Growing Good: Quail Hill at 35

Photography by Doug Young

Back in 1990, if you asked someone to define “CSA,” you’d have likely been met with a stare as empty as a fallow field. Just three short decades ago, the nascent notion of community-supported agriculture, where patrons pay for a ‘share’ of a local farm in order to benefit from weekly, in-season produce while providing farmers with a steady flow of dependable income, hadn’t hit the general vernacular. 

On the East End, farming — once an entirely common way of making a living out here — has dwindled as the mad rush for prime real estate continues to gobble up acres upon acres once filled with potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, lima beans and countless other varieties of produce. But one farm burst from the soil to become the beacon of what things could be, perhaps should be, in the face of financial stress and pressure to sell the Hamptons to the highest bidder, instead choosing to keep the region’s history and heritage of farming alive and well: Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett.

Acres of History

“We’re actually celebrating our 35th season of CSA farming this year,” says Layton Guenther, the director of Quail Hill Farm since July 2019, when they took over the position from long-time farm director Scott Chaskey. “Thirty-five years in its current location.” Although it took a few name changes and a bit of creative thinking to get there.

Quail Hill is an unusual East End specimen, a farm that is a stewardship project of Peconic Land Trust, a nonprofit land conservation organization founded by John v.H. Halsey in 1983 as a force in protecting wetlands, woods and meadows, as well as conserving land for working farms on Long Island. 

“It was exciting to be part of it. No one was doing what we were doing,” says Chaskey, author of “Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life” (Milkweed Press), who was Quail Hill’s farm director for the majority of its 35 years, taking over from the project’s original farmer, Bob Willet. Chaskey had been living for a decade in Cornwall, England, getting a master’s degree in writing and starting a family when he and his wife, Megan, decided to move back to the States to be close to her mother, abstract painter Connie Fox, and artist stepfather, William King. 

By the time the Chaskeys arrived, Fox and King had become interested in a small group of local families working with Willett to farm a small parcel of land in Amagansett in exchange for a share of the bounty that was being grown. It began as the project of a local biodynamic fruit grower and Australian expat named Hugh Williams, who’d started the intriguing participatory farming endeavor at Full Circle Farm on Mitchell Lane in Bridgehampton, close to where the Hayground School currently sits. 

“When we moved back, Bill [King] invited me to this meeting of something called community-supported agriculture. I signed up and there I was for over 30 years,” laughs Chaskey, who was immediately attracted to this new model of farming, where people could reap what was sown, as long as they helped do to the sowing (and weeding and harvesting). 

Williams was using private land, however, and its owner quickly grew weary of seeing strangers showing up to tend to their farming duties. Willett, who was part of the original group, decided to rent some complaint-free land and split off from Williams, bringing with him 10 families, including Chaskey’s in-laws, to this new site in Amagansett. 

What began with 10 families in the late 1980s became New York State’s first CSA, and the germination of Quail Hill as it’s known today. The project caught the attention of Halsey and his burgeoning Peconic Land Trust project, when Willett approached Halsey to rent this new tract of farming land from the Trust. Halsey, however, was chewing on a different idea. 

Local philanthropist and conservationist Deborah Ann Light, who was part of the Trust’s board, had acquired quite a cache of acreage in Amagansett and had been in talks with the Trust to let them use about 20 acres of it for agricultural or preservation purposes, with the promise of another 200 acres to use in the future. 

“I said to Bob, ‘well, I’ve got another thing for you to consider. We’d like to hire you to do exactly what you’re doing.’ He couldn’t believe we were interested in hiring him,” Halsey says. “He was a single parent of a daughter, and the great thing about working for the Trust was he would get benefits to cover her and himself.” Willet had originally called his CSA Half Circle Farm — a bit of a good-natured joke regarding its origins — but agreed to rename it Promised Land Farm as a nod to Light’s generosity. 

Within a year, Light gave that initial 20 acres of land to the Trust in full. “But then it was no longer promised!” laughs Halsey. “The promise was fulfilled, and we couldn’t call it that anymore.” Light came across the name of a sledding hill on an old map in the Amagansett Library that she quite liked: Quail Hill, which became the official name in 1990, and the one that stuck.

“She was just one of these philanthropists who was super conservation-minded and had a lot of faith in the process and in the community,” Guenther says. When Light learned she had lung cancer and was given six months to live, she donated an assemblage of over 200 acres of preserved land to the Trust, in addition to the proceeds from the sale of the development rights to that land. (The happy part of that devastating diagnosis: She lived another 20 to see the farm flourish and that her gift was in good hands.) 

