“I’ve probably tried every single thing there is to do in agriculture,” says Clifford Hatch, co-owner of Upinngil in Gill. It’s true: Upinngil is an unusually diverse operation.
Clifford, his daughter Sorrel Hatch, and their team of employees and family members grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including specialty crops like mushrooms and winter salad greens. They also produce raw milk, cheese, beef, pork, maple syrup and honey and operate a bakery featuring regionally grown grains.
Their products, along with a carefully curated selection of locally grown and made goods, are available year-round at the farm store and seasonally through the farm’s pick-your-own offerings.
When Clifford Hatch and his wife, Patricia Crosby, started farming in the late 1980s, the plan was simple. “Sheep, bees and leeks,” says Clifford. “Because I had worked as a chef, I knew leeks were one of the things I paid the most for by the crate. I had already started beekeeping, so I figured I’d add leeks and then the sheep would eat the leeks that didn’t sell.”
Do sheep like leeks? “They’ll eat ’em!” says Clifford.
As it happened, the demand for leeks at the time didn’t meet the farm’s production, so the
Hatches diversified. “One day I was at a family member’s farm, and I saw all these people
picking strawberries,” says Clifford. “I thought about the previous November, pulling leeks out of the mud in the cold, and these people were out there picking and having fun? I had already saturated the leek market, and sometimes you just have to change gears.”
“That’s the thing that has made us successful over the years: learning to change gears,” says Sorrel Hatch. “You’ve got to follow the pull of what people want rather than trying to push your products on the market.”
At that point, Clifford says, the farm had 10 acres that were good for cultivating strawberries and another 30 acres that could be used for keeping cows.
“I grew up in a dairy family. I figured I could spend my winters making cheese and sell it to people when they showed up for pick-your-own strawberries in June. But once you get started, one thing leads to another. I call it the barnyard theory of inevitability: You get a cow to get some milk, and then you get some pigs to drink the extra milk, and then things get out of control,” he says.
Upinngil was licensed to start selling raw milk in 2005, just a couple of years before Sorrel Hatch decided to return to the family farm.
“I wasn’t necessarily planning to come home again after going to Cornell,” she says, “but being away from home made me really appreciate farming and my family and my community. I took a course in college that was about innovation and solving environmental problems, and I thought, ‘I might be the only person in this class who could go home and start actually applying these ideas in real life.’
“We’re trying to farm in a more regenerative way. That’s the beauty of what we do: You can farm in a way that’s healthier for the Earth, and it’s more labor, but that’s what humans are built for,” says Sorrel.
This timing — getting licensed to sell raw milk and an infusion of youthful enthusiasm from Sorrel — was fortuitous for the farm. Demand for raw milk was growing as concern about growth hormones in milk started getting more public attention.
“The raw milk was instrumental in our growth because it’s one of those things that people really want year-round and it’s only legal to sell it directly from the farm, so it draws people to you,” says Sorrel. “It enabled us to transition our vegetables from wholesale markets to selling them directly from the farm.”
“And with the milk, it makes sense to start offering things like granola and coffee,” says Clifford. “Suddenly we had a pretty full grocery. Then we started growing grains for a few years, and that’s when we added the bakery. If you’d asked me 20 years ago about what we’d be doing now, I would have thought you were making it up. I was actually making retirement plans. It was getting to be too much for me to do by myself.”
Sorrel jokes that she returned to the farm to help her dad and make things easier for him but that, instead, she’s had the opposite effect.
“Everything has just blossomed from there. It’s a bit overwhelming, but it feels good to serve our community in this way,” Sorrel says.
As the farm and farm store operations have grown, so, too, has the crew at Upinngil. Sarah Porrovecchio, the farm’s herdswoman, manages the dairy cows. Simon Eaton is Clifford’s right-hand man, and he oversees the vegetable production. Isaac Bingham, Sorrel’s husband, has led many of the farm’s infrastructure projects. Many more people work on the farm, in the bakery and in the farm store.
“And at this point, we’re looking at the next generation,” says Clifford. “Sorrel’s children (ages 12, 10 and 8) are starting to take on enterprises of their own. They’re old enough for chickens or whatever else interests them.”
The skilled staff is essential to Upinngil’s operations. So are their dedicated customers.
“That is one of the magical things about the Valley,” says Clifford. “The thing that makes our farm work is that it’s not just us. Our customers care. Our customers give a damn. That’s a really special thing. We have a common feeling here in our area that I think many parts of the country don’t have.”
Upinngil’s bakery and farm store are open year-round, seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Stop in for a wide range of farm products — this is the time of year to enjoy the farm’s much-loved winter greens and salad mix.
Claire Morenon is a communications manager at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). Find more local farms and farmstands at buylocalfood.org.