On a rainy day in late March, a small group of young men and women sat huddled together around a wooden table in the far western corner of the Amber Waves Farm market, listening to an information session on the “101” on nonprofits and how they operate. The info session was just one component of the apprenticeship program they’re enrolled in at Amber Waves Farm, a 35-acre, 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Amagansett, founded in 2009, that has become an integral part of the community and local food system in a seemingly endless variety of ways.

Katie Baldwin and Amanda Merrow were like them once.

Seventeen years ago, the Amber Waves co-founders met for the first time, in spring 2008, as apprentices at Quail Hill Farm under the guidance of their mentor, Scott Chaskey. Both had enrolled in the yearlong apprenticeship as a means to a different kind of career end.

But then life had other plans.

Nearly two decades later, the duo have made the farm and the indoor market space — formerly the Amagansett Farmers Marker — right off Montauk Highway in the heart of Amagansett a destination for both year-round and summer visitors. People arrive in droves, especially during the heart of the summer season, for many different reasons and sometimes all of the above. The farm not only grows and sells a wide range of fresh produce and other locally-sourced, fresh foods, while also making delicious menu items from the food it grows, but it also is a gathering place for both children and adults who want to learn more about farming, food systems, and the food they eat.

Be the Change

In April 2008, Merrow and Baldwin met when Merrow picked Baldwin up from the Amagansett train station. They headed to Mary’s Marvelous for a cup of coffee, and then straight to Quail Hill Farm, where they got to work learning about the business of farming. At the start of that yearlong program, neither one of them intended on becoming a farmer.

Baldwin, originally from California, had studied international relations and worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, on a track toward a job in the state department. She had an interest in global public health and international food policy. Seeking a better understanding of food systems in the U.S., she decided to start at the source. She learned about Chaskey’s apprenticeship program after someone recommended his 2005 book, “This Common Ground.”

Similarly, Merrow had a degree in economics and environmental science and had planned on working abroad in a microfinance capacity, and came to Quail Hill for what she figured would be valuable field experience for that type of work.

They became fast friends, and both fell in love with farming. With the financial crisis throwing so many lives into upheaval, they decided to take a leap of faith. A bit of luck was on their side as well. The property that would become Amber Waves Farm had just become available for lease. They submitted a proposal, held hands, and jumped.

“People always ask, how did you do this after just one year of farming?” Baldwin said, sitting down for an interview at the table next to the apprentices on that rainy spring day earlier this year. “Audacity? Naivete? Luck? All of it?”

Fairly early on during her own apprenticeship, she had an epiphany.

“I realized there is so much work to do in this country’s food system, that I immediately knew after farming for a few months that I can shift my thinking and be a farmer and make real change in the food system that way,” she said.

When it came to settling on what farming together on their own would look like and what they’d focus on, Baldwin and Merrow began thinking about grains.

“We realized that no one was really celebrating grains in a culinary context,” Merrow said. “We were thinking, could you even grow local bread or have truly local pizza? The East End was the first place in the U.S. where European settlers grew grain — we have windmills in every hamlet.”

They figured that focusing on grains to start would be a great way to differentiate themselves as farmers, and by the end of the summer of 2008, they had decided to grow organic grains.

That focus brought about the origin of the farm name — which has become widely popularized by the ubiquitous trucker hats — but settling on a name wasn’t easy.

“We had a list of key words and wanted something feminine and something that led your mind to the ocean,” Merrow said. “But all our key words together sounded like cocktails, like ‘Sea Breeze’ or ‘Ocean Mist’.” She laughed.

The name came to them during a conversation with a friend. Merrow said she doesn’t remember the details of that conversation, she just remembers the feeling that, upon hearing the words “Amber Waves,” they all instantly agreed that that was it.

A Historic Property

The property that would become Amber Waves Farm had a long history and important place in Amagansett long before Merrow and Baldwin took over. Pat Struck, who died in 2022, first created the Amagansett Farmers Market in the 1950s, setting up a small card table on the front lawn of the home she owned, which sits just west of Amber Waves. The farmers market grew over the years, from selling pints of wild blueberries that had been foraged by locals, to building the brick and mortar location that is now the Amber Waves market. The Amagansett Farmers Market had its “glory days” in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Merrow.

“It was the place to be on a Saturday morning,” she said. “Pat had a real vision and understanding of how to create community and what her customers wanted, and how to share her land and her space with the people around her. That set the tone for how we’ve stewarded the property.”

The Amagansett Farmers Market had its last year in operation in 2007. The market changed hands in 2008, and then Eli Zabar was a tenant of the market from August 2008 through 2014. An organization called the Amagansett Food Institute — which would eventually become East End Food — ran the market in 2015 and 2016.

All the while, Merrow and Baldwin had been farming the land, and eventually started working with the property owner and the Peconic Land Trust on an enhanced easement that would further restrict the farmland uses, and thus make it more affordable to buy. They finally reached a deal in 2017, which reunited the farmland with the market.

In many ways, the work Merrow and Baldwin are doing is a continuation of the legacy that Struck started, making the farm an open and welcoming place in the community, taking advantage of its proximity to the Amagansett downtown, the main road, and the local school. Merrow said that many people she meets and talks to in town over the years have told her that they had their first job at the Amagansett Farmers Market, courtesy of Struck.

Stewardship and Sustainability

During the early years of Amber Waves Farm, Merrow and Baldwin were busy.

They had dreams and a vision for the future, but executing them would take time. In the immediate, there was just the unglamorous and unrelenting work of farming.

“From day one, in April of 2009, Amanda and I did all the jobs, and we did them together,” Baldwin said. “I remember someone asking how many hours a week do you work? It was probably close to 95. It was a lot of literal manual labor hours.”

