Blue Moon Acres has grown baby greens and lettuce for chefs to use for 20 years. But starting in early June, the organic farm will sell its produce directly to customers from a retail farmstand in Pennington.
Farmer Jim Lyons looked approvingly at the timber frame building that Amish workers have been building for him for the past few weeks.
“Up to this point, we’ve sold primarily to chefs and a few local retailers,” he said. “Now we’re branching out into retail sales.”
The story of Blue Moon Acres is about more than just retail sales. It’s the story of how Lyons went from being a cheeseburger junkie to one of the early advocates of a natural diet. It’s also the story of how he has slowly been building an organic empire.
The story began in the 1970s, when Lyons was attending Lafayette College and swimming competitively.
“I would eat two cheeseburgers, two hamburgers, two orders of fries and a milkshake,” Lyons said. “And that was a snack.”
But the ultra-high-calorie diet wasn’t working for Lyons. He noticed his health beginning to decline, and asked a cousin for advice. The cousin recommended he clean up his diet. And so shakes and fries gave way to beans and rice.
“I dove in,” Lyons said. “I went from eating McDonalds one day to brown rice and vegetables and beans the next. It was pretty crazy but eventually my body started becoming used to the switch and I started feeling better.”
Lyons found himself firmly on the granola end of the American cultural landscape. He decided he wanted to study either acupuncture or health food as a career. Food won out, and Lyons began a career as a clerk at a health food store.
Fast forward a few decades of hard work, and he founded his own source of healthy greens, Blue Moon Acres.
Greens have borne the Blue Moon name for two decades. Until three years ago, all the crops came from greenhouses in Buckingham, Pa. Now, the fresh veggies grow on the sprawling 63-acre Pennington farm that Lyons runs with the help of farm manager Scott Morgan.
A wide variety of crops are grown on the farm due to the need to rotate crops to preserve the quality of the soil. There’s baby spinach, baby arugula, mustard greens, kale, chard, spinach, cauliflower, tomatoes, rice, cabbages, broccoli, carrots, potatoes and almost any other vegetable anyone could want in their kitchen.
Morgan said every twice-weekly harvest yields about 2,000 pounds of food. Though it’s not as much as Morgan was used to harvesting in his previous career as a conventional farmer, he said that at least at Blue Moon Acres, he doesn’t have to see skulls and crossbones on his farming supplies.
That’s because Blue Moon uses organic farming techniques instead of the plant food and pesticides that conventional farmers use to produce high yields on their land. Rather than specially engineered chemicals, Blue Moon uses compost derived from leaves collected from all over the township, soil from mushroom farms and other natural techniques. Chickens in a mobile henhouse not only provide eggs, but their waste enriches the soil.
Lyons is a believer in the farming philosophy of Wes Jackson, and is concerned with maintaining the quality of the soil.
Chances are if the township collected leaves from your yard in the last year, they are destined to end up spread on Blue Moon’s fields.
The shop will sell not only the bounty of the Pennington land, but will also sell meat, cheese and fruit that comes from other local farms.
“Sustainable local food production. That’s the most important thing to me,” he said.
Blue Moon Acres is located at 11 Willow Creek Drive in Pennington. When it opens, its hours will be Thursday and Friday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. On the Web: bluemoonacres.net.
Clara Morgan
