(Originally appeared in The Tewksbury Times January, 2025)

TT: I guess we should start by saying, “Welcome to Tewksbury!” You bought your property here in October 2019. How did you find Tewksbury and what made you decide to make your home here?

Jason: We lived in the Montclair area for over thirty years and as environmentalists / nature lovers we watched as development pressure and population density really started to degrade our quality of life. Once both our kids had finished high school, we decided to look for a place to live where we could be closer to nature, grow some of our own food and be surrounded by natural beauty instead of traffic and noise.

Deb: We were still very connected to Montclair. I was an environmental educator at Van Vleck House & Gardens, Jason had been the Vice Chairman of Montclair’s Planning Board and we had lots of friends and family who lived there, so deciding to move was a big decision. We always dreamed of living on a decent sized piece of land but thought we’d end up somewhere in Sonoma County, upstate New York, Vermont or Massachusetts. Because of our desire to stay close to friends and family, however, we kept pushing off moving. Fortunately, Jason had been coming out to Tewksbury on long training bike rides from Montclair for decades and over the Summer of 2019, we started looking at properties in the area. The moment we first drove down Cold Brook Road both our hearts started racing and we knew this was where we were going to make our home.

TT: You purchasedyour property from longtime Tewksbury residents Charlie and Jeannie Chapin. What about the place captivated you?

Deb: We had developed a multi-page list of requirements for our property – things like Southern exposure (for solar power), enough land on which to have a good sized vegetable garden, easy access to main roads to make travel easier, “quiet and beautiful,” “a variety of habitats and topography,” things like that. It’s funny, but one of the things that captivated us most was what we couldn’t do with the land. It was loaded with land use restrictions due to riparian zones, a large easement with New Jersey Conservation Foundation and the general limits imposed on development by the Highlands Act. Although the property was 43-acres, its “development envelope” was tiny. This meant that virtually all the land would need to remain untouched. Potential buyers saw this as a negative, we loved it.

TT: Coming from Montclair, I assume that thinking about what to do with 43-acres was a very big change for you?

Jason: Laughing. Yeah, far more than we initially anticipated, for sure! We began by looking at properties that were 3- 5 acres and coming from our ½-acre in Montclair, they already seemed huge. The property we fell in love with on Cold Brook Road was a whole different order of magnitude and its size necessitated some significant “mission creep” in what we were planning to do. Thankfully, we knew what we didn’t know and brought a couple of incredible resources into our planning discussions to help us answer questions about what Cold Brook Farm should ultimately become? The professionals at Terra Genesis International and Hundred Fruit Farm helped us envision how we could minimize our own human footprint on this gorgeous piece of land while ensuring that we’d also be able to improve the health and functioning of the surrounding ecosystem and grow healthy food.

TT: Ecosystem health is a theme I’ve heard you both repeat again and again – in our conversations preparing for the Sustainable Tewksbury series and my own review of your very informative website (www.coldbrookfarmnj.com). It’s obvious that you feel a responsibility to leave the land better than you found it. Tell us more about that.

Jason: This is something that Deb and I take very seriously. Simply put, we believe that we should live our lives as a part of nature as opposed to being apart from nature. This core belief infused everything we did to develop what we have come to call our “Sustainable Homestead” – something I expect we’ll touch on in a lot more detail in future conversations. Living as part of nature is an ethic we try to embody every day. We live on a very finite planet and us humans have really abused our home in ways that we need to reverse if we want our kids to have any hope of having healthy, long lives.

Deb: This is the reason that the very first thing we did after purchasing our property was to change the farming practices on the 13-acres of agricultural land where we would build our farmhouse. Most people do not realize it, but agriculture and land use practices associated with it are the single largest contributors to climate change – collectively more than the emissions from all the planes, trains, ships and automobiles in the world. We knew that if we were going to rapidly move in the direction of creating a healthier ecosystem on our farm, we had to both minimize the amount of land we disturbed when building our home and we needed to change the way the farming was done.

Jason: Our land had been farmed “conventionally” as is the vast majority of farmland in Tewksbury. It had been in a GMO corn, soybean and wheat rotation that was reliant on glyphosate, fungicides and a variety of other synthetic inputs. We reached out to the farmer who had worked the land before we purchased it and asked if he would help us transition it to organic management, but he was unwilling to do so. The unfortunate reality is that it’s perceived as being more financially prudent to farm “conventionally” than using organic methods. For better, or worse, there was just no way that Deb and I were going to poison our land and the waterways that run through it. In our minds it’s a case of “pay now or pay later,” and we just don’t want to do things on “our” land – which we hesitate to even refer to that way as we are just short-term stewards of it – that harms the health of living things. Herbicides, pesticides and fungicides cannot be doing any kind of good to anyone in the long term. If there is any long-term hope for humanity on this planet, we need to make the transition from relating to the land in an extractive, destructive way to that of trying to improve it and leave it better than we found it.

TT: And yet you built a house right in the middle of farmland. Isn’t that a destructive act in its own way?

Deb: Yes, and honestly, the first day of our construction project was a very sad one for us both. No matter how environmentally sensitive the construction (and we’ll talk a lot about that together later in this series), no matter how many innovative, sustainable building techniques you use, the reality is that there is now a permanent human structure where once there was only open land and that just cannot continue indefinitely. Our first option had been to retrofit an existing house with all the things we wanted to do – solar electricity, ground-source heating and cooling, outstanding insulation, etc. – but after months of searching it was clear that we’d need to build something designed to be efficient from the outset.

Jason: Interrupting. And this is one of the reasons that we kept the footprint of our farmhouse small and employed Permaculture principles in the two acres immediately around it. By doing these things, the amount of land we used purely for ourselves (the house, barn, driveway and walkways) ended up being just 0.5 acres.

TT: So, back to the farmland. I understand that you have converted the large field to Regenerative, Certified Organic practices and that you grow grain for food, is that correct?

Deb: Yes. We began managing the field using organic principles in January 2020 and we are very proud to be one of just 88 Certified Organic Farms in the state. Jason took on the project of getting us Certified starting right around this time last year. The paperwork was rather time consuming, but it was nowhere near as difficult or expensive as many would have you believe. Additionally, the Inflation Reduction Act provided a sizeable amount of funding for farms transitioning to Organic Management. When it was all said and done, not counting Jason’s time, we ended up spending less than $500 on the Certification process itself and we have already been paid back many times that amount by being able to sell the food that we grow for a nominal premium to “conventionally” grown food.

TT: What commercial products have you grown and sold so far?

Jason: We only just started planting our perennial food crops – fruit, nuts and berries – two years ago, so those will take time to come into commercial production. But we’ve already grown and sold multiple annual crops including three kinds of wheat, rye, oats, honey, sweet potatoes, garlic, squash and herbs. We’ll never be a large producer because we want to remain human scaled and highly locally focused, but it is really rewarding to see friends and neighbors enjoy the food that we grow. I believe we are the only Certified Organic farm in Tewksbury at the moment and we are tremendously proud of that.

TT: How can our readers buy from you?

Deb: Some of our grains are always available in Oldwick at Larger Cross, during the growing season up in Long Valley at the Ethos Farm Market, through River Valley Community Grains and, of course, online through our own web store at www.coldbrookfarmnj.com. If readers join our mailing list, we’ll let them know when new products become available. Sadly, what we grow does not last long as demand tends to outstrip the amount the two of us can grow!