Pine Island farmer follows in his parents' footsteps

The D’Attolico family has been farming organically for more than three decades, By Becca Tucker Pine Island - It’s Saturday morning. Vincent D’Attolico is sitting on a milk crate under a tent in Union Square with a finger in one ear, fielding a call on his cell phone. On the other end is a customer who’s been shopping the farmer’s market long enough to know that the D’Attolicos’ “sprout bar,” offering eight types of sprouts, might well sell out by 10:45 a.m. Vinny communicates the order to his wife Denise, apparently telepathically. Denise uses her tongs to heap the worm-like baby plants into two takeout-sized plastic containers, which she then sets on top of a cooler. Minutes later, the sprout aficionado appears in the back of the D’Attolicos’ tent and peels $8 off a billfold. Vinny hands him the containers, the customer ducks back out between a parked truck and the D’Attolicos’ red van, and disappears onto 17th Street carrying mung bean sprouts picked just the day before from the Black Dirt of Pine Island. “Sprouts is big in Manhattan,” says Vinny, 46, crystallizing an entire food revolution into five words. Organic before organic was chic It’s not as if the D’Attolicos are frontrunners of the organic movement - at least not on purpose. In fact, over the past 33 years they have made an incredible stand against any change at all. Vinny is doing business two stalls down from where his parents had a farm stand in the 1980s. His four-year-old daughter is home on the farm today with her grandmother, Joan D’Attolico. The family farm is organic and chemical-free not because it’s fashionable but because the trade has been passed from generation to generation since “before chemicals were born, plain and simple.” When it comes to technology, well, their 1997 Hewlett Packard recently gave up the ghost, leaving them without e-mail. But that’s okay, because the markets are where the D’Attolicos do their “advertising” (talking to customers) and “market research” (talking to customers). Sometimes, old timers will ask for comfrey leaves to boil and use for wraps to treat arthritis, and the D’Attolicos will pick the purple herb that grows wild on the farm and bring it to market the next week. As he talks to customers, Vinny pops open shelling peas ($8 for a one-pound bag), eats them and tosses the pods by his feet. He offers me some. Having tasted them on the farm, I don’t decline. Just picked, the peas are so sweet and plump with water they taste like tiny fruits instead of vegetables. When I ask why they continue to eschew chemicals on their eight-acre farm, when they could use certain organic chemicals and still be certified organic, he holds up a pea pod and smiles. “You don’t have to worry ‘bout side effects and residue,” he says. “The only side effect is happiness.” ‘The farming life’ Vinny was 13 when the economy went sour and his father, an electrical engineer, decided he’d have better luck feeding his family off the land. Except for a four-year stint in the army, Vinny has been working on the Pine Island farm ever since. He also works part-time winters delivering oil. Denise, 40, was working at a men’s shirt factory when she met Vinny 17 years ago. She is quietly cheerful about having “married into” the farm life, which consists of farming, farming, more farming, and last year, a vacation to Disney. She laments only that no matter how many hours she toils outside next to her field-tan husband, her complexion remains fair and freckled. The couple has had maybe 10 fights over the course of their relationship. Growing peas, carrots, winter and summer squash, herbs, sprouts, tomatoes, eggplants, onions, garlic, lettuce, mustard, kale, collards, swish chard, bok choy, cucumbers, artichokes and raspberries, plus some chickens and a little girl, leaves them too tired to argue. On my way into the D’Attolicos’ farm, one of their numerous enemies scuttles across the dirt road. I’m not sure what it is - a hedgehog? - until four-year-old Clairice, in pink rain boots, identifies the critter by its trail. “Look!” she shrieks when we come across a deep hole with an entrance on either side of a dirt path. “A woodchuck!” Days later, the D’Attolicos would trap the young woodchuck using a Havahart trap and release it across the street. Another of their afflictors has left its dainty tracks in the black silt between rows of white-flowering peas. To protect against deer, the D’Attolicos have fortified their perimeter with a four-foot-high neon orange snow fence, just inside a deep drainage ditch. Deer only jump when they’re scared, Vinny explains; they won’t jump the fence just to get in and eat the peas. That worked fine until two days before my visit, when a deer with good problem-solving skills walked up the driveway, right by the house and into the pea patch, where it ate its fill of market-ready shelling peas and then walked out the way it came. Insects are kept off of plants using hoops and cheesecloth, but the number one scourge, hands down, is weeds. “Once they start, they start. If you can define the line, you’re ahead of the game,” says Vinny. Other than using herbicides, the D’Attolicos take every defensive measure available. They lay down black plastic to keep weeds out of the greenhouses. In the fields they let weeds grow between the rows, fighting them back from the crops with a weed whacker. The day I visit, they have hired three of their neighbor’s Latina workers to assist in the never-ending weeding. “It’s a battle,” says Vinny. “Sometimes the weeds win. Sometimes we win.” What does “Organic” mean? “Certified organic” is the most demanding of the certifications a farm can receive. Crop and Dairy farms that have more than $5,000 in gross organic sales per year and are marketing their products as organic are required to become certified organic. To do that, the farmer pays a fee each year, and an inspector visits the farm and all facilities and tests the water. The farmer is required to provide an equipment list; harvest records; maps of all fields to be certified, with an identification system using either names or numbers; a history of the land that includes soil amendments applied, including manure, seeds planted and any pest/disease controls used in the previous three years. The use of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides are prohibited in certified organic production. In general, land to be certified must not have had prohibited synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers applied in the previous three years, and transplants used in organic production must be organically grown using only approved potting mixes and certified organic seeds, if commercially available. Crop production requirements include the use of crop rotation systems, to control plant diseases and pests. If fields are adjacent to conventionally farmed fields (as in the D’Attolicos’ case), a buffer zone may be necessary. Source: Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA-NY) Community Supported Agriculture To get weekly deliveries of local, seasonal food directly from the D’Attolico Farm, call 845-258-7451 by June 24. A full share is $550 and a half is $300. Shares are no-risk, because the farm continues to produce year-round, so if a crop fails, the deliveries will be extended.