In August 1969, when Max Yasgur hosted the Woodstock Music and Art Fair at his farm in Bethel, N.Y., he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to revel in “three days of peace and music.”
Yasgur, then 49, was a conservative Republican who supported the Vietnam War. He was also the biggest dairy farmer in Sullivan County, and his interest in inviting nearly half a million hippies to his land was driven by the rental fee he could charge, which would help offset recent flood damage at the farm.
“The vagaries of farming obviously played a huge role in the fact that Woodstock happened here,” said John Conway, Sullivan County’s historian.
Woodstock became a junction between America’s agricultural tradition and a postwar generation that was rejecting the consumer culture their parents had built by going “back to the garden.” Half a century later, our era of environmental decay and ultraprocessed foods is still stoking that countercultural impulse, as new generations of back-to-landers get acquainted with the “vagaries of farming” in the 21st century.
The urge to farm among young people is gaining strength. In Sullivan County, the latest census data show that of the 749 producers reported, 36 percent were new and beginning farmers. We spoke with Sullivan County farmers of all ages who followed their own calls to the land, finding ways to sustain their commitment any way they can.
The Flower Children Who Stuck It Out
In 1973, Sonja Hedlund and Richard Riseling bought Apple Pond Farm in Callicoon, N.Y., paying $12,500 for the former dairy farm and its 13 acres of neglected fields and abandoned buildings.
The couple had met in the late 1960s and made a life in New York City. Ms. Hedlund spent 25 years in public health administration, while Mr. Riseling was a teacher at the New York State Economic Opportunity Center in Brooklyn and at SUNY Empire College. For 19 years, they split their time between getting the farm operational with animals and gardens, and living in a rented commune in Brooklyn with three other couples.
Like others in their cohort, they became increasingly disillusioned with societal norms, particularly “capitalism, greed and a lack of a vision for how we are all going to live,” Mr. Riseling said.
When the Boerum Hill commune building was sold, Mr. Riseling recalled pondering, “What is the one thing that our country is great at? That is agriculture.”
So he retired early and moved to the farm full-time in 1995, with Ms. Hedlund joining him in 2002. Over the years, the couple expanded their acreage to 81, raised goats and sheep, and bred and trained draft horses.
Trading an urban life for a rural one meant “we could make our own community and live by our own principles,” Mr. Riseling said. But it also meant cobbling together a life that was financially sustainable. They made money with farm tours and special events, and by selling hay, wool and yarn, and the draft horses.
After training and becoming certified in solar, wind and energy efficiencies, Mr. Riseling became a consultant in Sullivan County for designing renewable-energy systems. In 2002 they added “Renewable Energy Education Center” to their name and went on to host hundreds of workshops and internships in that emergent field.
“It was not as much a revenue thing as much as a way to educate and show how it was a possibility for everyone,” Mr. Riseling said.
In 2023, a tornado spun through the farm, all but destroying it. The couple, now 85, were forced to give up their animals. Now, after five decades of education and stewardship, they are selling Apple Pond Farm.
Mr. Riseling would like to see a collective farm project take the land, while Ms. Hedlund wants to “cast a broader net,” perhaps an animal rescue farm or agritourism center. In the meantime, they’re planning to move to a smaller home in the nearby village of Jeffersonville.
“Living on a farm and farming, not just as a second-home gentrifier, was so interesting and engaging mentally and physically,” Ms. Hedlund said. “I’m overcome with nostalgia and how beautiful this farm is. I am so torn about moving away. It’s a beautiful place to have lived and even to die here.”
Heritage Farmers Strive to Adapt
Amy and Dave Erlwein were each introduced to the farming life by their parents.
Ms. Erlwein’s parents were Woodstock-era transplants from Long Island who bought a small farm and former boardinghouse in 1969. They learned to grow and preserve their own food, and passed those skills to their daughter.
Mr. Erlwein, 66, represents the third generation of a farming family from Jeffersonville. The chicken farm his grandparents started in 1896 switched to dairy cows in the 1960s. In 1996, the couple bought the farm from Mr. Erlwein’s parents. But they all worked together, his father never really retiring.
“Back then,” said Ms. Erlwein, 64, “you could pick a co-op to sell your milk to; there were several of them and they would barter with you to get your milk.”
Then the milk market collapsed in the 1990s, with buyers consolidating and farmers losing a competitive advantage. By 2006, Ms. Erlwein said, “there were only two co-ops in the entire country that you could sell to.”
“There’s nowhere that you can turn and get relief,” she said. “The prices were fluctuating so much, we could not depend on our milk check from one month to the next.”
As the operation teetered, the Erlweins’ children, off to college, showed no interest in carrying on the farming tradition.
“Usually in farms, it’s generational and the older person passes it down, and then they pass it down to the next generation,” Ms. Erlwein said. “But when you lose that generation, farms just disappear.”
The couple sold the cows in 2006, but kept the land — 150 acres, on which they now produce hay for sale. Ms. Erlwein took on some part-time jobs and her husband went to work for a farm-supply store.
“It was a challenge, being my own boss and then to go out into public, work, punch a clock, and do what everybody else is telling you to do,” Mr. Erlwein said.
Five years ago, they became federally certified chicken processors, a modest sideline to their hay business. They also bring in revenue from their homegrown vegetables.
“The economics and the mechanics of farming is a lot, and mostly you fly by the seat of your pants,” Ms. Erlwein said.
But she isn’t ready to abandon it. Serving on the board of the Delaware Highlands Conservancy, Ms. Erlwein is an advocate for farmland to be preserved for future farmers.
“We’re losing farmland rapidly,” she said. “And when you lose farmland, you lose the ability to feed your very own country, and that’s not good at all, especially nowadays.”
