A successful crop needs support in order to thrive: insects to pollinate it, people to weed it, sunshine and water to help it grow. Farms, too, cannot thrive in isolation. That’s where the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming comes in. Founded in 1997, Glynwood is an agricultural nonprofit which builds connections between and provides resources to food systems actors in the Hudson Valley. As Glynwood’s Program Manager, YSFP alumna Kate Anstreicher ’18 helps manage the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, the Food Sovereignty Fund, and other initiatives. In this interview with YSFP communications manager Sadie Bograd ’25, Anstreicher explains the crucial role that stakeholder-driven partnerships play in sustaining a thriving agricultural community.
This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the world of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
What is the Glynwood Center for Food and Farming? What do you do as program manager?
Glynwood’s mission is to ensure that the Hudson Valley remains a region defined by food and farming where farmers can thrive. One main part of Glynwood’s work is our regional food programs, where we help build producer coalitions in the Hudson Valley to assist with things like collective marketing and skill sharing. I manage the Hudson Valley CSA [community supported agriculture] coalition and help with communications, website development, and other parts of various projects.
Since land is so fragmented in this region, a lot of farms are small-scale, diversified vegetable operations, for which CSA is a good model. In 2016, we founded the CSA coalition and received grant funding to build a central website with a directory where consumers can search for farms near them using their zip code, what sort of things they want in a CSA share, and how they want to pay for it. That's been an important, centralized way for CSA farms to promote their offerings. We also organize an annual winter summit where we promote peer learning.
One of our earliest regional food programs was working with cider makers and apple growers. The alcoholic cider industry has grown a lot in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years, and New York is no exception. Glynwood saw an opportunity to help large-scale apple producers create a value-added product in the early 2000s. We got funding to send cider makers, apple growers, and other restaurateurs and spirits experts on several international trips to see other regions in which cider is a proud and long-standing industry. Those international exchanges helped grow the industry and provide technical assistance. We're still doing a lot of cider work, but our work also resulted in the founding of a separate organization, the New York Cider Association, which does advocacy to make sure that New York’s laws are supportive of cider makers. Lately, they’ve been working on doorstep delivery and shipping. Right now, there's this weird bottleneck: New York cider producers can ship their product to consumers in other states, but I could not order a bottle of cider from a New York producer to have it arrive at my door.
Those sound like valuable partnerships. What else does Glynwood do?
Our food access work has expanded since the pandemic. We founded our Food Sovereignty Fund in the spring of 2020 with an advisory council of farmers, food pantry representatives, and other folks across the region who were concerned about the increase in food insecurity at the onset of the pandemic. The Food Sovereignty Fund aims to channel more fresh produce and meat and dairy products into the emergency food system—although what we call an “emergency” is really a chronic issue in our country. We build contracts and pay farms in advance to grow food for food access partners and their communities, whether that is a food pantry run out of a church or a larger organization that also makes hot meals. We prioritize building relationships with farms that are run by historically marginalized farmers, including BIPOC, queer, and female farmers. This year, we contracted about $300,000 to 22 different farms who distributed food to 20 different food access partners.
We have a farm on site that's over 230 acres. In 2007, we started our farmer training programming, in which apprentices learn sustainable vegetable and livestock farming practices. We also help organize apprenticeships at other farms. A lot of farms want to help train the next generation of farmers, but they don't necessarily have the time or the resources to provide educational opportunities to their employees. We're able to pay those farmers for a four-hour workshop, for example, so they still get their hourly wage but can come to Glynwood.
We build additional revenue for our mission-related work through site rental. We're really close to the city, so people want to get married in the Hudson Valley. Model Hailey Bieber and her husband, Justin Bieber, came for a photo shoot once because Hailey was modeling for Vogue. They ended up using one of our goats.
I’ve seen some recent reporting that land prices have become a big issue for farmers in the region. Could you elaborate on these and other challenges that farmers face in the Hudson Valley?
