On the North Fork, farming remains both the backbone of the landscape and one of its most precarious ways of life — an enterprise shaped not only by punishing land prices and razor-thin margins, but by shifting town laws, neighbor tensions, labor issues, climate stress and the difficult question of whether a younger generation will be able, or willing, to carry it forward.
Yet for North Fork farmers Leslie ‘Les’ Howard and his wife Priscilla, “we consider our success on the farm our happiness,” he said. “We love what we do.”
But both he and Salt Air Farm co-owners Dan Heston and Prudence Wickham Heston said the next generation will need more than enthusiasm. It will need practical knowledge, land access, housing and laws that reflect how farming actually works on the North Fork in 2026.
The couples first met when the Howards joined the Peconic Land Trust’s Farms for the Future program, where Dan is the PLT’s director of agricultural programs. Farms for the Future helps new and aspiring farmers get started by providing affordable access to protected farmland, shared infrastructure and equipment, and optional guidance, allowing them to build viable farm businesses without the upfront cost of buying land.
(Pictured above, from left, Dan Heston and Prudence Wickham Heston of Salt Air Farm and Leslie and Priscilla Howard)
‘A lot of determination’
For anyone romanticizing the idea of starting a farm on the North Fork, the panelists at Thursday night’s Cutchogue Civic Association discussion at the Cutchogue New Suffolk Free Library — which included the Hestons and the Howards — offered a blunt corrective: farming here is extraordinarily expensive, even before the first seed goes into the ground.
“It takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of determination to start a farm,” Prudence said. “I think that most people underestimate the cost that goes with getting a farm started.”
She argued that farming is unlike most professions because experience comes slowly, and under conditions that rarely repeat themselves.
“A farmer, if they start young, is going to get a maximum of 50 tries to get it right,” Prudence said. “And every year the weather is different.”
The cost of land alone remains one of the biggest barriers. Prudence said that preserved farmland on the North Fork — land with development rights already sold — “is going to run you about $40,000 an acre, totally bare, with nothing on it.” If development rights remain intact, she said, “it’s $150,000 to $200,000 an acre.”
“And let’s say you want to step over to the South Fork, where the markets are really good,” she continued. “If the land is protected … it’s going to cost you about $100,000 an acre. And if those development rights are intact, it’s going to cost you about a million dollars an acre, with nothing on it.”
For the Howards, farmers who came through PLT’s Farms for the Future initiative, the early years were defined by improvisation and scarcity.
“We started with nothing, really,” Mr. Howard said.
At Salt Air Farm, the story was similar.
“When Dan and I started our farm, we started with one pickup truck that [Cutchogue farmer] Ernie Case gave us and one roto-tiller,” Prudence said.
The acts of generosity mattered. As did community. But the underlying economics remain punishing. Farmers must buy seed, equipment and infrastructure long before they see meaningful revenue, and often long before they can afford basics that other businesses take for granted.
“We don’t even have a cooler,” Dan Heston said near the end of the panel, grinning at the irony. “We’ve been doing this for 18 years, and this year we’re going to have a cooler.”
The ‘best’ or the ‘worst’
As the North Fork changes, panelists said, one of the most unpredictable factors in a farm’s survival can be the people living next door.
“The neighbors can be the best thing to happen to a farm or the worst thing to happen to a farm,” Prudence said.
As the North Fork becomes more populated, she said, and as more newcomers arrive without a background in agriculture, friction has grown.
“There’s a reason that farms generally are kind of out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “They’re not always beautiful, they’re not always quiet. They’re not always conducive to retirement type living.”
Since Covid, she said, “we’ve seen a little shift in some of the folks that are living out here and what they’re looking for in our community, and there’s not as much patience sometimes for things that, you know, don’t look good.”
That tension extends beyond crop fields to the working waterfront economy.
“The oyster growers got creamed this winter with the weather,” she said. Their damaged gear, she noted, may not be pretty, but it is part of a working waterfront trying to recover. “The neighbors do not have the patience,” she said. “It’s ugly. It’s sitting there out of the water. It’s ugly,” she repeated, though the second time she seemed to be referring to the newly-arrived neighbors’ attitudes.
The Howards said they have been fortunate overall with neighbors, but still encountered problems. At one farm, Les said, rodents coming from a nearby restaurant dumpster devastated crops.
“They like to take one bite out of every cucumber,” he said. “They were really causing a lot of damage. It cost us thousands of dollars.”
Farmers’ rights
When Dan Heston was asked about Right to Farm protections, he described a Peconic Land Trust property in Eastport with an agricultural easement that not only permits farming, but requires it.
“It requires it to be farmed,” he said. “It also requires it to be in food production.”
That legal reality has not stopped conflict with neighbors. On that property, he said, “the neighbors are actually sabotaging the farmers. They’re calling the cops” and “spray painting” the farmers’ signs.
“We have had to use the right to farm, the fact that we’re in the ag[ricultural] district,” he said. “We have to farm it. It has to be farmed.”
He said some residents simply do not understand the protections built into agricultural law.
“They don’t know the laws, and the rights that a farmer does have, which are quite a few rights.”
He said those rights include basic seasonal protections for farmers leasing land. “If you have a lease on farmland and you’re in the middle of your growing season, you can’t kick that farmer off.”