Such advocacy should help young farmers like their niece, Rianne Erlwein (the daughter of Mr. Erlwein’s brother), who has succeeded her own parents at Myers Century Farm, just up the hill, after leaving a nascent career as a registered nurse. She did so with her parents’ caution.
“They told me that if you want to milk cows, you’re going to have to get creative,” said Rianne, 31. So she did, shifting to a smaller herd of Jersey cows, whose creamy milk she sells in part to a kosher dairy, with the rest going into her own creamery brand, Ri’s.
“Pretty much the ice cream business has saved our family farm history and livelihood,” she said.
From a Hedge Fund to a ‘Food Forest’
At first glance, Wildsong Gaian Sanctuary looks like a city weekender’s dream: a rough-hewed lodge set on a knoll above a private pond, 150 quiet acres beneath a big sky.
And, for a while, it was just that. Bing Cheah, 42, a former financier, bought the property in November 2019 with a partner for $1.5 million, “because we fell in love with it, but without a plan.”
Born in Malaysia, Mr. Cheah moved to New York City after business school and took a job with a Connecticut-based hedge fund. “I earned a lot and spent a lot, had a consumerist life and was enjoying it a lot,” he said.
But in 2017, a life-threatening stomach cancer left him questioning his priorities. In 2023, he rented out his Brooklyn house and moved up to Bethel full-time. “I was just looking for a quiet place to be with nature,” he said. “Though I still did not want to be a farmer.”
But after a few months, he decided to step into the role of steward. A few things had changed his mind: a growing dissatisfaction with the commercial food system, particularly driven by his health issues; and a love of growing food and cooking, rooted in his Malaysian and Singaporean heritage.
On the land, he started a “food forest” comprising about 40 tree varieties, including American persimmon and pawpaws, the latter a sweet fruit native to North America. Mr. Cheah calls his 10-acre farm “a modern ecology project” that teaches him how to build a self-sustaining ecosystem.
That involved digging out swales in Sullivan County’s famously rocky soil to manage ground water and flooding, and using ducks and geese to fertilize the grounds, till the topsoil with their feet and eat harmful insects.
He also joined a local farmer mentor program to learn about crop spacing and production for his burgeoning enterprise, which will provide niche fruit products that Mr. Cheah says are delicious, indigenous, and require no chemical cultivation. The fowl will also become part of his business as artisanal meats for the restaurant industry and farmers markets.
The market for pawpaw and persimmon fruit “doesn’t fully exist right now and there’s no obvious how-to manual on how to successfully cultivate” such an orchard, he said. “How many farmers are willing to put in that investment, time, attention and wait it out? So far, almost nobody.”
The Harvard Business School graduate said his investment in the farm is about $150,000, and he projects another five years before the cash flow turns around, estimating his start-up costs at around $300,000. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment adjacent to the lodge, which his partner continues to run as a retreat rental, a fledgling business still in the red.
“There are so many channels open to new farmers doing things in a way that is not producing in mass quantity,” Mr. Cheah said. “That really didn’t exist 10 years ago.”
Better Food for Underserved Communities
When Brenda González and Chris Nickell moved from New York City to the Hudson Valley to start a farm in Beacon, N.Y., the idea was to create food access for underserved communities.
The couple, high-school sweethearts in Pittsburgh who married 13 years ago, moved to Upper Manhattan in 2013 when Mx. Nickell was accepted to New York University’s doctoral program in ethnomusicology. Ms. González, an educator, later helped found Comp Sci High, a charter school in the Bronx, and Mx. Nickell worked as deputy chief of staff for state Sen. Robert Jackson.
Living and working in neighborhoods with high rates of infection during the pandemic affected them deeply. “We came out of lockdown incredibly burned out and traumatized,” Ms. González, 37, said. At that point, it was time to stop talking about their pipe dream of farming and make a plan.
They created Finca Seremos on paper in 2022 and began planning the operation: how and where to access land, on-site infrastructure and the crops that would support a culturally sensitive CSA and other distribution. In the meantime, Mx. Nickell, 35, spent two years working on two farms within cycling distance of Manhattan.
By 2024, they had the skills and start-up money to lease an acre of fallow land in Beacon, in Dutchess County.
“We didn’t go into this with any romantic illusions,” said Mx. Nickell. “We knew it was hard work, it was going to be intense, intensely seasonal, and we wanted all those things.”
During a year in Beacon, the couple tilled the soil, planted crops and built propagation infrastructure. Meanwhile, they launched a CSA in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, offering their harvest to people on food assistance. In the first year, they earned $55,000 through the CSA, as well as through mission-aligned wholesale providers and farmers markets.
When challenges with both the landowner and the site spurred them to opt out of a lease renewal, the couple looked west to Sullivan County. “Land access is by far the biggest challenge facing all young farmers, and has certainly been our biggest challenge to date,” Mx. Nickell said.
Spreading word of their plight to their peer community, they were offered three acres on a farm on nearby Channery Hill. It meant rebuilding, but also the opportunity to expand production.
Finca Seremos relaunched in February with 17,000 linear feet of vegetables common in Central American and Caribbean cuisines such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, okra and root vegetables. They project 2025 revenue to be about $100,000 and hope to grow the CSA from its current 105 members to 120 across sites in Inwood, Newburgh, N.Y., and Liberty, N.Y., by fall.
A combination of sales and grants geared toward young farmers allowed the couple to pay back their start-up loan and hire a part-time employee. This year, they project being able to pay themselves.
“The work is dirty, messy and slow, but you just have to keep doing the work and it’ll pay off,” Mx. Nickell said. “We are living proof it is sustainable. You just got to bust your chops.”
Erin Schaff is a photojournalist for The Times, covering stories across the country.
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