They kept up that punishing pace for about three years, seeding and planting mainly by hand, or asking other farmers to do the tractor work — because they did not own a tractor.

They scaled up over time, both in terms of the acreage of land they farmed, and the number of people they hired. Currently, the farm includes a total of 35 tillable acres — 10 at the farm and market headquarters in Amagansett, and an additional 25 acres at other parcels. The CSA membership grew, from just 18 families in the early days to around 100 now. Amber Waves employs 30 people on a year-round basis, and many more for seasonal help.

“Amanda and I tend to ideate, decide, do and then hire later,” Baldwin said with a laugh. “We get the project in motion first.”

They’re also proud of the fact that the vast majority — Baldwin estimated 95 percent — of their employees are women, and many of them have been working at the farm for five years or more.

“It feels like people come to work with a sense of purpose beyond their job,” Baldwin said. “I think that’s what we’ve tried to instill.”

A commitment to sustainability and stewardship are at the heart of the Amber Waves Farm mission. It’s a principle Baldwin says came from their mentor, Chaskey. Everything starts from the ground up, both literally and metaphorically.

“I learned that if you want to be a successful organic farmer, you must care for your soil,” Baldwin said. “We pulled that up to be a core tenet of how the organization operates in the community. You have the soil and the farmer, and you have Amber Waves and the community.”

The physical location of the farm is part of that.

“This property, on Main Street in Amagansett town, is an open access point,” Baldwin said. “So the property is stewarded by thoughtful farmers but it also acts as a gathering place for community stewardship.”

To that end, the farm has a self-guided walking tour, free for anyone, and also hosts free, play and exploration-based classes for children. They host field trips on a regular basis, giving young children a chance to understand where their food comes from and also have a new idea of what a farmer is, does, and looks like.

“The kids from the Amagansett School, when they do a visit and then send thank you notes, in their pictures, the farmers riding the tractor always have ponytails,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin expanded on why education is such a key part of what they do.

“Amber Waves is a teaching farm,” she said. “We teach new farmers how to become farmers, and we also teach eaters, which is everyone, about food. We focus on young children as a primary audience because we’ve seen time and time again that if you can capture the imagination and spirit of a child, and have them experience food memories on a farm, they cultivate their own appreciation that we are part of an interconnected world; we depend on processes and other things and people. Having that appreciation for the natural world infuses their creativity and their kindness and compassion.”

Another part of creating a sustainable way forward when it comes to local agriculture and food producing is to break down the barriers between people, the food they eat, and the people who grow it.

“From a community perspective, what a refreshing relationship it is to have that you know your farmer,” Baldwin said. “People can say, ‘I know Farmer Katie and Farmer Amanda.’ We know our doctors and lawyers and mechanics, but we don’t know our food professionals. The globalization of food has eroded that relationship, but we’re trying to recapture that farmer-eater connection.”

A Ripple Effect, and the Future

While they may not have set out on a career path as farmers nearly 20 years ago when they met each other at Quail Hill, Merrow and Baldwin seem to have the perfect set of skills to achieve everything they’ve set out to do and have largely done. A total of 72 farmers have now graduated from their apprenticeship program, and 18 of them now have their own farms or food business operations.

Laura Rose Dailey, the Amber Waves Market Manager, graduated from the apprenticeship program in 2014. A year later, she farmed a 1.5-acre plot in Springs, and also used the experience she gained to work as the head of the produce department at the Green Grape grocery store in Brooklyn. She is a certified herbalist, after going through a three-year program in Vermont, and she returned to Amber Waves after that. She has watched the apprenticeship program, and everything else at Amber Waves, grow over the years, and shared her thoughts on the evolution of the farm, and the magic that Merrow and Baldwin have created together.

“They’re kind of yin and yang,” she said. “They’re a good team of dreaming and doing. [Amber Waves] has grown exponentially in some ways, but also on pace with, okay, we’re doing this thing the community likes, how can we lean into that more? We’re really responding to what people out here need, year-round folks for sure. And the apprenticeship program has grown so much. They have such a robust curriculum.

“They have an eye,” she added of the pair. “They just know.”

Merrow and Baldwin have come a long way from their humble beginnings as eager apprentice farmers, and they say the success they’re seeing now with Amber Waves is beyond what they could have imagined at that time. True to form, they’re always thinking ahead. Baldwin said she’d love to add to the infrastructure of the property, to provide more opportunities for learning and gathering, in all types of weather. (A storage facility would be nice too, she added.)

She said that, as employers, they feel the pain of the affordable housing crisis, estimating that they would have more than double the number of apprentices every year if housing was more accessible. They’d love to fill out that program, especially because there’s a demand for new farmers. They both point out that the average age of a farmer is now 60, and that many of them would like to pass their land on to the next generation to farm, rather than see it sold off and be developed.

“There were two agricultural requests that went out for proposal today,” Baldwin said, speaking of East Hampton Town. “We need farmers.”

At the end of the day, Merrow and Baldwin want to ensure they can keep on doing more of the same for the community.

“The overall mission and feeling and vibe has been consistent from the beginning,” Merrow said. “From the first day that Katie and I set foot on this property, we were just like, this just has to be for the public. It can’t be Amanda and Katie LLC. It has to be for the town.”

Their enthusiasm for what they do and their sense of pride for what they’ve managed to accomplish is palpable. And it’s well-earned.

“We have been effective at creating something bigger than ourselves,” Merrow said. “The lives and new farms and careers and food experiences that have come out of this thing that Katie and I conjured really blows me away. When you’re building something, the goalposts can move, so it can be hard to look at the progress because you keep marching forward. But when I do zoom out, it’s extraordinary what the organization has been able to do for people.”