With the decline and near collapse of the North Fork’s once-dominant potato industry, a new generation of farmers, along with some determined holdovers, are blending tradition and reinvention to survive. In the process, they’re redefining what it means to work the land in Riverhead and Southold.
At a panel discussion on Saturday at Hallockville Museum Farm in Riverhead, multiple speakers offered variations on the same theme: the old model no longer works. Wholesale markets have eroded and prices have stagnated. Costs have surged.
In response, farmers have pivoted to direct-to-consumer sales, value-added products, agritourism and niche growing. Modern day farming is often backbreaking work with slim margins, but for those committed to it the life holds deep meaning.
“All I know is, if you haven’t had the pleasure of going into a field at sunrise and you look out over your field, and you see your animals and your livestock,” said North Fork vintner Rex Farr. “You see your crops. You see that sun coming up. My God, there is nothing better. It’s as simple as that.”
Despite unforgiving economic pressures reshaping agriculture on the North Fork, something deeper continues to anchor those who remain.
At its mid-20th century peak, Long Island, particularly the North Fork, was one of the nation’s leading potato-growing regions, with about 75,000 acres in production in the 1950s, according to the state comptroller’s office. As suburbanization pushed east, total farmland on Long Island fell from 150,680 acres in 1950 to 37,243 acres by 1992, dramatically reshaping the region’s agricultural future.
By the 1980s, the industry was in a free fall. Plunging prices, rising costs and competition from cheaper producers in places like Idaho and Canada made large-scale potato farming increasingly unsustainable. Acreage declined sharply, and many farmers simply gave up.
Today, farming persists, but it’s been transformed. Suffolk County still has 578 farms across about 33,821 acres, according to journalist Karl Grossman, yet only a small share is devoted to potatoes — 2,605 acres harvested in 2022. Former potato fields have largely shifted to vineyards, specialty crops and direct-to-consumer agriculture.
Against that backdrop, each farm represented on Saturday has carved its own path forward.
‘Blood, sweat and tears’
Joann Zilnicki of Zilnicki Farms in Riverhead is a third-generation local farmer, on both her Irish and Polish sides, as she declared with great relish last weekend. She used to eat potatoes “three times a day,” no complaints.
“My mother always said being a farm wife was not for the faint of the heart. There would be plenty of blood, sweat and tears.,” Zilnicki said. “She was right. Farming is not a nine to five job. You worked weekends, holidays, birthdays, and if something needed to be done, it needed to be done. The farm comes first.”
But she has watched the industry crumble in recent decades.
“When you start out growing 200 acres and you can sell your crop right away — export trailers to Puerto Rico, or whatever — and now you grow 30 acres, and you still can’t get rid of them? Something is not adding up. It’s just not right. Potatoes are coming from Idaho and Canada for a cheaper price than we can grow them now.
“Our prices keep going up, whether it’s taxes, rent, supplies, insurance, labor, gas, seeds, fertilizer. Diesel is over $5 right now. So we’re going to think twice about turning on the irrigation motor in the summertime because of the bills. But if you don’t turn your irrigation you might be not going to get your yield.”
Her daughter, Jackie Zilnicki, said traditional farming can be heartbreaking, recalling one recent summer when the family secured a major broccoli order.
“We have beautiful broccoli, and we wanted to get it out, and we finally had an order and it was a good price, and we were so excited,” she said. “We were in the yard, we were getting the boxes ready, we were getting the wagon hooked up to the tractor. And then we got the phone call … It was a buyer saying, ‘Hey, we’re getting it elsewhere’ — I think it was Pennsylvania — ‘for cheaper.’ So the order is canceled. That’s a buzz kill.
“You’re working hard. It wasn’t a great price, but it was better than you were usually going to get. And it got canceled. I remember another time we grew beautiful cabbage, green cabbage … it was probably the prettiest cabbage we’ve grown in a long time.
“We had a big order, maybe 100 to 150 crates of cabbage, and we were excited. We’re like, ‘This is beautiful.’ It went into the market. I’m talking about crates that have 12 big heads in it. We got $3.50 for each crate.
“You can’t keep farming with those prices.”
In response, the Zilnickis have pivoted, moving away from wholesale and toward direct sales, building a community supported agriculture (CSA) program that connects them with customers.
They have diversified into raising beef cattle and expanding egg production, growing their flock from a handful of chickens to hundreds. They have also opened their farm to the public through initiatives like outdoor farm yoga and flower cutting workshops.
‘Holy Schmitt!’
