Cliff Foster Remembered As Farming Visionary; Memorial Service To Be Held Saturday At Farm

There is a photo of Cliff Foster standing on a tractor when he was just 5 years old. It’s an old photo, out of focus, the word “Farmall” on the side of the machine barely distinguishable, a dusting of snow on the ground beneath the wheels. But the look of pure joy on his face is unmistakable as his small gloved hands grip the giant steering wheel that is nearly twice his height.

“I don’t think he ever thought of himself as anything other than a farmer,” Lee Foster said of her husband earlier this week. The Sagaponack residents celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary on June 22, just three days before Mr. Foster died at the age of 78. He had been in poor health since a recent stroke.

A memorial service for Mr. Foster will be held at Foster Farm on Sagg Main Street on Saturday, July 8, at 3 p.m.

According to those who knew him best, farming was Mr. Foster’s destiny—and he embraced that destiny with fervor, excelling as a steward of the land that had been in his family since the 1870s.

His wife, three children—Robin Anne, 50, Dean, 48, and Marilee, 46—fellow East End farmers, and other friends and colleagues spoke about Mr. Foster’s intelligence and expertise with all things related to farming: his mastery of crop rotation; his skills as a machinist, with the ability to fix and improve any piece of equipment he encountered; and, perhaps most important, his tireless dedication to improving the lives of his fellow farmers and advocating for the preservation of the agricultural lifestyle he cherished.

He had a large presence physically speaking, as well, standing at well over 6 feet, and almost always in overalls.

Mr. Foster served in leadership roles for the Long Island Farm Bureau, the Long Island Cauliflower Association—the island’s main supplier of seeds and other essential farming supplies—and the Long Island Antique Power Association, where his love of tractors and other farming equipment found another outlet.

His service to the community was not contained to the agricultural sphere: He served for many years at the commissioner of the Bridgehampton Fire Department, and was also a longtime board member and past president of the Suffolk County Fire Academy, which oversees training and protocol for fire departments in the county.

Of course, Mr. Foster was known to his community primarily for his commitment to farming. As giant homes replaced farms over the years in Sagaponack, Mr. Foster was determined to remain in his occupation of choice.

“The transactions my father was able to put together to keep the farm intact were incredible,” said his youngest daughter, Marilee Foster, who in addition to farming is a columnist for The Press. “He had that don’t-blink attitude toward getting things done. He was a toughie—and thank God.”

One of Mr. Foster’s good friends, Robert Hartmann, who served with Mr. Foster on the Long Island Farm Bureau board and in other organizations, remembers that toughness on display during the 1970s, when they worked together with several other farmers in the bureau to lead the fight against the Long Island Lighting Company, or LILCO, and its desire to build several nuclear power plants on Long Island—a move that the bureau believed would have devastated the farming community.

Mr. Hartmann recalled a time when “big shots” from LILCO made a visit to Mr. Foster’s farm and asked why he was giving them such a hard time.

“They said, ‘Look at all this electricity you’re using on your farm. You need us!’” Mr. Hartmann said. “And he just slid open the door to the barn and showed them a big Caterpillar diesel with a generator and said, ‘I don’t need you guys.’

“He loved his family, and he loved farming,” Mr. Hartmann added. “Those were his two loves in life.”

It was a love he passed to the ones he loved, particularly his son, Dean Foster, who took over operations of the farm in 2001, working closely with his mother, Lee, and sister Marilee. The younger Mr. Foster said that, just like his father, he never considered it a different way of life, knowing he’d follow in his father’s footsteps from the time he set him loose to drive a tractor on his own around the farm fields at the tender age of 6.

“My grandfather on my mom’s side built me a seat that would go on the fender of the tractor when I was just a toddler,” Mr. Foster recalled. “My dad would belt me into that seat on the side of the tractor, and I would ride and ride and ride. My dad created such a wonderful experience for me as a young child, I just couldn’t think about doing anything else.”

