(Originally appeared in The Tewksbury Times February, 2025)

One of the things that makes Tewksbury special is its wide-open spaces – our zoning rules, preserved land and working farmland (much of it also preserved) combine to create stunning vistas and provide abundant opportunities for exploration and enjoyment of the outdoors in ways that have become increasingly rare in this, the U.S.’s most densely populated state. Behind every pastoral Tewksbury scene, however, someone needed to make conscious decisions about what to farm there and when the DeSalvo’s purchased Cold Brook Farm in 2019 they made the unique decision (at least thus far in our town) to grow Certified Organic cereal grains for human consumption. The majority of farmland in town is presently devoted to commodity grains or soybeans destined for either animal feed or to be turned into ethanol. A fair amount of hay is grown here as well, along with lesser quantities of fruits and vegetables.

So, why would two new residents in their mid-fifties with no background in farming decide to grow things like wheat, rye, oats and buckwheat and, equally interestingly, how did they go about doing it in a way that within two years had their grains being used by some of the NY Metro Area’s finest bakeries and restaurants (at least one of them a Michelin 2-Star)? Check out www.TewksburyConnect..org for our conversation with the DeSalvo’s to find out!

For a little hint, the DeSalvo’s choice had everything to do with the fact that our area of New Jersey was once part of “the breadbasket of the original 13 colonies.” Not just because the soil was great, but also because of numerous waterways that were available to power mills and allow grain and flour to be easily transported prior to the advent of convenient ground and rail transportation.

The other question you may be asking yourself – that will be answered online – is, “why is this a topic covered in a column called Sustainable Tewksbury?” It turns out that small grains can be grown in our climate using regenerative, organic farming practices and doing so has a profound impact on the health of our soil, water, wildlife and us!

If you’d like a taste what small batch, Tewksbury-grown Certified Organic Oats and Wheat taste like, Cold Brook Farm’s grains are available at Larger Cross (in Oldwick) and online at www.coldbrookfarmnj.com.

A Chat with Jason & Deborah DeSalvo About Growing Certified Heirloom Grains at Cold Brook Farm

TT: I want to make sure that I have this straight…neither of you had any farming experience prior to starting Cold Brook Farm in 2020, when you decided to convert a GMO corn field to organic management and grow heirloom grains for human consumption…why?!?

Deborah: (Laughing) Yeah, we definitely bit off a bit much all at once! It started simply enough…we found this amazing piece of property that happened to have 13 acres of prime agricultural land on it that had been farmed “conventionally” for many decades and there is no way we were going to live on land being poisoned with chemicals. So, our initial goal was simply to have the farmer who had been working the land convert to using organic management practices. When he would not do this, at first, we panicked, but then we realized that it created a whole new world of possibilities for us. Rather than having someone else make all the decisions about what would happen on our farmland, we could.

Jason: We purchased our property in the early Fall of 2019 and had a vacation to Vancouver Island planned in November of that year. By then it was becoming clear that we were not going to be able to work with the farmer who had been farming our land previously. He’s a lovely person and a real farming success story in our area, but he just could not get on board with managing things organically and we were unwilling to continue allowing GMO crops, herbicides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers to be used here. The soil on our farm was dead and we wanted to change this because healthy soil is the foundation of any thriving ecosystem.

I started scouring the internet researching various possibilities for what we could reasonably grow on 10 acres. We knew that would be doing some pretty time intensive farming on the 2.5 acres of agricultural land immediately around our farmhouse – where we now grow well over 60 different fruits, vegetables and nuts – so we needed something on the large field that would be fairly low maintenance during the height of growing season. I printed out case studies and research papers to read on our transcontinental flights about a dozen or so different potential cash crops that could be grown organically in our area –chestnuts, pawpaw, elderberry, lavender and small grains to name a few.

TT: What made you choose grains?

Deborah: That ended up being a combination of four things, really. First, Jason and I agreed early on that whatever we grew here we’d also have to love to eat. One of the observations a close friend of ours made recently is that “Food is love at Cold Brook Farm,” and that rings true for us in a big way. This narrowed our choices and made clear that we would not be doing this solely based on economics. We wanted to grow exceptional food that would taste great and be healthy for us, our land and the community – and that we would love to eat! Jason and I are both bakers and so grains moved up towards the top of the list of possibilities.

As Jason continued doing his deep dive about various possibilities of what to grow from a practical farming standpoint, one thing he learned was that our part of New Jersey was referred to as “the breadbasket of the original 13 colonies.” This really excited us and thinking about it, how many street names can you think of locally that have the word “mill” as part of their name? It just seemed to make so much sense and became a strong second reason for choosing grains – we loved the fact that historically cereal grains had been grown here – it was a “back to the future” kind of thing.

