Bill Zalaker’s approach to his new job running the Long Island Farm Bureau is holistic.
“It’s not a 9-to-5 job for me,” he said. “It’s a way of life.”
Zalaker took over as executive director in September, stepping into one of the most influential positions in Long Island agriculture at a time when farmland is vanishing and costs are soaring. His mission, he said, is to keep farmers on the land and make sure the broader public understands what’s at stake.
“Farmers are notorious for not wanting to have to go and stand up and preach about this or that problem. They just want to farm … that’s where Farm Bureau comes in — as the voice for all those farmers.”
The Long Island Farm Bureau is a nonprofit membership organization representing farmers, nursery operators, vineyard owners, aquaculture businesses and other agricultural producers, that for decades has helped shape local, state and federal policy on labor, regulations, land preservation and water-quality issues.
The bureau serves as a liaison between growers and policymakers, provides education and promotes the economic and environmental importance of agriculture in a region facing intense development pressure. Its leaders have played key roles in major initiatives, including Suffolk County’s nationally influential farmland preservation program and the “Grown on Long Island” marketing campaign.
‘In my blood’
Zalaker’s path to his new role began outside Pittsburgh, where he grew up. “I was always into agriculture,” he said. “My parents weren’t, but it was in my blood from when I was a kid.”
He studied horticulture at Penn State University and, after graduation, took a job in the early 1980s on Long Island at a chain of nurseries and garden centers. When that company was sold, he struck out on his own, and in 1986 he and a partner launched a greenhouse company in Patchogue.
At the same time, he was running a side business breeding llamas, bringing the animals together for therapeutic encounters with autistic children, older adults and nursing home residents. “It was for personal satisfaction,” he said. “I worked so hard in the greenhouse and I wanted something to enjoy.”
After about a decade he joined the Long Island-based Weiss family’s greenhouse operation, one of the largest in the country, and stayed for 28 years. With locations up and down the East Coast and thousands of employees, the job gave him a crash course in the regulatory and labor thicket that modern growers navigate.
“I was kind of the face of the operation,” he said. “I handled all the employee relations … so I got good exposure to every regulatory agency you could imagine.” That experience, he said, left him with “a wealth of agricultural knowledge.”
Long Island Farm Bureau’s influence long predates Zalaker’s tenure. He recalls his predecessors, Joe Gergela and Rob Carpenter, as powerful figures in state and national agriculture policy.
“When Joe Gergela passed away [in 2022] … Hillary Clinton talked [at his funeral] … about how, when she started in politics as a New York senator, she knew nothing about agriculture, and she reached out to this guy at Long Island, Joe Gergela,” Zalaker said. “He got so powerful down in Washington … Joe actually had Bill Clinton and all them out here playing golf with the farmers.” He called Carpenter, who had worked under Gergela since he was 19, “phenomenal in the things that he did.”
Grassroots
But Farm Bureau membership has slipped sharply from its peak, with about 1,000 current members, Zalaker said, down from 7,500 in the late 1980s and 1990s.
“The Farm Bureau is a grassroots membership organization,” he said. “Everything starts right at the county level … from the local farmers out here that come up with ideas that say, I need this to be changed.”
Those ideas move through the state Farm Bureau and sometimes to the American Farm Bureau, where he once served on a national Promotion and Education Committee.
As executive director, he wants to widen the definition of who belongs. “Farm Bureau members don’t necessarily always need to be just farmers,” he said. “They need to be a lot of the general public that care about and supports agriculture.” A broader membership base, he said, can “help navigate our ways and grow and make the changes we need — and educate people.”
One of his first big pushes came before he took the helm on Long Island, when he was serving on the state board. For decades, the five boroughs were outside Farm Bureau’s formal map. That never made sense to him in a region where “between the city and Long Island, you’ve got approximately 13 million people.”
“What I did is I went to change the bylaws for the State Farm Bureau to now include the five boroughs of New York City so that they felt like they were included … you got to include them in your game,” he said.
The need to educate policymakers became clear during the pandemic, when his phone rang with an unexpected invitation.
“I get an email from the White House … ‘Mr. Zalaker, the president wants to have a conference call with you,’” he recalled. He was sure it was a scam and ignored it. A couple hours later he got an anxious call from a White House staffer he knew, following up.
“Did you get the text? And the email? Why haven’t you responded?” his contact wondered.
He said the White House national security team and President Donald Trump felt the “food supplies in agriculture really need to be looked at as a national security interest,” a strategic focus that “really brought an awareness about educating the public.”
