We are announcing the launch of our nonprofit The Catskills Agrarian Alliance which we’ve been secretly developing over the past 1.5 years. The nonprofits brings the work we’ve been doing for many years together to promote our local food/mutual-aid movement, which have all been ways we attempt to intervene in a food system predicated on a corporate feudal system. Specifically, The Catskills Agrarian Alliance encompasses (1) Community Organizing & Mutual Aid (2) Land access for BIPOC farmers (3) sustainable food production and alternative distribution and (4) farm to school work.

SOME HIGHLIGHTS! This past year we grew and donated 17,543# of food to our partners with the help of your donations, sales, events,  and grants! It was also the first time we farmed with a majority BIPOC crew including @iridiscentearthcollective. We grew black beans, potatoes, garlic, at our new forever-farm we purchased in 2021. Nuestra Mesa held weekly farm stands in the city with Mexicano Unidos and La Morich with free produce  and cooked food, to further active community support for a more food-sovereign world. Over the 2022-2023 school year, the CAA distributed 30,000 pounds of local product to K-12 schools across the region.

While grassroots initiatives build local food economies and  local models of food production can sustainably meet peoples needs, small-scale, ecologically-based farming is in direct opposition to global agribusiness and receives no funding from the USDA. The Catskills Agrarian Alliance is our fighting strategy towards real diversity at every level and hopefully a story about strengthening  ecological responsibility in a world characterized by ongoing environmental/social irresponsibility.

Future Foods collaboration with Hartwick College

This past year we were in class with Dr. Carlena Ficano and her students at Hartwick developing a subsidized 10 week CSA for 10 families. We spent the winter over Zoom classes, working with students and chef Kara Lewis on a project that would begin to address food insecurity in our area. Our questions included: Why should the healthiest food go to the highest bidder? How can local producers more effectively feed our region? How do students envision their futures? How do we commit to  social and environmental justice in the face of a world-wide pandemic and climate change?

Dr. Ficano and students Emily Edmunds, Lydia Marteney, Roxanne Mitchell, Keif Timmins were instrumental in driving the work. Through the course of the class, we developed a partnership with a local social service agency, Catholic Charities. We  conducted interviews with families because we felt it was important to have a personal connection to the individuals we serve, and to also understand their dietary needs. Kara Lewis then meticulously developed and wrote recipes that were included in each box, and drove partnerships with other farms that supplied eggs, cheese, grains, and milk in order to produce a full-calorie CSA.  

Through this process I think we all experienced the inherent and blatant classism ingrained in a world driven by transactional values, and that these notions are deeply embedded in our food system. However, it is encouraging to be among individuals and students seeking to address these systemic inequities and are willing to care for what is outside of their own personal lives. As a farm, we were able to redistribute our produce to families who (for cultural and geographic barriers) do not shop at local farmer markets or receive CSA shares, in one of our first step towards trying to dismantle our own classism as organic farmers and care more for the vitality and health of our local community.

We are in deep gratitude to Carli, Hartwick College, Keif, Roxanne, Emily, Lydia, Kara Lewis, our fellow farmers who made this all possible, and we hope to expand this project next year!!

Local Farm Partners

• Star Route Farm

•  Kara Lewis (recipes)

• Harpersfield Cheese 

• Middle Brook Mill

• Family Farmstead

• Bakers Grimm 

• Faraway Fields Farm (eggs) 

• 607-CSA

Institutional Partners

• Hartwick College: Dr. Carlena Ficano with assistance from students Emily Edmunds, Lydia Marteney, Roxanne Mitchell, Keif Timmins

• Catholic Charities of Delarate, Otsego and Schoharie Counties: Christy Houck, Associate Executive Director

Veggie soba

with poached egg, herbs, and farm veggies

Frittata with salad

kale, potato, local eggs, sungold tomato, and summer lettuce

Vegetable Curry

kale, potato, daikon, leeks, and carrots

Burnt Orchard

To the demons within us, our ancestors before us, and mothers of all us we give thanks for your nurture and our present. May you bless this mess and help us realize how to be more of ourselves not less, make art and farm against the mad world, and acknowledge our priviledges to stand for another way of life. That we work against the idea of infinite consumption of our own selves and nature, that we learn self compassion, and continue to cultivate our deep affinity to each other.

We give thanks to the animals in our lives. We give thanks to our homes, our exploited bodies, our abundances, the food we eat, love, trees, plants, community, caffeine, the pond, the farm, the full moon, the blazing sun, our failures and continual karmic lessons, our beds, our imagination, music, the cars that transport us, and books. We give no thanks or blessings to the institutions that have oppressed us and normalize abuse.