Jason: The third thing that made grains attractive was that we wanted something to be replicable for others. We very consciously developed our property with an eye towards having it be a kind of “demonstration site” for what is currently possible for living a sustainable life, so growing something on the main Ag field that would be overly difficult to easily replicate for other homeowners / landowners was out. Small grains are grown in much the same manner that people here are already used to – fields are tilled once or twice a year; seed is planted, and crops are harvested with a combine. If others wanted to follow our lead and convert their “conventionally” managed fields to something more sustainable and healthier they would not need to become familiar with an entirely new kind of farming.

Finally, and I cannot emphasize the importance of this last piece of the puzzle enough, one of the case studies I read was about a local, recently formed grain cooperative – River Valley Community Grains – that was milling locally grown grain right up in Long Valley! BOOM! That was the clincher, the stars had aligned. As soon as we got back from Vancouver Island, I called the folks at River Valley, and we’ve been working together with them ever since.

TT: What were some of the obstacles that you had to overcome?

Deborah: We are super proud of the fact that we’ve been able to harvest exceptional quality grains each year so far, especially when you consider the fact that the first four or five years following the conversion to organic management are notoriously difficult and we made this transition during a time that included three very serious drought years. In fact, 2024 included the longest period in recorded history without any rain. These things combined to severely limit our yields, however, thankfully, our quality remained excellent throughout – so much so that our 2022 Glenn Wheat was selected by Dan Barber to be served at his Michelin 2-Star restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns (In Tarrytown, NY).

Jason: Beyond the weather and transitioning to organic management, before we even got that far we had to find someone locally who could help us with some of the farming tasks (and equipment!) that we were not prepared for. We didn’t grow up on a farm and so we needed help with routine things like disking a field, using a seed drill and running a combine. Fortunately, we were introduced to a young farmer, Jay Vogelaar, who’s from an outstanding farming family in Far Hills that runs River Bend Farm. Jay was super interested in helping us grow high quality grain and so we bought a used combine and in exchange for him helping us and using his equipment on our field, he is free to use our combine on any other farm if it is organically managed. The next big hurdle for us is to develop a local grain processing and storage facility for organically grown grain. Sadly, our friends at River Valley moved up to Marksboro and it’s no longer convenient to clean and process grain that far away.

TT: What are you most proud of so far?

Jason: Definitely having our grains appreciated by someone as fanatical about ingredient quality as Dan Barber is up there along with the hundreds of people we have fed wholesome, healthy, locally grown grains over the years, but I think what we are probably most proud of is how much we’ve been able to improve the health of our soil and the impact that has had on the overall ecosystem on our farm. When we first started here, our soil was rock hard and dead. If you dug up a chunk of it up with a shovel you’d see no sign of anything living in it. No worms, no fungi, no insects, just dirt. There were also precious few flying insects, pollinators or birds to be seen above the field.

January 16, 2025 marks our fifth year of managing this land using regenerative, organic methods and we’ve seen a quantum leap in the amount of life here. You can now easily grab a fistful of soil (it’s soft enough to no longer require a shovel) and in it you’ll find all kinds of organic material, earth worms, fungi, insects…the soil is literally teeming with life. In fact, we’ve increased our soil organic matter from under 2% to almost 5% — which is quite high for a clay-based soil. And this is really where the whole sustainability aspect of how we now farm comes into focus. In addition to the obvious benefits of not dumping toxic chemicals and synthetic fertilizers on our land that ultimately find their way into the ground water and waterways, each 1% increase in organic material in the soil allows an acre of farmland to absorb an additional roughly 20,000 gallons of water. Given the heavy rain events that are so common now, our little ten-acre field can effectively absorb over 600,000 gallons more water than it could just five years ago. Imagine how much less run-off and erosion we’d have throughout our region if more farms transitioned to this kind of management?

Deborah: Finally, on any given day in the Spring and Summer our field is buzzing with insects, pollinators of all sorts and bird life that we simply didn’t see before. Many an evening in June and July we spend sitting on our barn porch mesmerized by hundreds of thousands of lightening bugs – a spectacle that couldn’t exist previously because our farmland was dead. That alone has made all the hard work worth it.

TT: What have you grown so far and is any of it available for sale?

Deborah: So far, we have grown Einkorn Wheat, Danko Rye, Glenn Wheat, Gehl Oats and Redeemer Wheat. This coming season we will be growing Buckwheat and next year we plan on growing a rare heirloom wheat that has never been grown in our area before that we are super excited about…stay tuned for more on that!

We still have some of our Oats and Redeemer Wheat available. The oats are available as whole groats, rolled, milled for porridge or milled as flour. The Redeemer Wheat is an heirloom variety that came from Ukraine in the 1800’s and is available as wheat berries or milled into flour. We roll or mill all our grains fresh to order. Rolled Oats and Redeemer Wheat Flour can be purchased at Larger Cross right here in Oldwick, and everything is available in our online store at www.coldbrookfarmnj.com. We offer local pickup and ship nationally.