East Hampton To Make Second Live-in Farmstead Up for Grabs to Young Farmers

East Hampton Town will soon begin searching for a young aspiring farmer, or farmers, to move to a Springs property and transform it into a working farmstead — a once common but now rare, way of life.

With more than 5 acres of farmland available and an existing three-bedroom house, the property on the fittingly named Farmhouse Lane gives the town the chance to offer a rare opportunity to an aspiring farmer: to live and work their farm, albeit a small one, on the South Fork, both at rates far below what could ever be found on the open market.

As with another property on Cedar Street that the town bought and then leased to young farmers last year, town officials say the plan is to put out a request for proposals from would-be cultivators for tenancy of the land. The fallow field and the home would be leased to the farmer with the best proposal.

“It’s a great way for us to help preserve our agricultural history out here — it gives the next generation a chance to gain a foothold,” Town Councilman David Lys said. “If you look at old aerial photos, most of Springs was farmland, and I think it would be great to have a working farm out there again. I really want to see someone working that land.”

The Town Board approved the purchase of the 4.4-acre property for $2.6 million from its former owner, Marucha Hinds, earlier this year and closed on the deal last week.

The property contains a three-bedroom contemporary house and a 4-acre field with an adjacent reserve — so potentially almost 5.5 acres of farmable land, Lys said. The land is currently fallow, a broad open meadow along the Jeep-trail of Farmhouse Lane, a name harking to the mostly lost history of the hamlet and the land off the narrow road off Springs-Fireplace Road, now dotted with homes.

The Farmhouse Lane property would be the second such live-in farming arrangement the town has created. Last year, Isabel Milligan and Nick Collins inked a lease agreement for 12 acres of farmland with an existing house off Cedar Street that the town had likewise purchased using the Community Preservation Fund.

The couple, who met while working in the apprenticeship program at Amber Waves Farm in Amagansett, moved in last year and have been fixing up the house and preparing the farmland for its first crops, which they will plant next spring.

“It has been an amazing opportunity that we are very grateful for,” Collins said this week. “We’re expecting to be in full production next year. We have cover crops in now for this winter, and we’re fixing up equipment, and we got 50 laying hens that are going to start laying eggs soon.”

It’s a future that almost wasn’t. Were it not for the plum timing of the town’s first farmstead purchase, Milligan and Collins were about to become two former South Fork farmers. “We were making plans to leave the area,” Milligan said. “We loved our jobs, but we wanted to start our own farm, and there is just not a lot of opportunity for land and housing here.”

Milligan, 28, is from Southampton and started working the checkout at Balsam Farms when she was in high school. She was drawn to the farming operations led by the farm’s owners, Alex Balsam and Ian Calder-Piedmont, and joined the Amber Waves apprenticeship — she’s in her seventh summer there now — then enrolled at Cornell University’s agriculture school, where the Balsam Farms owners themselves met.

Collins was in agriculture school himself but dropped out, preferring the hands-in-the-dirt learning at Amber Waves. He now works at Balsam Farms.

When they put in their pitch to the town for the Cedar Street property — which is now known as Feathertop Farm — they were already veterans of many harvests at Amagansett’s two wildly successful farm operations and built the diversity of agricultural options they have learned there into their proposal.

The plans start with row crops of vegetables and fields of berries and herbs, chickens and grazing livestock, and a CSA to provide fresh vegetables to residents. They have plans for a farm stand on the land, wholesale distribution to restaurants, and educational and apprenticeship programs for other young farmers like the one that brought them together.

They are applying for special loans that are available to farmers who do not own the land they cultivate — and therefore don’t have the collateral — to fund deer fencing and equipment.

“It’s so great to be able to share our own farm and stay close to my family,” Milligan said. “It’s exciting to hear the town is going to do the same thing again. It can really strengthen our farm community out here.”

The unique opportunities of a viable farmland and a home, made available at a price that a farmer can afford is a rare one. The town purchased the Cedar Street property Milligan and Collins will farm for $10 million. They pay $35,000 for the lease.

“There is really not very much a young farmer can do without an initiative like this,” Alex Balsam, who is also the chairman of the town’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, said.

Balsam acknowledges that he and Calder-Piedmont benefited when they were getting started from having roots in the community — Balsam is an East Hampton native — and connections in the community that gave them a boost early on.

“It’s hard to imagine a path forward as a new farmer now without really deep pockets,” he added. “For young people getting started, it’s so hard. So I think this is great idea that will be really important to keeping farming here.”

The use of the Community Preservation Fund to purchase an existing house that can be occupied as a residence requires that the structure’s inhabitants are working directly toward the maintenance and operation of the intended use of the land when it was purchased.

Town officials said they didn’t know how quickly they would be able to put the new property up for an RFP from farmers. The land has to be surveyed and inspected by farmers to determine what is possible on its acres. Finding eager applicants will probably not be too difficult, though, they suspect.

“It has to be a bona-fide farmer, but we have a lot of young people graduating from Quail Hill and other programs who fit the bill and are looking for farmland to cultivate,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “And as we all know, housing is always a problem out here, especially when you are trying to start a business and all the investment of capital that requires.”