Branching out
Every Wednesday morning around 6:30, a refrigerated van from the Adirondacks stops at the corner of 135th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem, where its contents—a week’s supply of fresh food from Essex Farm for 40-50 households in Manhattan and Brooklyn—are transferred into two more vans, one headed for each borough.
The Adirondack vehicle, having traveled down the Northway and Thruway through the night, returns to The Hub on the Hill in Essex, a nonprofit local foods promoter that recently added delivery to the list of services it offers local farmers to help them get products to market.
Essex County’s farming revival of the last decade or so, which primarily fed regional markets at first, is increasingly supported by sales in urban markets elsewhere in the state—often in New York City. It takes some extra food miles to keep a local food movement thriving in the Adirondacks, where the growing season is short and the population seasonal. Two of the three farms featured in Ben Stechschulte’s 2012 film, “Small Farm Rising,” now sell a