The Schmitt family, who operate Schmitt’s Farm Stand on Sound and two other East End locations tells a parallel story of adaptation, shaped by a long history that stretches from Queens to Riverhead.
Like many farms, theirs once depended heavily on wholesale production. But as that market became increasingly untenable, they began to adapt, expanding retail farm stands and relocating to higher-traffic areas.
From there, they moved into value-added production — most notably through their ‘Holy Schmitt’s Horseradish’ business, which began as a family tradition and evolved into a branded product distributed well beyond the North Fork, said Ashley Schmitt, who appeared with her mother-in-law, Debbie Schmitt.
“The story of the horseradish is that my husband’s grandfather, Phil [Schmidt] Sr., every spring, would harvest horseradish, the first crop of the season, generally. And everybody would … prepare the horseradish and hand it out to friends and neighbors around Easter time, big celebration, and everybody thought it was really fun.
“My husband felt that we were giving away a lot of this horseradish, and that was nice, but he was a businessman and wanted to try selling … We were selling it on the Sound Avenue out of a cooler, because we didn’t have any refrigerators or anything at that point, no label, and people bought it. So it kind of took off from there.
“We had a friend at the time who was in advertising and graphics … we were all hanging out the night and eating the horseradish, and — Holy Schmidt! And he was kind enough to help us make a label and everything. And once that happened, we saw that there was a market for it, we were able to then start wholesaling horseradish.
Their horseradish business grew from roadside sales into a brand carried by retailers like Whole Foods Market and distributed well beyond the North Fork. The Schmidt’s also expanded into pickled vegetables, prepared foods and other value-added products.
Carol Sidor of North Fork Potato Chips
For Carol Sidor and her family, the collapse of traditional potato markets led to a bold and unprecedented North Fork pivot: turning their crop into North Fork Potato Chips. The Sidors purchased chip-making equipment and launched the operation, but the transition wasn’t easy.
“We had to come up with UPC codes, had to find a seasoning company, distributors,” she said.
Even after establishing the business, new obstacles emerged, from rejected shipments to an outright theft that cost the company an entire truckload of chips. Yet the move has allowed the farm to survive by controlling production and creating a consumer-facing product, even as margins remain pretty tight.
As Sidor observed wryly, “we make chips, not money.”
‘I can probably grow just about anything’
Anthony Scott offered a different perspective. His grandfather, James R. Wilson, fled racial violence in 1920s Georgia as a young child and eventually became part of the network of Black migrant workers who sustained Long Island’s agricultural economy in the early 20th century.
Scott said he takes pride in the fact that his grandfather “elevate[d] himself to the point where he actually was a leader in the Black migrant workers [community], that he had the opportunity to help a lot of other people, because in the farming industry there’s a lot of moving parts. Nobody can make it on their own without having people that that are in there with them, grinding to get that the product out.”
Scott, who with his siblings was raised by their grandparents, was born on a farm in Port Jefferson in 1962 and moved with the family three years later to another farm in Cutchogue, across the street from what is now the Red Rooster on Depot Lane.
“All my [youthful] memories are being on the farm and learning how to do the work of the farm worker, and that’s what I knew … I don’t look like what I’ve been through,” the HVAC technician said, “but I can tell you right now I know every dirt bomb that is in the ground. I can probably grow just about anything.”
Like many of his generation, he ultimately left the industry, actively encouraged by his grandfather to pursue opportunities beyond the farm fields.
‘Very lucky’
Rex and Connie Farr’s Farrm Wines in Baiting Hollow represents yet another model of adaptation. Relative newcomers compared to some of the North Fork’s multi-generational farm families, the Farrs entered agriculture in the 1980s, eventually establishing Long Island’s first certified organic and biodynamic farm in 1990.
Planted across 8.5 acres with Bordeaux varieties including Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Malbec and Petite Verdot, the vineyard produced its first wines from the 2012 harvest, launching Farrm Reserve and Farrm Rosé, as expressions of the region’s terroir.
The Farrs are guided by the principles of Rudolf Steiner, Rex said, following biodynamic practices that emphasize natural cycles, including lunar influences, over a roughly 220-day growing season involving 25 stages of work. Grapes are hand-harvested at peak ripeness, with yields of about three tons per acre, before undergoing traditional winemaking processes from de-stemming through fermentation and bottling.
Rex said he and Connie feel lucky to be part of such a noble tradition on the North Fork.
“We have such a great history of farming — 300 years, which in Europe is a blink of an eye. But over here, 300 years of farming, the Halseys — 325 years, the Wickhams — 300 plus years, I think … So we’re very, very lucky.”