In 2025 the Rockland Community Farm Network was awarded contracts to manage and operate two county-owned farms in Rockland, Cropsey Farm and Depew Farm. Since then, Sue Ferreri and her team of operators and volunteers have provided Rockland with food, education and community.
The RCFN operate county owned farm land like Cropsey or Depew farms as a non-profit. The network grows over 8,000 plants, including flowers, strawberries, arugula, and mustard, and the crops grown at RCFN farms are sold throughout our region.
The network also hosts a Farm Stand where crops and other food stuff like jam, pasta, and dairy are sold.
Their most important work is their education. The RCFN hosts school field trips with over 10k students passing through the farms annually. They teach students about the ways various fields of study can apply to agriculture and how they themselves can get involved in feeding their community. Along with field trips, RCFN also runs a camp for kids grades 1-7. They host both a spring break and summer program with each week themed around a different aspect of farming.
The network also does adult outreach through their market stand and private education classes. The aim is to educate people about the food they put in their bodies and how it gets to their tables. Ferreri says that often, kids are the ones able to effect the most change. Introducing younger students to an array of fruits and vegetables makes a difference in the kids’ diets, sparking changes in the diets of their parents as well. Ferreri says that she’s had parents call her after school field trips to tell her about the miraculous change in their child’s diet and how getting their kid to eat a vegetable went from painful to painless.
As a non-profit, the Rockland Community Farm Network fundraises for many of their activities. The events they put on, be it school field trips or adult farm to table dinners, help cover the cost of the daily operations and their educational programs.
Their biggest struggle is predicting the weather. Like all farmers, the RCFN has to put a lot of trust in the weather. Small periods of heat in between cold can ruin crops, too much rain could ruin crops, too little rain could ruin crops – basically, there’s a lot to be careful over. They grow organic foods and take care to make sure what they plant is healthy and how they plant is sustainable. They donate between 2 and 4 tons of food a year and sell to local restaurants and businesses in and around Rockland County.
The RCFN food market is open from now until Thanksgiving week. To learn more visit https://www.rocklandcfn.org/
Food-ucation with the RCFN added by rctadmin on
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