Please help us acknowledge that we are not farming but being farmed, empower us to work with humility and destroy our egos, heal our lyme, hearts, our lonelinesses, anxiety, and stresses. Please guide us towards dismantling internalized self hatred that is the product of patriarchy and white supremacy and sharing our equity and resources to those who have been excluded from this hellscape. May 2021 be full of poetry, learning, yearning, and abundance. May the last be first. May you help us forgive and love ourselves.

Year of the Ox

Happy Chinese New Year!
We are feeling so blessed by your enthusiasm and support we have already received this winter in the Year of the Ox! Thank you for having us in your life, listening to us, being a big part of our work towards mutuality, becoming better farmers, and redistributive justice. We've been keeping silent but have all been busy crop planning, shoveling snow, feeling anxious, strategizing for the upcoming season and future funding, planting spinach, volunteering with our mutual-aid partners, and facing so many questions that are no longer abstractions.
We are guided by these inquiries: Can farming be a means for change, but first can it be work that preserves us rather than destroys us? What is the most effective means to building a strong soil microbial community allowing for a higher nutrient value in our food while increasing our soil's ability to store carbon? How do we move towards a multiracial-led food system? What is dying, living, and has yet to bloom during a time when dominance is increasingly understood as destructive?
We farm as a way to think through these questions, to transform and become more human, engage with community, and to expand our imagination for what we want to see more of- a worldview in which Earth is not just an extractable resource, food and essential needs are not commodities, and partnership replaces exploitation.
Recently we have partnered with Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Varanam, a Buddhist temple in Elmhurst, Queens. In collaboration with Min, the 607 CSA, Millicent Souris, and Bread and Life, and temple-goers, we distributed 100 bags of honey, rice, cabbage, beets, daikon, apples, and Lucky Dog potatoes and squash for Chinese New Year. Min, the temple community, and the monks welcomed us for service, fed us home-cooked meals, taught us how to meditate, and shared with us Buddhist rituals. We are so grateful to them for reminding us that the spiritual way of knowing is the way to acknowledge our interconnectivity to each other, our environment, and our ancestors. We look forward to the lessons we will learn from each other as we continue to work together!

We will be spamming you soon about our upcoming Instagram art raffle, spring plant sale, a fundraiser at Dandy Wine & Spirits, Danny take-out meal at Brushland, and joining us for Lu Biltucci's online music event on March 7th! Thank you again for being a part of us and big thank you to Chicory Creek for their support!!

Please continue to  donate. Any small amount helps! We are at $25,000 of our $100,000 goal thanks to you!! 

CLICK PHOTOS TO SCROLL THROUGH!

A great big warm thank you to everybody who has taken the journey with us and helped us in our transition towards food-sovereignty work. In the words of international farmers organization Via Campesina we want to be a part of the movement in which “the people who produce, distribute, and consume food control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution”. In a bold step towards this movement: We are driven by the question of how to pivot our farming more towards a place of thriving while we seek to raise $100,000 to fund our food-access work in 2021!

The current public health crisis illuminates the failure of the government to isolate the spread of Covid-19 and that our current food supply chain is not sustainable. While we have lost 50% of our business this past season, food banks continue to be exacerbated with demand to a point of running out of food.

This disparity signifies that plenty of food and resources are available but structural inequalities bar lower-income households, and Black, Indigenous, People of Color from basic human necessities. It also points to the extreme disconnects between the consumer, the distributor, and the producer  in our food system - restaurants will continue to close, chefs will continue to lose work, while farmers will struggle to find new markets for their products.

Yet we are humbled and thrilled by the support shown from our community in support of our food-access work. Thanks to all of you  we will continue donating our produce to  community-based organizations including: Heart of Dinner, Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, and upstate food pantries. We are asking for your continued support this year while we search for grants, and larger foundational donations, as to not depend on our community in perpetuity!

• Please read this new website to learn more.

• Proceeds from the  online store fund our food-sovereignty work. 

Consider helping us spread the word by:

• Telling friends and family who might be interested in our project by sharing starroutefarmny.com and  https://www.gofundme.com/f/star-route-farm-food-access  through social media and email! 

• Email us and tell us how to get the coin to feed the people. Share with us ideas for fundraising, food-access based grants,  and community based organizations who are doing good work please! 

We also  wanted to share some exciting and inspiring news:

• Thanks to the support of our community, as of Dec. 18, 2021, we have already raised $17,573 through our GoFundMe campaign. We are humbled and extremely grateful for this love. Special thanks to so many of you, including Ben Fain, Dave Gould, John Fox, GoFundMe, Peter Dowling, the Newbergs, Fan Hon & Sam Wong,  and the Aggar Family for their generous contributions! Love to  607 and Marc Aggar for delivering our food to Bushwick Ayuda Mutua and Heart of Dinner.

• Ricki Dwyer donated  $1,190 he raised through a raffle campaign on Instagram. 150 people donated $5-10 to win one of Ricki’s sewn fabric flags!!

