Heather Ridge Farm: Honoring the Land with Good Food and Good Practice in Preston Hollow, NY
From the outdoor dining area of the Bee’s Knees café, you can see clear across the Catskill Mountains. Summer afternoons bring guests to the café for live music, workshops, and lunch sourced from the 160 acres that surround the 1820s farmhouse. Together with a thoughtfully stocked farm store, the Bee’s Knees serves as the face and home base of Heather Ridge Farm, a mixed livestock farm in Preston Hollow, NY, just two and a half hours north of Manhattan.
When co-owner Carol Clement moved from New York City to Preston Hollow in 1979, she didn’t envision herself as a farmer. “I wanted to live in an agricultural community,” she says, plain and simply, “I wanted to have a few animals, a big garden, and avoid processed foods.” A graphic designer and animator by trade, Carol bought a house sandwiched between two dairy farms and spent the next ten years growing her new homestead and running a successful marketing firm.
In the late 1980s, when the region’s dairy industry was collapsing, Carol‘s firm was hired to work with the Catskill Center on an agricultural grant designed to help dairy farmers plan for the future of their land. Through this process, she was introduced to the concept of rotational grazing, a management system that involves moving different species to fresh pasture in a rotation that maximizes the health of each animal and the land. Though the dairy industry continued to decline, Carol was hooked on the idea of a farm that lets the animals do the work. Around the same time, the neighboring dairy farm became available and Carol decided she was ready to pivot. “I’d never thought of myself as a farmer because in my mind, farmers were big, strong guys with tractors and big barns and a huge amount of capital invested in the farm,” says Carol, “but suddenly I realized you don’t need all that.”
With a small crew, Carol and her husband John Harrison (who likes to say he married into the estate) have been growing the farm for the better part of two decades — each step forward a thoughtful reaction to the last. The couple opened the Bee’s Knees in 2008 and for the past four years, it has been under the watch of chef Rob Handel, a Catskills native who grew up cooking alongside his grandmother in the kitchen of their family resort. Maintaining an open dialogue about farming practices has always been a priority at Heather Ridge, and the café allows that transparency to reach new heights. Guests are invited into the kitchen to talk to Rob about what he foraged that morning or to pick his brain on how to prepare a specific cut of meat that they are interested in purchasing. John offers weekly farm tours for those interested in connecting further to the land from which their lunch came, and Carol circulates between the fields, the café, and the store. “One of the things that distinguishes us is that this is a real collaboration between chef and farmer,” Carol says of the blurred lines that exist between the farm and the Bee’s Knees, “you can talk to the chef, you can talk to the farmer, it’s both.”
Photos by Christian Harder, Words by Hannah Leighton