Tomato Season Comes Early On Pike Farm

A few seedling trays sit in the bay window. There are 210 green shoots that just edged their way out of a peat-based mixture, reaching toward the sunlight. It is the beginning of March and the Pikes are getting a head start on the tomato season.Come June, they said, their efforts will be rewarded—they will have the only farm stand with East End-grown tomatoes that early.

“We open our farm stand in June because that is when we have strawberries. It isn’t really worthwhile if we are just selling strawberries,” said Jim Pike, who owns Pike Farms in Sagaponack with his wife, Jennifer.

They also sell arugula, sugar snap peas and lettuce, but other early crops, like zucchini or cucumbers, aren’t ready for the first opening week.

A native of New Rochelle, Mr. Pike moved to the East End in 1979. He worked on a potato farm in Water Mill before taking a job at the environmental research center for Cornell University. Afterward, he decided to get into farming.

“I was lucky because potato leasers were consolidating and getting rid of their smaller pieces,” he said. “I made a business out of finding smaller pieces to farm.”

He thinks it would be difficult for a young farmer to take this approach today, as, by his estimation, most available farmland is already in use.

Owners of large tracts of land in the Empire State have been encouraged to lease land to farms through the New York Agricultural Districts Law, which grants them reduced property taxes in exchange for letting their land be used for agricultural purposes. However, many farmers on the East End are reporting that in the past five years, they have been rapidly losing leased land. Most say the farmland they used to lease has been lost to development.

“Greenhouse varieties differ from field house varieties because they are bred to a single stem,” Mr. Pike said of the tomatoes he grows. This means that his plants grow vertically, twisting their way around a piece of twine that hangs from the ceiling. This takes a lot of attention and “training” of the plant—otherwise, Mr. Pike said, “we’d have a jungle mess in here.”

The tomato shoots will stay in the house until St. Patrick’s Day. Then, Mr. Pike will transplant them, fitting two tomato plants into each 5-gallon planter that, weather permitting, he can move into the greenhouse by April 1. If there are some warmer days before then, he carries the plants out to the greenhouse to bask in the sunlight, just for the day.

In addition to the cost of heating the greenhouse in April, the greenhouse tomatoes are also quite costly in terms of labor. In addition to the replanting, the Pikes have to prune and trim the tomatoes more than they would if they were growing in the field.

“Over the course of eight to nine weeks, we get 20 pounds [of tomatoes] per plant. We can do that because we monitor it closely,” Mr. Pike explained. To put that number in perspective, an heirloom tomato plant in the field averages around 5 to 8 pounds per plant.

One downside of greenhouse tomatoes is that they can tend to not be as flavorful as other varieties that are grown in their fields. But, luckily, Mr. Pike has a trick: starve the tomato a bit. If you dehydrate them sporadically, it makes them sweeter.

The greenhouse also serves as the storage facility for tractors and seedling trays and shelving for the farm stand. Space is tight on the Pike Farm, as the family operates on 45 acres, 13 acres of which they own outright. At one point, they had 70 acres in operation, most of it leased. Mr. Pike said that if they lose any more rented land, they will not be able to function.

They hope to purchase additional land to ensure the farm’s survival, but in recent years, farmland, even with its development rights sold, has become very costly. According to the Peconic Land Trust, protected farmland subject to regular development rights on the South Fork east of the canal has sold for as much as $200,000 an acre, putting it out of the reach of most farmers.

“It is a nice life, but it’s hard to make a living,” said Mr. Pike. “We got in at a good time when there were less deer, and land was cheaper.”