2014’s snowy winter has offered significant challenges for area farmers, although Jess Niederer knows the real work starts in March.
Jess Niederer stands in a hoophouse on her organic farm on Titus Mill Road in Pennington on Feb. 19, 2014. The land has been in the family for generations. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
13th generation farmer sells locally grown produce through community-supported agriculture program
Jess Niederer glimpses the shoes of a couple of visitors to her farm and asks if they would like to borrow some boots.
It’s a cool February afternoon and she’s ready to show them her hoophouses — plastic-sheeted, metal-framed growing environments where, even in a winter like this one, hardy crops can grow — but, after a short truck ride, she warns, it’s all ice and snow between there and here.
When the visitors politely decline, she walks them over to a 4×4 pickup truck where her dad is standing by. Steve Niederer smokes a cigarette, waiting patiently to get going. He looks down at the visitors’ feet. “You guys are gonna want some boots,” he says.
Upon this second offer, one visitor accepts the boots. The other, well. His feet will get really wet.
This is Chickadee Creek Farm, and it’s Jess Niederer’s farm. She started it in 2009 and has grown it from startup into a successful, certified organic CSA farm situated along a bend in Titus Mill Road in Pennington.
Chickadee Creek Farm is on land that has been in the Niederer family for generations. Niederer leases her acreage from her dad, who is also a farmer, and on her land she grows a wide variety of fruit, vegetables and flowers that she sells in local farmers’ market in an intriguing twist on the traditional CSA method.
CSA stands for community-supported agriculture. In a typical setup, members purchase shares up front, which entitle them to a portion of the crops that are grown during the year.
In many CSAs, including Honey Brook Organic Farm not too far down the road, members go to the farm on a regular basis to pick up their shares. Whatever is in season and growing satisfactorily will probably be in their share; this is constantly changing. There are usually also “pick-your-own” crops, which are exactly what they sound like. Around November, when the last of the fall crops start shutting down, many CSAs close until the following spring.
Chickadee Creek Farm has pick-your-own fields too, but Niederer, 30, has found success with a different CSA model. Instead of having her members report to the farm each week for a box of pre-sorted items, she distributes the food via area farmers’ markets. This year they’ll be at five markets: Princeton, Rutgers Gardens, Pennington, Montgomery, and the Stangl Market in Flemington.
She piloted the alternative CSA model her first year with 10 members. She had 135 members in 2013, and expects to support 200 CSA members this year.
“I felt it was a way of doing community-supported agriculture that would work well for a lot of people in our community,” she said. “There are plenty of folks out there who love to support local, affordable organics, but also want to choose exactly which vegetables they are getting in their farm share.”
Members have accounts with Chickadee Creek, meaning they don’t have to pay with cash when they go to the market. They just tell the farm stand attendant who they are, and the value of the items they purchase is deducted from their account.
“I don’t think a traditional CSA model reaches everybody who would be interested in buying from local farms. [If people] know they don’t like beets, they don’t have to find out again and again that they don’t like beets. For some customers, it just doesn’t fit as well as something else would.”
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The Niederers have been in Hopewell Valley since 1910, when Otto Niederer immigrated from Switzerland. But agriculture is in the blood. Jess is the 13th generation of the family to call farming a vocation.
There was a time when Niederer’s generation didn’t look set to carry on the tradition. Her older sister, Mandi Perez, is an elementary technology teacher in the Hopewell Valley School District, and her younger brother Steve is with the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office. (Mom Kathy, who is assistant to the Hopewell Township administrator, lives in Langhorne, Pa.) Jess went to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where she majored in natural resources. She had plans to become a conservation biologist, which is why she pursued a degree in ecology.
The 2002 Hopewell Valley Central High School graduate took a semester off in 2005 to do an exchange program in Nicaragua, where she learned Spanish in exchange for teaching English to preschool children. “I went there to understand a different way of life,” she said.
Then she went to Costa Rica, where she did field work for a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology until August of 2005.
After the hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, she again left Cornell, this time to volunteer in the efforts of Common Ground Relief in New Orleans. She spent December 2005 through August 2006 there, and she said the time she spent there shaped her feelings towards justice, fairness, human health and the importance of humans’ relationship to ecology.
After going back to Cornell for one last semester, she returned to Nicaragua in 2007 to assist supervising a student group in construction of a library in the same school that she had taught and been taught in in 2005.
Finally graduated, she returned home where she worked at Brothers Moon in Hopewell and also started working at Honey Brook, learning from Jim Kinsel and Sherry Dudas.
After two years at Honey Brook, she took the plunge, starting up Chickadee Creek. So far it’s gone well enough that she’s been able to sustain and grow the farm without the benefit of loans. It’s been her goal from the start to operate the farm solely on the basis of its own revenues.
She may have learned how to be an organic farmer at Honey Brook Organic Farm, but she also grew up on a farm. At the age of 11 she was doing chores for her dad, and getting paid for the work too. She says working from a young age and learning the value of a dollar probably helped develop the conservative mindset she has about operating the farm.
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The hoophouses are just down Titus Mill Road, where on a snowless day you’ll find a parking lot and rows of pick-your-own crops. Now there’s just acres of white, though Niederer points out that somewhere under there, cover crops are growing in secret. Even she doesn’t know what she’ll find when the white stuff melts.
On this day, she also doesn’t know what she’ll find in the hoophouses, where she’s growing a number of sturdy varieties. Winter farming isn’t as intensive as work in the other seasons, when she goes seven months without a day off. Still, there’s almost always something that needs her attention, and trips away from Titus Mill Road are rare. She is just returning from the pleasure of a long weekend, and wondering how her turnips and tatsoi are doing under the plastic of the polytunnel.
The answer is: not great. The vicissitudes of this zany winter are to blame. If it isn’t the regular snowfall, it’s the frigid temperatures, and if it isn’t the frigid temperatures it’s the lack of sun. She can still harvest some of these crops, but most of it, she says, she’s going to have to till under and replant.
“That’s farming,” she says. “You probably shouldn’t be doing this if you can’t learn to roll with it. It’ll be all right.”
Anyone who is interested can go online to chickadeecreekfarm.com to sign up for farm shares or find out more about the farm. Niederer expects to have CSA shares available until mid-April.
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