Featured Publications

UConn Orchard Grows Thanks to Local Farmer

Anna Zarra Aldrich, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources

The orchard is part of the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR), and is part of a newly launched effort to reestablish UConn’s longstanding fruit research and education program.

The two-year-old Fuji Supreme and Ambrosia apple trees come to the UConn orchard courtesy of Steve McMenamin, a farmer who runs an organic produce farm in Greenwich, Connecticut.

How Greenwich's Versailles Farms planted 3,000 apple trees in a trellised orchard

Greenwich Time

GREENWICH — A lot of puzzled and curious motorists have been driving by a vacant lot on upper King Street and wondering what was happening. Over the past several months, all within view of curious commuters, workers have been taking down weeds, invasive species and junk trees and prepping the site for something.

"Lots of curiosity," said Steve McMenamin, whose local agricultural operation Versailles Farms has been the contractor at the site. "Everybody's been stopping and asking: What's going on here."

The cleared field is becoming an apple orchard.

A Greenwich farm owner is always looking for a new locally sourced product. Now he’s making high-end charcoal

Greenwich Time

At Versailles Farms up in the northwest corner of town, Steve McMenamin is constantly looking for new products to make the most from their 15-acre farm. He and his wife have become the largest producer of shitake mushrooms in the state, and in recent times, he has been turning his attention to producing high-end charcoal, all of its locally sourced.

New Jersey Tomato, Victim of Modern Farming, Vies for a Comeback

The New York Times

The Jersey tomato, red, ripe and juicy, was once revered as the best to be had, with a tangy, sweet-tart flavor that was the very taste of summer.

Scientific Breeding Gives New Jersey the Rutgers Tomato

New Jersey State Horticultural Society News - November 1934

The Rutgers tomato was developed by selections from a cross made in 1928 between the Marglobe and J.T.D. varieties.

Versailles Farms: Working ‘simpatico with the land’

Greenwich Time

In 2012, McMenamin and his wife, Ingrid Delson, bought the property adjacent to their backcountry Greenwich home. The following year, they sold their Greenwich Avenue restaurant, renowned for its pastries and celebrity sightings, to focus on other endeavors, including the farm. In a few years, the couple has restored the Locust Road property to its one-time purpose as New England farmland. This summer, they have begun sharing their produce and story with the community.

Love, death and food in Greenwich

When Versailles restaurant opens at 339 Greenwich Ave. next month, Versailles at 315 Greenwich Ave. will close. The continuity is not lost on Ingrid McMenamin, owner of the bistro-patisserie and bakery. It’s something of the point, realized every time a grandparent treats a grandchild to an éclair as good as the one the grandparent knew as a child.

Versailles - A renewed French connection on the Avenue

With the face of Greenwich Avenue changing so much in recent years, it’s a comfort to witness the rebirth of Versailles, a bistro and patisserie that has been a popular meeting spot for thirty years. The French favorite recently relocated just a few doors down from its original, cozy-slice-of-Paris location. Versailles’s brunch and lunch menu and decadent, freshly baked desserts have enjoyed a loyal following, but the new draw is the full dinner menu prepared by executive chef,Jean-Pierre Bagnoto.

Top 10 trends in market farming

Market farming is a constantly evolving business. Crops, markets, laws, products, consumer trends — nothing stands still in this line of work. Here are the top trends that are likely to affect market farmers this year. You can read more about these topics in upcoming issues of Growing for Market and there are additional resources at www.growingformarket.com/categories/trends.

Culinary Research on a Bicycle in the Alsace

We have always traveled. At first we carried backpacks. Then we chartered sailboats that served as our waterfront hotel room. We always traveled for pleasure and always on socially sanctioned vacations. But that all changed when we took over Versailles. Now we travel on business and we don’t wear a suit. For those of us who grew up with the New England work ethic, the notion of enjoying ourselves on a business trip is loaded with guilt. So it was with mixed feelings that we made our pilgrimage back to France.

Pairing fine beers with fine food

Let's call it our dinner with Jean-Pierre, as it was to be a voyage of discovery in the adventurous pairing of beer and food.

To my left was Walter Stratton, a wine expert and wine-lover of many decades who admitted to little affinity for beer.

Versailles Adds a Meal
(To Eat Before Dessert)

SINCE 1980, Versailles in Greenwich has been a local institution, for croissants or a full breakfast in the morning or a cafe meal at lunch. But since Sept. 14, when this patisserie-cum-cafe moved a few doors down Greenwich Avenue to a slightly larger space, it has served dinner as well. Its business card attests to its versatility: Boulangerie — Patisserie — Bistro Café.

Connecticut lost 460 farms over five years. A handful are up for sale and many are interested

Just two working farms in Connecticut are listed for sale on LandWatch and other CoStar Group clearinghouse websites that provide national exposure for potential sellers, of more than 22,000 listings across the 50 states. One is under contract to be sold after being listed for an asking price of $6.8 million. It includes a historic tobacco farm spanning some 280 acres of Windsor and East Granby that has more than a half-mile of wooded frontage along the north bank of the Farmington River. The buyer's identity or plans for the property remain unknown, at least until the sale is finalized.

More farms crop up with a deeper dive into various commercial real estate websites and the Connecticut FarmLink program, which aims to help would-be farmers find opportunities to purchase agricultural businesses. They include the six-acre Versailles Farms in Greenwich carrying an asking price of $4 million, producing greens, tomatoes, mushrooms and syrup among other produce; Hickory Hill Orchards in Cheshire which went on the market last June for $3.5 million; and the former Woodward Greenhouses property in Windham, which operated a wholesale plant business.