A Legendary CSA 

These days, Quail Hill farms about 35 acres of the land that Light proactively set aside. The entire tract of acreage, called the Deborah Ann Light Preserve, “stretches from the Quail Hill Home Farm off of Old Stone Highway, all the way to where the Balsam Farm farm stand is,” Guenther says. The Peconic Land Trust also leases acreage to Balsam Farms, Amber Waves Farms, Summer Hill Nursery, and to incubator farmers through the Farms for the Future program. It is, in essence, set up to ensure the future of farming here, right down to the equipment. “The Trust owns the machinery, land, and infrastructure,” says Peconic Land Trust vice president Yvette DeBow-Salsedo, “and all farmers at Quail Hill are staff members at the organization.” 

For many, Quail Hill, which farms both organically and biodynamically, is best known for its groundbreaking CSA program, which began at the same time as the farm in 1990, with just 10 families. Green Thumb Organic Farm in Water Mill was the only other organic and biodynamic farm operating on the East End when Quail Hill opened its doors and CSAs were extremely new. This year, the Quail Hill CSA will have about 250 families as members, who can choose between the traditional style — harvesting in the field — and a newer option, a box-share CSA, in which participants can pick out their bunch of radishes, lettuce, potatoes, etc., directly from a crate and weigh them for a different option of interactive vegetable picking. 

“CSA is thought of as a way to market your produce,” Guenther says. “It’s a way to direct-to-consumer. Make a promise to your shareholders that says: ‘Look, let’s enter into this reciprocal relationship with one another. You give me money for your share in January, February, March. I have the money to buy my seeds. I have the money to heat my greenhouse. I have the money to order my sweet potatoes and hire my apprentices. And then, in exchange, you put your faith in me.’ ” 

Chaskey was also one of the first 10 families to hold a coveted Quail Hill CSA membership, Guenther notes. (Technically, the membership belonged to his in-laws, Fox and King.) 

CSAs, Guenther says, are “extremely diversified as a way to manage risk,” meaning that members can expect to receive many different types of vegetables (and, in some cases, fruits, too). Over the years, this has become a way to expose people to different and interesting types of heirloom produce, while allowing farmers to expand the types of crops they grow and pivot demand when necessary. If, in a given year, a blight appears on a tomato crop, all is not lost. A bumper crop of something else — corn, cabbage, cucumbers — can more than make up for one lost-if-beloved item. 

And this type of farmer’s reality does, in fact, happen. “At Quail Hill last year, we had a fungus come in, wipe out our entire garlic crop,” Guenther says. “This is part of the contract of being involved in the CSA. Yes, we lost our garlic crop. And we had this incredible tomato crop, so we try to convey to folks through the CSA that we’re asking them to come into the back of house with us.” 

Pick-Your-Own

Operating as a department within the broader organization, all farmers who work at Quail Hill are direct staff members of the Trust too, which means guaranteed wages. That, in turn, allows staffers to think more broadly and inclusively about how the farm works. 

Part of that is encouraging CSA participants to be hands-on with access to the actual fields as part of the program. “Members really get to see how the vegan sausage gets made,” Guenther quips. Although some CSAs have dedicated U-pick days — reserved largely for fruit — nearly all of Quail Hill’s programming is pick-your-own. 

The traditional share encourages members to arrive at the farm two days a week and to go out in the field and harvest their own produce. There are signs posted, of course, alerting members as to what they can and cannot do, and, Guenther says, new members must participate in a farm orientation that helps them understand how to pick vegetables and how to get to know the fields. After that, they’re off. Members have input, too. “Also, a longstanding tradition is that if three members ask us to grow a crop, we’ll do it,” DeBow-Salsedo says. 

Being in the fields offers members a different perspective when it comes to growing food and participating in a CSA. Members have the opportunity to interact with protected land and with the food they’re eating in a unique and important way, which serves the Trust and the community at large. “Get them used to the idea of what flea beetles do, and why your arugula looks the way that it does,” Guenther says. “It basically functions as a public good in that way.” 

The Future of Farming

Quail Hill, too, is a place where farmers come to learn about the future of farming. Each year, the farm hosts between four and six apprentices, who range in age — some are college students; others are well into middle age and beyond. “We try to get people who would have a couple of years of farming experience in order for them to deepen their skills and hone their management skills a little bit, building more toward farm manager positions in the future,” Guenther explains.

The result is a farm that grows 50 to 60 different types of crops — and, within those types, countless sub-varieties, too. Crops are not altered too often, but the farm dials in what works best for efficiency and control. All of this — a farm that feeds 250 families every year, doing good work on protected land — is thanks to the foresight of one philanthropist, and, today, to the hardworking people who continue to manage its needs. 

“I remember I was at a conference where a fellow I very much respected who was a farm activist in the Midwest and deeply involved in policymaking in Washington, D.C. I was listening to him talking to a group of CSA farmers,” Chaskey says. “He used the word ‘purpose’ and that really stuck with me. The work at Quail Hill has great purpose — and that’s a lovely thing.”