Still, he said, speaking from extensive experience, “it’s better not to have to get into all that, if you can just get along with your neighbor.”
Local laws ‘slow to change’
When Southold Town Councilman Brian Mealy, who was in the audience, asked whether the town is doing enough to support farming, the panelists offered a mixed but largely respectful assessment.
“I think the town really tries,” Prudence said. “And I do give it a lot of credit for that. I think it cares, and I think it tries.”
But intention and execution, she said, are not always the same thing.
“When you’re trying to work with the town and follow all the rules and everything, it can be really frustrating at times.”
The biggest obstacle is speed.
“The laws are so slow to change,” she said, contending that farming on the North Fork has changed faster than zoning and preservation frameworks have. The North Fork is no longer defined only by commodity farming. More farms now survive through direct sales, events, value-added products and diversified business models.
“I’m farming as hard as anybody else is farming out there, but my market is weddings,” Prudence said, describing her event-based flower and farm business. “You got to really work to get past that mindset and get people to understand that this is a working farm.”
She described the frustration of being told that because she is not a winery, she cannot use a barn or enclosed structure in the same flexible way North Fork vineyards can.
“You know what the town says to that? Nope, you’re not a winery, so you can’t seat anybody in a building,” she said. “That’s a frustration.”
Her husband Dan pointed to one area where he said Southold has improved: no longer preserving farmland “hedgerow to hedgerow” without leaving a place for a house.
“Southold Town doesn’t buy any development rights anymore without leaving a development area on the farm,” he said. “That was smart.”
But both Hestons said more flexibility is still needed, especially around barns and agricultural structures.
“That’s probably one of the number one areas that Southold town needs to look carefully at what they’re doing with,” Prudence said, “to allow some more flexibility with what people can do in those buildings.”
Climate change
On climate, the farmers said, the evidence is in the field.
“For anybody that works outside and is around the water, something’s changing,” Dan said.
He pointed to sea level pressure on groundwater and land that is no longer farmable. “We’ve actually lost some of the land that Prudence’s granddad farmed as a child,” he said. “Now it’s not farmable at all because it’s got standing water in it.”
Les described increasingly erratic weather and new pests he’s never seen before.
“In the summer [I’m seeing] more insects,” he said. “I’ve been seeing bugs I’ve never seen in my life before.”
He cited pickle worm damage to fall squash and the loss of overwintered crops after severe cold. “You spend all that time, and you have these beautiful squashes, and they all have holes in them,” he said. “You can’t sell it.”
Prudence said one visible response will be more high tunnels rising across the North Fork landscape.
“You can expect to see more and more high tunnels going up,” she said. “The government is interested in seeing farmers get experience growing under these high tunnels.”
High tunnels are simple, unheated, greenhouse-like structure made of metal hoops covered with plastic, tall enough to walk or drive equipment through, that allows farmers to grow crops directly in the ground while protecting them from weather and extending the growing season.
The future of North Fork farming
Asked what the future of farming on the North Fork looks like, the panelists returned again and again to stewardship, skills and public support.
“My goal is to have a farm that isn’t only going to function for our lifetime, but is going to be a farm that can be passed down to the next generation,” Prudence said.
Her husband also warned that local farmers increasingly face competition from wealthy landowners who can build operations far faster than working farmers can.
“What takes us a decade to do they do it in one or two seasons,” he said, seemingly referring to Stefan Soloviev, a billionaire who owns hundreds and hundreds of acres of farmland and other properties on the North Fork and Shelter Island.
In the end, though, the message from the panel was simple and urgent. The North Fork can preserve farmland on paper. But if residents want real farms, real food and a real agricultural economy, they have to actively sustain it.
“For the farms that are out here,” Prudence said, “you got to get in and support them.”
If the future of farming on the North Fork remains uncertain, it is not for lack of interest, imagination or people willing to try.
When an audience member asked whether the region’s preserved farmland will ultimately tilt toward vineyards or remain open to a broader mix of agriculture, Prudence said policy will be the decisive factor.
“I think some of that depends on how the laws go and how they’re able to adjust some of that kind of thing,” she said, describing a recent visit to Town Hall where she was told certain uses might only be permitted if a farm operated as a vineyard. “We’ve got wonderful vineyards out here, but that’s not my business plan, and that isn’t what I want to do.”
The answer, she suggested, lies in preserving flexibility.
“If we’re going to say that, ‘well, only this type of farming can do something’ — that’s a problem,” Ms. Heston said. “We don’t want to put our thumb on any one type of agriculture. We want all of them to be able to prosper out here.”
‘Eat it, drink it, put the flowers up’
Still, Dan said the diversity of agriculture on the North Fork is already drawing a new generation of would-be farmers to the region, citing properties that the Peconic Land Trust owns.
“If you think there’s no interest in new farmers coming along, we had about six applications for every single property.”
Some applicants did not meet the qualifications, he said, but many did — and came with serious plans.
“So there’s hope.”
Even in sectors facing headwinds, the bottom line is adaptation. Veteran vintner Louisa Hargrave, sitting in the front row, noted challenges in the global wine market and from climate impacts, but framed them as part of the broader reality all farmers now face.
“So again,” she told fellow attendees, “you got to buy the stuff, eat it, drink it, put the flowers up, do it.”