• Our retired subway conductor neighbor Roy Shulman donated $1,000 to support the farm!

• We held an outdoor event at Brushland this last fall and raised $1,500 from selling soup! We sent napa cabbage and mustard greens to Heart of Dinner with this money and they were thrilled.  Special thanks to Sohail and Sara for donating their space, Jordi Wheeler for playing music, Alison Roman for the hype, Kara Lewis for making apple cake. 

• Last weekend, Kitty’s Hudson warmly opened their space for us to sell fish sandwiches, radicchio salad, and farm merchandise.  Thanks to MAYB TMRW  (who donated 450 silkscreen totes) and Super Glou (who donated boxes of wine) and chef Lauren Schaefer and her kitchen crew, Amiel, Kelly, Pruitt, Ben, Belle, and Anna we were able to fundraise $5,000! 

• Catskill Harvest has donated time in their kitchen for us to create our value added products.

This amounts to $25,000 towards supporting our food sovereignty work and sending our food to donate to pantries and mutual aid groups. We would not have been able to do this work without the generosity of our friends and family and without the continued support of the grocers and customers that continued to order with us this past year!!

Your support feeds people but also enables us to do more. 

Your solidarity makes farming more viable for us:

Tianna Kennedy - A long time farmer/organizer/artist who has dedicated her life to bringing economic prosperity to the Catskills mountains and distributing healthy food across New York State. This past year the 607 CSA employed sixteen people, supported forty farms and food businesses in the 607 area code, and fed 600 CSA members. 

Walter Riesen - farmer/former glass artist/soil-nerd who taught himself how to farm while researching farming for a television series he was writing. His endless curiosity coupled with his desire to address problems in the food system led to a collaboration with Dr. Carli Ficano. Their Future of Foods project will be  a class at Hartwick college with a  10-week subsidized CSA for 10 families in Otsego county in 2021. This project inspired Star Route’s transition into full time food sovereignty work.  

 Amanda Wong - An artist/graffiti writer/farmer who is so inspired by frontline communities of color fostering food security in New York, that she wants to farm in affinity with the mutual aid movement. She will be spending these winter months crop planning and volunteering with the community groups we are working with. 

 Danny Newberg - A kitchen-less chef/farmer who expresses care and love through cooking and sharing fermented, healthy, and  tasty meals. His transition out of the restaurant world and motivation to learn is responsible for growing the cultural emphasis on food at Star Route. He will lead take-out fundraiser events next year to support the farm and is planning to grow flowers and make teas available at next year’s market. 

Carl and Bleue came to take care of Amanda and harvest parsley

Kitty's Fundraiser December 5th and 6th 2020

SRF's becoming: Full-time food Sovereignty work on the horizon

FALL 2020 - FOOD ACCESS FUNDRAISER

Star Route Farm will be transitioning to a non-profit farm in order to expand our food-access work to provide quality, local food for all people in our region. In 2021 we hope to continue donating our vegetables to food-access projects  such as Delaware Opportunities, United Immigrant Defense Network, Ayuda Mutua, Heart of Dinner. With your help and support we will be able to achieve this goal! 

Please join us at our Star Route Farm Fundraising Meal! 

Saturday, November 7th 1-4pm 

Brushland Eating House

1927 County Road 6

Bovina Center, NY 13740

Suggested Donation: $25 

Cauldron Lamb Bone Soup with farm vegetables and grains 

Bitter sweet chicory salad with anchovy and breadcrumb 

Apple cake 

Beer and wine for drinking 

Takeout and outdoor seating available 

Live music by Strange Victory/ Strange Defeat

Socially distanced good fun!

2019 star route farm poem by Amanda Wong

live a life

with hands 

on a rusty knife

hanging with summer demons

laughing

and

farming

against the mad world

FALL FARM HANG!

Because it’s fall and we’ve worked all year and haven’t had time to chat.

DEER FENCE DINNER!

Click HERE for more information

GREGRE'S @ FABLE: PARDON MY FRENCH

FRENCH BROTHER AND SISTER HERE TO RUN POP-UP AT FABLE

MENU FOR THIS WEEK/END

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO

Price: $55 per person (includes service). Tax, beer and wine is not included. New York State wine and locally brewed beer are available by the glass or bottle. You are welcome to bring your own. A $5 corkage fee is charged per bottle. By reservation only via phone 607-278-5800, text 607-386-3226 or warren@stoneandthistlefarm.com. A credit card is necessary to reserve your seat(s). If you cancel on the day of your reservation, or if you are a no-show, your credit card will be charged the full, prix-fixe menu charge. You may send a friend in your place! Groups of ten persons or more require a nonrefundable deposit.   FABLE IS LOCATED at

Stone & Thistle Farm
1211 Kelso Road
East Meredith, NY 13757

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome,

Tianna, Constance, Walter, Amanda and I, Augustin, are happy to start a new food project at Fable.