There is a competing interest in the beauty of the landscape. Particularly during the pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers found it scary to live in the city, and the Hudson Valley became a very popular destination for people to settle down, to buy land, to have a family. I really don't blame them, but that has put a lot of pressure on the land market, and land values are astronomically high. Land access is a huge issue here for farmers who want to start a farm from scratch, especially first-generation farmers who don't have that much collateral and aren't inheriting land. Luckily, there are a lot of organizations in place that can help acquire land and found these incubator parcels.
Land access includes housing. The market here is honestly terrifying. I'm a salaried employee at a relatively well-resourced nonprofit, but the Beacon housing prices are a stretch for me. For people in a farm crew making $16 an hour, I can't even imagine how hard it is. I've heard stories from farmers who've said that they have tried to hire someone, and then that person can't find housing, so they can't take the job.
Something else that has shifted in the past five years alone is the climate crisis and the severity of the climate disasters that are occurring on an annual basis, even in our region. It’s the whole gambit: both too little water and too much water and crazy wind storms and hail storms in the middle of the summer and tropical storms.
You said that your mission is to maintain the Hudson Valley as a region defined by farming. What does the agricultural landscape look like?
This has been a bustling region for thousands of years. The Hudson River has always been a river of commerce and was stewarded by Indigenous populations for generations. At the beginning of colonialism, the Hudson Valley became a region that freighted food to New York City.
There are a lot of vegetable farms and orchards. You need to drive further north or west to get to crops like corn and soy. The land is too valuable here for that commercial scale. We also have some awesome raw milk dairies in the region, including sheep and goat dairies. It's harder to find big enough parcels of land for large-scale livestock production, especially for cattle. But I know of a lot of people who are raising broilers and laying hens.
It's amazing how robust the farming community is here. There are some multi-generational farms around, but the Hudson Valley is also a bastion for young farmers, first-generation farmers. We have an incredibly robust queer farming community and increasingly BIPOC farming community, in large part thanks to farms that are very intentionally building that community, like Soul Fire Farm, Rock Steady Farm, Sweet Freedom Farm. They're all advocating for food justice and for the training of BIPOC farmers and queer farmers, and they’re building a safe space for those farmers. Chaseholm Farm is a queer-owned, third-generation, grass-fed dairy, and they have a dairy drag show every June that's popular among farmers.
How does Glynwood fit into that community? How do you figure out the specific challenges that you can help address?
We're still learning. We are a well-resourced, majority white organization, so especially when it comes to things like food justice and social justice, we're not the experts. For example, with the Food Sovereignty Fund, the accountability council is really our guiding force. We have the time and the resources to facilitate the project, but we need input from folks who are on the ground distributing food and representing communities elsewhere in the Hudson Valley.
We're trying to get more into language justice and offering more of our services in Spanish in particular, because there are tons of farm workers here whose first language is not English. Quite a few farmers are using the H-2A program to employ farm workers from Guatemala and Mexico. We try to have several bilingual events a year and are trying to translate as many written resources as we can. We also bought equipment for bilingual events that we are willing to rent out to other entities for free, because we think that language justice should be more widespread. That was in large part inspired by the Hudson Valley Farm Hub who already had that model in place.
One thing that we have to remind ourselves of is that efficient work is not always the best work. You want to see change really fast, but it's slow, intentional work in which you involve stakeholders that can help you better achieve your goals in the long run.
Slow, intentional work—that reminds me of the Yale Farm! Could you tell me about your time there?
The Yale Sustainable Food Program was a wonderful and influential part of my college experience. I started volunteering at the Farm my first-year fall and was working as a culinary events manager by the following spring semester. I loved being able to be outside every Friday, rain or shine, and to learn some awesome culinary skills from Jacquie. The Chewing the Fat speaker series was also amazing. That was the first time that I heard Leah Penniman [of Soul Fire Farm], Michael Twitty [author of The Cooking Gene]. The lineup was just incredible, and it opened up a new dimension of food and agriculture and environmentalism to me.