Pioneering land preservation program
Zalaker said Suffolk County’s pioneering farmland preservation program remains central to Long Island’s future.
“Suffolk County is where the original land preservation program started, back in the ’70s” … the first one in the United States [and] now it is templated throughout the whole U.S.”
He said aggressive efforts to preserve farmland is what has made the North Fork what it is today, but that that’s only half the equation.
“You can have all the land preservation you want. Somehow you got to preserve the farmer also. I don’t care how much land you preserve if you don’t have a farmer to farm it.”
That’s getting harder as prices spike. Zalaker said that when he was on the American Farm Bureau, farmers from other parts of the country seemed unable to comprehend the development pressure on eastern Long Island farms.
“People would say, ‘How much is it for farmland where you are — $5,000 an acre, $10,000 an acre?’” he said. “Guys, we’re at about $100,000 an acre. You get down on the South Fork and some of it’s going for a million dollars an acre.”
He sees organizations like Peconic Land Trust as key to the next chapter, “taking land that was unattainable, preserving it, and then finding young farmers to come in and farm either 5-, 10-, 20-acre parcels.”
The same preservation logic, now extends to the coast, thanks to Suffolk County’s new waterfront preservation law, he said. “Like the farmers, the fishermen are disappearing.” If they lose docks, processing space and waterfront infrastructure, “you lose a whole industry … they’ll go somewhere else.”
Zalaker recognizes that agriculture has to keep improving its practices, but he bristles at the idea of farmers being cast as environmental villains.
“The farmer is not always to blame for everything,” he said. “With the nitrogen pollution … everybody wanted to blame the farmers. It’s not the farmers. Yes, we put nitrogen down. We have to. But a lot of that comes from the public, with the cesspools and the nitrogen going into our waterways.”
He said his approach to leading the bureau is data-driven. “You got to let science dictate the regulations, not legislation.” His skepticism of all-or-nothing environmental solutions extends to pesticides and fertilizers, and he frequently cites what happened when Sri Lanka tried to mandate all-organic farming overnight.
“In 2021, Sri Lanka [mandated] no chemicals, no fertilizers, nothing,” he said. “Their overall economy dropped 54% between April of ’21 and November of ’21 … to the point where the government stepped back in and said, ‘We’ve got to reevaluate this.’”The PFAS problem, he said, is even more complex, especially where treated wastewater or sludge has been used on farmland. “We have a serious problem, not just here in New York, but this country with the whole PFAS issue,” he said. Farmers who find contamination on their land risk losing everything.
He said his instinct in these disputes is to bring people together rather than dig in.
Farmer and Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski said “we’re fortunate to have [Zalaker] in that position. “To be able to communicate across all those levels of government, and do it effectively and professionally, is really critical.”
The supervisor described the Long Island Farm Bureau as a crucial organizing force in a region where farmers are too busy, stretched and fragmented to consistently engage government on their own. He said the Farm Bureau’s greatest value lies in its ability to connect growers with information, especially when new local, county, state or federal regulations are coming that could reshape their businesses.
Krupski emphasized that Long Island agriculture is unusually diverse — from aquaculture and nurseries to sod, greenhouses and the remaining “dirt farmers” like himself. The Farm Bureau’s strength, he said, is its ability to bring all those sectors “under one umbrella,” coordinate with partners like Cornell Cooperative Extension and Suffolk County Soil and Water, and help growers “survive” in a tough industry.
“Rob Carpenter was there for so long, and I can’t say enough about what he did,” Krupski said. “Bill’s the same kind of man — he’s able to work with people.”
For all the challenges, Zalaker insists there is momentum to build on.
“We have come a long way on some unity, but I would like to see that grow a lot more,” he said. “I would like to see it grow more on the public end.”
He remembers the mid-1980s ‘Grown on Long Island” campaign launched by the Suffolk County Economic Development Corp. as a powerful example of unified messaging that rallied the agricultural community to “use on all their produce and buy local, buy grown on Long Island.”
The veteran diplomat is connecting what happens in fields, greenhouses, vineyards and bays to what people see in stores and on their tables.
“You got to get the public pulled in and enthused of what’s going on, where their food is coming from, where their flowers are coming from, where their wine, their beer, whatever it may be, comes from,” he said. “Embrace that entity that you have right here, and cherish that and support it.
“Long Island has always had the most diverse forms of agriculture anywhere in the country,” he said. “That’s what’s built our industry so well … We need to maintain that.”