"stone barns" news and stories

Kitchen gardens just aren't enough anymore. A small but growing number of chefs and restaurateurs are taking local to a new level, raising their own meat, keeping honey bees and tending goats to make cheese.

Chef Dan Barber and his acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants helped pioneer the trend. Both his Greenwich Village and Hudson Valley outposts draw from Barber's four-season farm at the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture, about an hour north of New York City. The seven-year-old farm, which also serves as an educational center (Michelle Obama and a group of school kids visited last September), provides the restaurants with everything from banana squash to veal. It's a model that translates best to wide-open spaces. In Aspen, Colorado, for instance, the Little Nell hotel's executive chef, Ryan Hardy, grows produce and raises livestock on his 15-acre Rendezvous Farms. He even makes his own cheese.

Photo: La tartine gourmande, Flickr

Those perplexed by this season's tomato blight, aka "late blight", or simply wondering why the heck the price of the beloved ruby-hued edibles has gone through the roof of late would do well to read this piece by chef/ restaurateur/ locavore Dan Barber in Sunday's New York Times.

Barber reveals that Stone Barns, the farm that is part of his restaurant north of New York City lost half its tomatoes in the span of only three days due to the "pernicious" blight sweeping the northeast. Many organic farmers have been forced to spray using pesticides, losing their organic certifications in the process.

Evidently the spring's wet weather has proved a "four-star hotel" for late blight. Americans looking to save money this year -- seven million more of us investigated home gardening this year -- unknowingly bought starter plants infected with blight from large industrial stores. Ironically, this helped create the problem, as tiny "Trojan horse" vines popped up on windowsills and in cages along the eastern seaboard.

Has late blight made an impact on you yet?


[Via the New York Times]

TIME magazine recently featured a piece called "The Farm-to-Table Fetish," which profiles chef Dan Barber, of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the movement that he and the restaurant/farm have come to embody. TIME's John Cloud follows Barber (right) out into the fields that produce much of the produce and meat that appear on Stone Barns' menu. One interesting detail is that the turkeys and Cornish chickens raised at Blue Hill are the same breast-heavy, fast-maturing varieties used by large-scale producers like Perdue. The birds raised at Blue Hill are pastured on grasses, however, as opposed to being penned and raised on grain and other feed. All in all, it's a pretty idyllic profile.