Longtime Farmer Casts Skeptical Eye on Organic Farm

Ask Robert Haydu, a longtime farmer, about residents' effort to create an organic farm in Fairfield and his expression may change to one of amused disbelief. At least it did Sunday.

Haydu, 69, who was raised on a farm in Fairfield and who has been a farmer most of his life, thinks residents who want to create an organic farm on town-owned property are underestimating just how difficult the undertaking is.

"First off, organic farming ground has to lay fallow three years to be certified organic. You can't use agricultural fertilizers, no herbicides, I guess they use some sort of bioinsecticides. They don't use fungicides for diseases. The late blight that hit last year, everybody that had organic tomatoes lost them overnight," Haydu said.

Haydu said tilling the ground for farming requires machinery if the farm is of any size, that soil in Connecticut includes a lot of sizable rocks and that deer pose a continual problem for farmers who grow vegetable crops.

Haydu said organic farming, in his opinion, was "a way of getting $4.99 for tomatoes instead of $2.99."

Haydu, who operates Greenfield Farm on town-owned land on Congress Street, isn't a disinterested party to the organic farming effort. The organic farm, proposed last spring by Pamela Jones and Jody Eisemann, would be created on an acre of town-owned property at 520 Hoyden's Lane but would then move to another town-owned property if it were successful so the town's Parks and Recreation Department could build ballfields on the Hoyden's Lane property.

Town properties mentioned as future locations for the organic farm include the Hoyden's Hill Open Space, which is 58.5 acres; the Barbieri Open Space, which is 41.1 acres next to the Hoyden's Hill Open Space; and Greenfield Farm, 10 acres of which Haydu leases from the town for $1 a year. The lease expires Dec. 31, 2011.

Haydu's family, which owned the property since 1902, sold it to the Steinkraus family, which then sold 21 acres to the town for $1.875 million in 1998 after spinning off two residential building lots.

Haydu sells fruits and vegetables at Greenfield Farm, but the vegetables come from a farm he has in Easton and the fruits are from a farm in Glastonbury. Haydu said he can't grow any crops on Greenfield Farm, except for corn, because deer eat the plants, and the town, for safety reasons, won't let him put up an electric fence around the property to keep deer out. He said the cost to put up an eight- to nine-foot-high fence around the farm was beyond what he could pay. He said he has a nine-foot-high fence around his farm in Easton to keep deer out.

"They'll eat 95 percent of any vegetable crop," Haydu said of deer. "The only thing they don't seem to bother is the corn. That's why I turned this site into a five-acre corn maze. You just can't control them."

Haydu said the corn maze is made of "field corn" and isn't edible, though, in July, he plants an acre a week of sweet corn in Fairfield, which he sells. "I plant all the way up until July 20th," he said. "I got the best-tasting sweet corn in the state, and I pick about four times a day; most farmstands maybe every other day they pick."

"I have customers that come from as far away as Greenwich for my corn and tomatoes," Haydu added.

Haydu said he tried planting pumpkins on Greenfield Farm for the town's annual Pumpkin Festival, which is sponsored by the Greenfield Hill Village Improvement Association and Greenfield Farm, but "the deer ate every damn last one of them."

"They eat them as soon as the little pumpkin forms," Haydu said.

Pumpkins for the festival now come from Haydu's farm in Easton, but they had to be shipped from Michigan for last year's festival due to all the rain in the Northeast in the spring of 2009.

Haydu said five acres of Greenfield Farm would be devoted to pumpkins if the town let him put up a seasonal electric fence, which he figured would cost about $1,000 in material.

Other difficulities in farming on Greenfield Farm is the lack of an irrigation system, the difficulty in farming for a man nearly 70 years old and the competition farmers face from supermarkets, Haydu said. "A small farm is just being wiped out by these super stores. Last week, Stop & Shop sold four pints of blueberries for $5. I'm paying $2.50 a pint [from a farm in Glastonbury] and they're selling four for $5," he said.

But Haydu said he takes care of the property for the town and has replaced a roof on the barn and twice painted the barn, among day-to-day chores that need to be done to keep the property in good condition.

"This is, by far, the biggest bargain the town of Fairfield ever had. There's no maintenance [needed by the town], no ballfields, no irrigation, no building or parking lots," Haydu said. "Where they spent millions of dollars on Burroughs Road, it costs the town nothing here for me to do this."

On Burroughs Road, the town seized about six acres of land by eminent domain from a developer and built two soccer fields on the property.

Haydu added that the Pumpkin Festival has turned into a big event in town, drawing more than 1,000 people last year, and that he donates money from the corn maze to the Aspetuck Land Trust and donates tomatoes and corn to Operation Hope, a 50 Nichols St. agency that helps the homeless.

Haydu said the Greenfield Farm property was bought by his grandfather in 1902 and that his grandfather, who had a dairy farm in Westport, started planting crops on it in 1905. He said his grandfather would travel by horse and carriage to stores and homes with produce and milk. "We were one of the first ones in the state to have pick-your-own strawberries," he said.

Haydu said his grandfather and father continued to grow crops on the farm and that he bought the property from his father in 1981. He said he worked at Remington Arms on Barnum Avenue in Bridgeport from 1965 to 1985 and had a painting business from 1985 to 1994. He said he was back to full-time farming in 1988 because he had employees working for him in the painting business. He said he leased 25 acres in Easton for farming in 1998, which was the year the town bought Greenfield Farm.

Vegetables for sale at Greenfield Farm on Sunday, most of which Haydu said had been grown on his farm in Easton, included tomatoes, radishes, green beans, wax beans, zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, pickels, green peppers, orange peppers, red pappers, baking potatoes, vidalia onions, red potatoes, red onions, Spanish onions and yellow onions.

Fruit for sale on Sunday, which Haydu said came from a farm in Glastonbury, included peaches, nectarines, plums, grapes, raspberries and blueberries.

Greenfield Farm, 3763 Congress St., is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

The organic farm planned in Fairfield may face some hurdles, but on Wednesday, Annie Farrell, a nationally-recognized organic farmer and expert in sustainable agriculture, is scheduled to be the featured speaker at a program on the proposed organic farm. The event, open to the public, is at 7 p.m. in Pequot Library's auditorium, 720 Pequot Ave. in the town's Southport neighborhood.