Westchester Land Trust’s Local Land, Local Food Farmers Network helps farms and farmers become more sustainable over the long term, thereby also helping them to resist development pressures.
The key goal of the Farmers Network is to permanently protect more local farmland by working with landowners on conservation easements, to keep the land available for farming. One of our most recent is a 70-acre conservation easement on Cabbage Hill Farm, in Mount Kisco, which you can read about here.
The Farmers Network’s 170-plus participants include farmers, chefs, retailers and organizations such as Glynwood, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Westchester County and Slow Food Westchester.
The Farmers Network’s match program connects farmers who need land with property owners who have land to lease.
Education presentations at monthly meetings support and strengthen the members of the network and their enterprises. You can read an op-ed piece we published in the Bedford-Pound Ridge Record Review that summarizes what we're trying to accomplish, here.
Farm tours and speed meetings connect local chefs and restaurateurs with local farmers. In 2010, we helped organize a farmers-chefs speed meeting at Muscoot Farm (read about it here) and a chef-to-farm tour at 10 local farms (more about that here).
We have a list of farmers who sell to local chefs, here.
For more information about the Farmers Network, call Candace Schafer at 914 241-6346 x20 or email her at Candace@Westchesterlandtrust.org.