CHESTER, N.Y. – Zoe Friedberg is surrounded by lettuce – about 15 different kinds of lettuce – on her two-acre farm, Little Gem Farm. She’s one of 11 farms leasing land from the Chester Agricultural Center in Orange County’s Black Dirt region.
Friedberg said she didn’t always know she wanted to be a farmer but her curiosity always took her outdoors. She studied agriculture and community development at Cornell University before eventually working at various small and big farms in the Finger Lakes region.
Now, she operates a small-scale diversified vegetable, herb, and flower farm in Chester, New York that she founded in 2023.
She named the farm as an ode to the Little Gem lettuce, a smaller lettuce variety that combines characteristics of the mildly sweet butter and crisp romaine lettuces, which she describes as an entry vegetable that gets people excited about eating salad.
“It’s so exciting to see people get excited [saying], ‘Oh this variety’s coming back,’ or ‘This does well in the summer heat,’ or ‘This is just for fall. We’ve been waiting for this,’” said Friedberg. “Seeing people count down the days for a different type of lettuce…I’ve never seen that before.”
Little Gem Farm also operates a community-supported agriculture model (CSA) in Rockland County that serves 70 weekly CSA members. Friedberg says it’s important for both her business and CSA community for the business to stay relatively small.
“I think we are able to have a very high attention to detail and harvest things at their peak, which I think a lot of farms at large scales are doing, too, but I love doing the work myself, being out here harvesting, meeting my members, building that relationship, and I think as we get bigger, that’s harder and harder to do,” said Friedberg.
You can find Little Gem Farm at Nyack Farmers Market in Nyack, New York every second Thursday of the month this summer and at various pop-up events.
Image: Little Gem Farm in Chester, New York (Photo Credit: Kimberly Izar)