Starting friday the 16th of June Constance and I will cook the stuffs produced by Tianna, Walter and Denise and Tom and people I still don't know like Boris or Suzanna.

Three times a week you must join us to enjoy the simple pleasure of sharing delicious food made with delicious products. And because we are french it will feel like a tiny holiday.  I'm telling you, you'll feel like a tourist at home.

So let me explain how it will work.

You have to make a reservation, by phone, e-mail, fax, smoke signal (text) whatever you want to reach us. And then we'll ask you to bring 55 dollars, preferably in cash cause we are still attached to cash.  It makes us feel richer. And then you'll have to come at seven to eat like in a regular restaurant. You're free to bring your own wine or beer.  No hard liquor.  We're not that kind of place.

You'll eat a meal between something à l'assiette, a family feast and a buffet.

To start, you'll receive a plate. In it one or two ingredients, raw or cooked, rough or subtle. An ode to eggplant, a poem about cabbage, Homlet by Sheggspeare.

The main dish will be shared with the 5 or 6 people around you. A juicy piece of meat with five, six side dishes. Family style! as if you had the chance to grow up in a family with proper cooks.  

Also side dishes won't be meaty at all. And at least half of them will be a hundred percent vegetables or fruitables.

Still hungry ? No problemo, you'll have access to The Amazing Desserts Rolling Table, glitter, glitter, psh boom.

If you're brave enough you'll choose between different kind of desserts. Tarts pastry style, lemon or chocolate. Poached summer fruits in a light flavored syrup or in a wine and berries syrup. Aspics, which are fruits stuck in an home made jello, it sounds gross but well done it's a refreshing delight in your mouth. Floating islands, best known as îles flottantes, which means floating islands in French ; eggs, milk and sugar mysteriously mixed to obtain something edible and oké nice. And last, a clafoutis (you should use a heavy french accent while reading this word).

I don't know how I can make you come, but please come. It can be nice. I just can tell you that if I had been me I definitely would have bought a ticket to the US to spend a night at Gregre's, pardon my french !

Tianna  was raised by wild tigers far away from upstate NY. She was eating raw rabbits her whole life when she discovered carrots, spinach, potatoes and the rest of the vegetables. Since then she has grown some on a farm. Sometimes when she sees a bunny, something goes wrong in her head and she needs to eat two pounds and a half of raw kale. Bam, like that, isn't it crazy ?

Walter  works now undercover at Star Route farms. He used be the famous Walter Chainbreaker, hired by the Barnum Circus. After a long tour in Europe and middle Asia he decided to dedicate his life to grow the best vegs ever eaten. Some sundays you can see him trying to break chains behind his tractor. But don't talk about it, he wants to keep his hobby private.

Constance  has a PHD in biology and she's now an entomologist specialized in moth. She's a cruciverbalist and she does sudoku hardcore level. If you have some insomnia's problems, you just have to start a discussion with Constance. I can bet you'll fall asleep in no time.

Augustin is a former pro surfer and a former hairdresser famous for mastering rainbow dyeing technics. After a yoga retreat in north Dakota he's sharing his life between cooking for people who wants to eat and building hair clips with colorful bottle tops.

CSA!

SEPTEMBER 17th - BOVINA

Joint Venture  teams up with Porcupine Hill, Green Shepard, Burnett, & Star Route Farms for a whole-animal cookout feast.  Fire starts at 4pm, dinner at 6pm, camping encouraged.  Purchase event tickets  here! 

ON-FARM WORKSHOP! Growing, Processing, and Marketing Value-Added Grains

Tuesday, Sept. 20, 1-4:30 pm
Star Route Farm, Charlotteville, NY

Interested in starting up a value-added grain enterprise?  Or are you growing or processing grains and could benefit from up-to-date, field-tested information on further developing a profitable grains enterprise? Join Walter Riesen and Tianna Kennedy of Star Route Farm and Dr. Elizabeth Dyck of OGRIN for an intensive workshop on value-added grains.  Star Route Farm will share their recent experience with growing, processing, and marketing the ancient wheat emmer.  Elizabeth will summarize eight years of research with farmers in the region on developing a locally grown grains economy. We’ll

• cover critical management practices and the basic equipment needed for high-quality grain production
• demo seed-cleaning and dehulling ancient grains using the newly developed, low-cost Stutzman/Stauffer dehuller
• survey other processing options that add value to grains
• discuss current markets, marketing strategies, and prices
• work through the costs and potential profits of value-added grain production

The workshop will also include a tasting of products made with ancient and heritage wheats, rye, and other grains.    Star Route Farm is located at 796 Co Hwy 40, Charlotteville NY 12036.  For more information, please contact starroutefarmny@gmail.com.  Brought to you by the Center for Agricultural Development & Entrepreneurship's Farm Food & Business Incubator program.