“The earth is gold to farm,” says Dean Foster, who learned before he was in kindergarten how to drive a tractor on his family’s potato farm in Sagaponack, N.Y. As a child, he never questioned going into the family business, which has been growing potatoes on the East End of Long Island for generations. “But now we have an influx of people who realize this earth is gold to build on.”
In 2015, Sagaponack, a village in the Hamptons, was listed by Forbes as the second-most expensive ZIP code in the country. Not great news for the Fosters’ farm.
If they had been looking to sell, the Fosters would have been set for life; local brokers estimated the value of their 150 acres at over $100 million this past summer. That may seem like a gold strike, but it would have required them to give up the family’s legacy.
“Our land values have gone through the roof,” Dean Foster’s sister, Marilee Foster, says. “And most of our adult lives, we’ve worried.”
The answer to their problems, unexpectedly, has turned out to be vodka.
“The New York Craft Act really kicked me in the pants,” Dean Foster says, referring to the law signed in late 2014 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo that eased regulations on small-batch craft-beverage producers. It was a call to the hipsters who had been making bathtub gin, but it was also a call to farmers who had been searching for a way to survive.
“It opened the doors to one of the best value-added products you could bring forward,” Foster said, “and allowed us to step up the game.”
He is betting the farm on Sagaponacka, the vodka produced in his new Sagaponack Farm Distillery.
Thirty years ago, the Fosters’ biggest business was exporting potatoes to Puerto Rico, and they sent out five 50,000-pound trailers a day, five days a week. This year, the Fosters have shipped only three trailer loads since the start of the harvest in mid-September.
“That market really disappeared with NAFTA,” Foster says, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994. “That was the beginning of the end for exports.”
And the local market has been no kinder. Last year, the Fosters were getting $0.11, at the most, for a pound of potatoes, down from an average of $0.22 a pound in 2009. Add to that the rising minimum wage, the cost of machinery and an impending inheritance tax, and the farmers felt doomed.
“The inheritance tax reflects on our net worth regarding this very expensive land we reside on,” Foster says. “After all is said and done, we’ll have given away 60 percent of our net worth to the government.”
Even though the New York Agricultural Districts Law, enacted in 1971, eased the strain of the property tax on farmers, the Fosters won’t have the cash to pay the inheritance tax when the farm changes hands. A potato grower’s income just doesn’t line up with Sagaponack prices; if they don’t find a way to make their land more profitable, they will have to sell it.
“If the farm wasn’t worth so much,” Foster says, “we wouldn’t be lying awake at night trying to figure out how we can save it.”
So Foster decided to shift his focus from the plate to the martini glass by developing a small-batch premium vodka made with Foster potatoes. He collaborated with Matt Beamer, who has stood at the forefront of the craft beer movement in Utah, brewing at companies like Uinta Brewing and Wasatch Brewery. In 1997, Beamer began Park City Brewery, which was subsequently purchased by Moab Brewery and has continued to grow.
“Craft brewers changed the beer world in the last 30 years,” Beamer said. “And a lot of people like me are getting into spirits now.”
For Beamer, the appeal of the project is the story behind the vodka, which is usually made from grain and doesn’t often have ingredients that distinguish one batch from another.
“The ingredients are unique to here, and have their own terroir,” he said. “We’re trying to capture Sagaponack.”
To be a farm distillery in New York, 75 percent of the ingredients used must be sourced within the state. Brooklyn has become a frontier for budding distillers, where nine of New York City’s 13 farm distilleries have appeared since 2010. Kings County Distillery, established that year, has the distinction of being the first distillery in the city since prohibition. Now the movement is booming.
In fact, the Fosters and their Sagaponack potatoes are a little late to the party. “There’s a new brand fatigue,” said Colin Spoelman, co-founder of Kings County Distillery and a master distiller. “It’s harder to get on the shelf unless there’s something really compelling, something very different than what everyone else is doing.”
Well, Sagaponack Farm Distillery has something that others do not. Unlike the vast majority of distilleries in New York, which source ingredients from farms all over the state, Foster and Beamer are trying to gather all of their ingredients from Foster Farm, where their distillery is also located. There they have total control over the process, growing, harvesting, washing, peeling and then grinding the potatoes for distillation, on the property.
They opened their research and development distillery in May 2015. The large still, a tower of gleaming copper, was completed this summer. The distillery recently received federal approval to make vodka from this year’s potato harvest, which is currently under way. Soon, it will start producing up to 70,000 gallons of sellable spirits a year. Foster and Beamer hope to have the tasting room open by next summer. In the meantime, several restaurants and liquor stores in the city and across the East End are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the vodka with the Sagaponack terroir.
David Loewenberg, who owns three high-end Hamptons restaurants, is already brainstorming what cocktails will best suit the newest vodka on the block. “I’m sure it will make an outrageous bloody Mary,” he says. Whether it’s the wine tap stocked with local wines or the Pine Barrens single malt from the North Fork of Long Island, Loewenberg supports what he calls “local swill.”
“At one point this was all farmland,” he said. “And the Fosters have found a way to keep farming by being creative with the product. Making vodka is still living off the land, and I support it.”
Beamer sees distributing their products to city restaurants and bars as crucial to the company.
“Given the size of our equipment,” he said, gesturing to the towering hand-hammered copper stills, “a major part of our vision is distributing in the city.”
Last year the Fosters grew 180 acres of potatoes; this year they grew 75. In 2017, that number will dwindle to 20 as they focus production on the distillery and a handful of restaurants, eliminating sales on the open market entirely. The rest of their land will be turned to grain, which will be used to produce more strains of premium alcohol at Sagaponack Farm Distillery. Wheat, rye, barley, oats and corn will all find a place in their soil. The hope is to eventually produce enough grains to sell to other New York farm distilleries.
“This is an effort to continue in something we see value and purpose in,” says Marilee Foster. “We don’t imagine stopping farming.”
Source: The New York Times