Building a farm into a successful business is hard. Figuring out what happens to it once you retire can be even harder.
The owners of Triple Green Jade Farm, in Willsboro, are looking ahead, with hopes to turn their farm into a business and housing cooperative to help people access land, farming and housing in the Champlain Valley.
The Breadery at Triple Green Jade Farm
Bread, made from local, organic, milled grains was the beginning of Triple Green Jade Farm, an 80-acre farm of rolling green fields and forest in the Champlain Valley.
“We started with bread because that was one of the things that we thought could be a good niche,” said Dan Rivera.
Dan and his business partner and wife Kimmy Rivera bought Triple Green Jade farm back in 2014.
“Organic flour was kind of our thing,” he said. “And luckily there weren’t many bakers at that time using organic flour, and we kind of found our audience and found our customers that way.”
I met Dan on the farm in early May, in front of a barnlike structure called ‘The Breadery.’
It used to be a garage, but the Riveras have turned into something that’s part bakery, part commercial kitchen, part instructional space.
It’s dominated by a huge, 5 feet by 7 feet wood fired bread oven.
“You can do about 35 sourdoughs at a time,” said Rivera, as he pulled down a long wooden bread paddle. “The oven is so deep this helps get to the back.”
There’s a big, three bay sink. A butcher block topped island is where the Riveras teach cooking and baking classes.
They even have their own stone mill for milling flour from whole grains.
“And that enables us to buy wheat that’s only 5 minutes away, 10 minutes away,” says Rivera, explaining they buy local wheat and grains from places from Full and By Farm in Essex, Cedar Hollow Farm in Altona, and Adirondack Hay and Organic Grains in Essex. “And we mill it and it goes into the breads. It goes into everything really.”
Building the farm into a business
The Riveras have spent the last 11 years growing The Breadery, and the rest of the farm, into a successful business.
They raise cows, and pigs, and chickens. They sell their products, and stuff they make from other local farms, at the Saranac Lake Farmer’s Market, right on the farm, and Trigo, a storefront they opened two winters ago in Westport.
“We kind of take all the raw materials that we can, from either our farm or other local farms … and create all kinds of value added foods with them, be it soups, chicken bone broth, chicken liver pate to go with breads and baguettes,” said Rivera.
Rivera said that it took a while, but the couple has figured out how to work solely “on-farm,” meaning they don’t have other jobs to pay the bills.
We were able to kind of just grow to the point where we were able to not have to work off farm,” he said. “We figured out, OK, here’s what the bills are, and here’s what we’re making. Once one is bigger than the other, you get to keep playing the game you know?”
Figuring out the next generation
The Riveras bought Triple Green Jade Farm after looking for land for years.
They looked in the Adirondacks and Champlain Valley region both because the land was a lot cheaper than downstate, and because Kimmy’s parents had retired in Saranac Lake. They actually found this farm on Craigslist, and are still friends with the former owner.
But the couple also came into this venture with some resources. They used to live in the Hudson Valley, and for a long time, Dan Rivera worked in corporate America in marketing and e-commerce.
They bought this farm because they wanted a different life; but Rivera said he knows that’s not something that’s possible for everyone. He said starting a farming or agricultural business is getting harder and harder.
“Essex County has those challenges as far as farmland access for young farmers, affordable housing, and (opportunities for) people that want to be somewhat entrepreneurial,” he said.
Those are things Dan Rivera says he and Kimmy started thinking about a lot in the last few years, as they started talking about succession planning and what would happen to the farm after them.
The Riveras are in their fifties, don’t have kids, and Rivera said something felt “off” about selling the farm for the highest price they could fetch.
“Rather than just sell the land to the highest bidder, how can we bring more people onto the land, because it’s so hard to access it?” said Rivera. “How can we bring more people from, you know, minorities? I’m Puerto Rican, so I know that those kind of challenges do exist.”
Turning Triple Green Jade Farm into a cooperative
That’s how the Riveras got to the idea of turning their 80-acre farm into a cooperative.
They announced their intention to do so recently, on Earth Day, April 22.
They want to welcome between six and eight other families to join them here as co-owners, of the land and the business.
Dan Rivera said people who join the cooperative would own the land together and share common buildings. For housing, the cooperative would lease land plots to individual members, who would then build their own houses.
He also said they’re prepared to help people with some level of owner financing.
He said the cooperative model is particularly compelling for him, because as they’ve grown the business, he’s felt strange about hiring employees.
“That never really jived with me,” he said, “only because if I had someone working alongside me, I always felt that they could be doing this themselves!”
Dan said he doesn’t want to be the boss of other people, but he’d love to see the farm’s land really utilized.
He said 80 acres is a lot, and he and Kimmy don’t have the time or energy to make the most of it.
“Like we don’t do vegetables, but we probably could,” he said, pointing to the southern sloped land. “ So if somebody wanted to come and live here and grow vegetables, it’s perfect.”
He can imagine someone raising more cows or sheep here, for meat or cheesemaking, artists, folks who want to do more with prepared foods. He also sees a place for people who aren’t necessarily young farmers, like retired people, or accountants to run the business’s books, or artists.
He says he’d happily teach someone everything he knows about baking, and eventually turn the Breadery over. “The eaters are here in Essex County and the Adirondack Park. The locavores are here,” he said.
Getting the word out there, starting a long-term process
Rivera said he knows this isn’t a conventional approach, but that he and Kimmy have done the legal legwork to make it work on paper, with the help of the Cooperative Development Institute, which helped Ward Lumber become a worker-owned cooperative, and the Food and Law Center at Pace University.
He said it also helped to learn from the American Farmland Trust that they’re not the only farm owners thinking this way.
“They were like, ‘no, more and more people are looking to kind of do this kind of thing!’ There’s a movement kind of simmering where cooperatives really fit,” said Rivera.
Dan said they’ve already heard from people as close as Keene and Essex and from as far away as New York City, and they’ve even set up some farm visits.
But he’s expecting this venture to take time; it could be ten or even twenty years before the cooperative is fully established.
“It’s going to take a while. We got to build houses … there’s a lot of things,” he said, joking that 53 a good age to start planning for retirement.
He says something he’s really excited about is the idea of sharing resources, like farm equipment. “There’s too many other farms doing similar things where we’re all buying the same things. Like we don’t all need a tractor,” said Rivera.
He also thinks a big perk would be sharing the joys and the burden of a farm, and helping each other to be able to leave for a vacation.
Rivera says a lot has changed for him since moving to the North Country and opening Triple Green Jade Farm, including a bit of his outlook on life.
“In the beginning, it was, you know: left the corporate world and started from scratch. and it was very much that idea of rugged individualism. But now it’s like, we all need rugged collectivism! We need everyone to work together,” said Rivera.