The elder Mr. Foster came to his occupation in much the same way as his son, inheriting the family business from his parents, Charles Halsey Foster and Anne Parsons Hedges. Mr. Foster attended the one-room schoolhouse in Sagaponack before graduating from East Hampton High School, but, according to his wife, he began his career as a farmer before he even received a high school diploma.

Mr. Foster’s eldest daughter, Robin Anne—who owns a dog boarding facility in Bridgehampton—had many vivid and cherished memories of her father as well, pointing out that despite how busy he was and involved in so many different organizations, he always made time to sit down to dinner with his family. She said her father taught her how to back up a big horse trailer, and drive a standard transmission, and passed along his mechanical know-how as well.

Helping others, even those outside of his family, was simply his nature, she said.

“My dad always was willing to help the little guy, the underdog,” she said. “He always saw good in everyone. I’ll miss him very much. He set a wonderful example. He was truly a big man and a great man.”

Of course, the underdogs Mr. Foster championed the most were his fellow farmers. Along with his wife, he worked tirelessly at the town, county and even state level to create planning policies aimed at preserving agricultural ways of life. Mr. Foster was at one time president of the South Fork Land Foundation, while Ms. Foster was on the board. The foundation still exists today but under the umbrella of the Peconic Land Trust. Mr. and Ms. Foster were instrumental—with the help of other old farming families in the area and Cornell Cooperative Extension—in the creation of an agricultural district in Southampton Town that helped farmers keep their land and continue to farm in the area.

“The gratitude I feel for my dad is just beyond,” Dean Foster said. “He taught me to be able to do anything; to be an electrician, a mechanic, a farmer. There are very few things I feel like I can’t do it. And perseverance—he taught me perseverance. You just keep hammering on it until you get it.”

Perseverance was a word many people used when speaking about Mr. Foster. His and his family’s legacy is vast, and they’ve left an imprint on the community in a seemingly endless number of ways.

Rob Carpenter, the administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, described the Fosters as “visionaries” for the way they preserved their farmland; Robert Holley, executive director of the fire academy, called Mr. Foster a “true gentleman”; Jeff White, the 1st assistant chief with the Bridgehampton Fire Department, called Mr. Foster a “pragmatic problem-solver.”

“Anything he focused on, he devoted his entire attention and resources to,” Mr. White added. “You knew exactly what he stood for and how he felt about something. And he did a good job with all of it.”

Lee Foster spoke about her husband’s perseverance as well, and the many attributes that not only made him a great farmer but also that attracted her to him in the first place.

They were married just before her 20th birthday, shortly after meeting, when she traveled from New Jersey to spend her summers with her family in a small house on Sagg Main Beach. First dates included watching wild ducks land in a field before dawn, and going for a moonlit walk to Camp’s Pond, a small kettlehole in the woods on land the Fosters eventually preserved.

“I knew I wanted to live here, and marrying a farmer is the way to do it,” Ms. Foster said. “I also wanted a horse—and that’s one way to get one.”

Ms. Foster eventually got that horse, buying a mare from a stable in Montauk. When it refused to get on the horse trailer, she rode it all the way home, she said, depositing a few coins in a pay phone in Amagansett to let her husband know where she was.

She watched her husband devote his life to his farm, and she did so right alongside him. She recalled her husband building his first potato harvester himself, and days when the entire family—and any friends who may have been at the home—moved irrigation pipe by hand.

“Perseverance—everything was perseverance,” she said. “He never lost a day.”

Like Mr. Foster, John L. Halsey’s family has been farming in Sagaponack for generations. The men knew each other most of their lives, growing up together in what was a tight-knit farming community. Mr. Halsey said he understands the life of a farmer as well as anyone.

“A farmer is born. There’s something about the make-up of a person who enjoys what it takes to be an agriculturalist,” Mr. Halsey said. “That role has changed over the generations, but our country needs to realize that there are those who want to do that for us. And certainly Clifford Foster was a shining example of that type of person.”

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his three children, as well as a sister, Julia Foster Mumford of Waverly, Pennsylvania.

Memorial donations may be made to the Long Island Farm Bureau, the Bridgehampton Fire Department, or the Long Island Antique Power Association.