor that legacy.

When we got the farm from Ben, he wanted us to have it, because we wanted to farm it, and that was his legacy. He did not want it chopped up into eight-acre McMansion sites. The conservation easement, to us, is a legacy in his honor so that the farm will be a farm long after we’re gone.

Aaron: Josh, what does success look like to you as a program manager of the Adirondack food system network? Can you give us an example of a policy solution that could strengthen our local food system?

Josh: I think success when it comes to agriculture and our food system means taking care of the livelihoods of our producers and that their products are making it back to Adirondacks. Considering that 20 percent of New York State’s agricultural output comes from this region, the 21st Congressional District, that’s a significant number that isn’t necessarily making it back to our communities. That’s $1.8 billion that could be reflected in our communities. And how we get there is through bringing those voices to the table and making sure we elevate that at a state level and making sure that it’s a collaborative process that brings all the counties of the park together.

There are efforts to allow state institutions to incentivize local procurement, so local beef could make it into hospitals or schools or prisons, for instance. That’s an avenue that hasn’t been explored before because of barriers we put into place. The big success piece for me is making sure that each one of our 12 counties within the food system network, their voices are being heard on a state level and in the same rooms that some of these policies are being decided.

Aaron: What are some of the hopeful things you are seeing as you seek to strengthen the Adirondack food system?

Josh: I think there’s more attention being paid to some of the problems that farmers are facing. Looking at incentivizing or reducing the cost of farmland within the state. That’s a big piece, and as the new generation of farmers moves in there are a lot of great success stories happening there.

I think there’s a movement as we live within a pandemic world, to focus more on collectively doing this together. Maybe that’s the idealistic version of me but putting those different pieces together to look at the whole picture. There’s a willingness to look beyond individual communities for the success of the larger Adirondack region. There’s a push towards revitalizing downtowns and creating opportunities to put local food in these communities, and then incentivize both farmers and consumers to partake. I think that’s a huge win. We’re seeing more and more of that and it’s movement in the right direction.

Aaron: Shaun, what gives you hope about farming in the Adirondacks for the future?

Shaun: What gives me hope is we’re going in the right direction. It seems like all the cylinders are firing at the right time. With conservation and the move to make farmland affordable, more people are wanting to come and farm. That’s probably the biggest thing, at least in Essex County, the average age of the farmer is actually starting to turn down. The people who are coming here are not coming for a second career, like me, but making their first career in farming, which is great.

The whole idea of developing local food systems is critical. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I had five freezers full of beef. Then the national food system collapses. In two weeks, I sold out. Of course, I couldn’t get another cow processed for over a year after that because the system had collapsed. But it really made people aware, when they went to Hannaford’s or Price Chopper and there was nothing on the shelves, harkening back to going shopping in Moscow around 1973.

And climate change is here. We’re dealing with the effects and the cost. You can feel it today, in August, how much water is flowing through streams that are normally dry this time of year. Things are changing in a vast way, things that are going to challenge the strength and the viability of our national food system. There has to be change, there has to be an interconnected network of local and regional food systems. We just can’t continue as a country that thinks [big box stores are] going to solve all our problems.

Aaron: Thank you both so much for being here and having this discussion with us.