Steve McMenamin and Ingrid Delson carved Versailles Farms out of six acres of Greenwich turf more than a dozen years ago with the intent to apply the latest regenerative agriculture techniques for produce quality and yields to supply the Greenwich Avenue bistro Versailles, which they owned at the time. McMenamin said they hope to find a buyer for the farm who will carry on their work, and are willing to offer a discount off what the property would get on the Greenwich real estate market for that purpose.

"We want to see this stay as a farm — we've had other people come here and say, 'we can buy it, but we don't really want to farm,'" McMenamin said. "Our real estate agent says, 'the price just doubled then.'"

McMenamin said he has had a few serious inquiries so far, one from a woman who grew up on a southern farm and whose mother is an agricultural professor in Connecticut, and the other from a Greenwich foundation considering an investment in the farm as an educational enterprise for youth.

Loss of Connecticut farmland

Connecticut lost about 460 farms over five years between 2017 and 2022, according to the most recent estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That dropped the total number statewide to just over 5,050 in all, for an 8 percent decline that was in line with New York's trend that saw nearly 2,800 farms pass into local lore.

By comparison, the farm count for Massachusetts dropped just 2 percent, while Rhode Island and New Jersey recorded gains of 1 percent respectively for farm counts in those states.

In Connecticut, the vast majority of the most recent decline were among "hobby" farms, producing less than $2,500 in annual sales revenue. Connecticut added more than 150 farms producing revenue of at least $10,000, including two-dozen additional farms with annual sales above $500,000 a year. The USDA data does not delve into deeper analysis of changes across brackets, such as the number of farms gone fallow versus those that move between revenue slots as business gains traction or ebbs.

It's also unclear how many generational farms are given up to the lure of development dollars, as the older generation looks to retire and the children or grandchildren have other professional interests.  

Two years ago, the American Farmland Trust projected Connecticut would lose 16 percent of its working agricultural land by 2040, equating to 55,000 acres getting repurposed for other uses. However, only New Haven County ranked among the U.S. counties with the greatest risk, and was at the lower end of that nationwide group, with nearly a third of its agricultural land at risk of redevelopment.

When land is scarce, values go up. Connecticut had the third highest farmland values among the contiguous 48 states, according to 2023 estimates by the USDA, at $13,900 an acre behind only Rhode Island and New Jersey.

In many instances, larger farms that hit the market end up under the control of preservation trusts, including this year with the historic Milde Farm property in Litchfield which sprawls across 670 acres. The Kent-based Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy purchased the farm in February.

And in 2022 alone, the Connecticut Farmland Trust leveraged funding to protect a half-dozen farms in Bolton, Griswold, Hamden, North Stonington and Thompson, in most instances with the assistance of state and federal entities or local land trusts.

However, plenty of residential sellers who own historic farm properties tout the potential to reboot agricultural operations, including for anyone with an eye on tandem agribusiness endeavors like the "farm-to-table" movement.

Connecticut Department of Agriculture spokesperson Rebecca Eddy said about 565 people have registered interest on Connecticut FarmLink in perusing farms available for purchase.

Despite farms adding extra revenue opportunities like events, it remains a challenging business whether due to labor shortages, weather, the cost of supplies and maintenance or other factors impacting the growing or harvest seasons. As a group, Connecticut farms saw lower yields over five years through 2021 according to USDA's most recent census released in February. Among specific crops tracked by USDA in Connecticut, corn feed production was down 4 percent from 2017 to 374,000 tons; hay was down 19 percent to 89,000 tons; and grapes down 25 percent to 619 tons.

As of 2021, the USDA counted 85 dairy farms in Connecticut, down 25 such farms from five years earlier. The federal agency estimated Connecticut's cattle inventory at about 47,000 animals, about 3,000 fewer over that five-year period, though the milk cow count stayed steady at about 19,000.

"While the number of dairy farms in Connecticut has declined, the numbers haven’t been as sharp as others in our region," Eddy said. "It’s also important to note that the number of milking cows in Connecticut has largely remained steady as those animals are absorbed into other established dairy herds."

Back in Greenwich, McMenamin noted that there are any number of people who can get their hands on a hobby farm, if they can get their hands on a spade and some time to start digging in their own backyard. At Versailles Farms, the modus operandi is "grow by the square inch, not the acre" in McMenamin's words.

"We want to teach people to grow their own food," McMenamin said. "This is what everyone should be doing — ripping up their lawn and growing. That's what we did."

As Danbury sizes up municipal interest in a small farm within the city limits and another in Greenwich is on the market, Connecticut has among the lowest number of working farms available for purchase in the United States — but with plenty of interest, as well over 500 people have touched base with the state Department of Agriculture looking for help in buying a farm.

Homes with equestrian stables pop up for sale regularly in Connecticut. Several have sold this year including Echo Ridge in Suffield and Carbery Fields Farm in Lebanon, which both have riding rings. But produce or livestock farms come on the market more rarely for any would-be farmers seeking a turnkey foray into agriculture with cleared fields, established orchards, barns and equipment.

Greenbacker's Brookfield Farm in Durham is currently the largest working farm in Connecticut listed publicly for sale on real estate brokerage websites, at just over 400 acres with horses, a dairy barn, wooded copses, pasture and crop land leased to others for growing hay, corn and other vegetables.

"It's for a small percentage of the population," said Gary Dobratz, the listing broker in the Wallingford office of Century 21 AllPoints, referencing the pool of people hunting for large farms in Connecticut. "I have a number of people with interest."

Rob Marchant contributed to this report; includes prior reporting by Jesse Leavenworth and Rob Ryser.