From Dream to Long Table Farm

  This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue

By Janet Roach

It all started over a glass of raw milk. Baylee Drown, then working and studying at Green Mountain College in Vermont, offered one to Ryan Quinn (who goes by Quinn). Quinn, an Old Lyme, Connecticut, native, had tasted raw milk before. He liked it, and he liked Baylee even better.

Baylee on her New Holland Hydrostatic TC35D tractor.

Fast forward to 2024 and the two have been together for more than ten years, united in their determination to bring regenerative agriculture to Lyme, Connecticut, and surrounding towns. Regenerative agriculture is a holistic methodology that enhances soil fertility, improves water quality and quantity, reduces carbon emissions, and promotes high and sustainable agricultural yields.

Baylee and Quinn started at Upper Pond Farm in Old Lyme in 2013, and expanded to 4.6 acres on Beaver Brook Road in Lyme in 2020, dubbing the new property Long Table Farm. They now grow vegetables and raise chickens, ducks, goats, pigs, and a couple of cows on the Beaver Brook property. They also manage two properties owned by the Lyme Land Trust where they grow winter squash, garlic, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Everything they offer at Long Table Farm and at various farmers’ markets is free of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and grown with mostly human labor.

Even in early March of this year they were able to offer for sale more than a dozen vegetables and greens, eggs, chicken, and meat.

Long Table Farm’s stand is open Saturdays, 10 a.m.–1 p.m.

Baylee, who grew up on a Michigan dairy farm, earned her Master’s degree in Sustainable Food Systems from Green Mountain College and brought experience as a board member of the Stone Valley Food Coop. Quinn, a UConn grad, had explored various jobs, including teaching, working in the building trades, and serving as the chef on one of the tall ships operating out of New London.

Baylee also brought ideas she gleaned from a philosophy class in which she was introduced to the teachings of Paul Thompson, author of Issues in Animal Agriculture. “Thompson didn’t like to see animals mistreated,” Baylee says. “He had this new agrarian vision of how things could be.” Thompson’s work addressed issues like food adulteration, food and health, environmental issues related to food production, and the social consequences of food production and consumption. So taken with his ideas was Baylee that she earned nine more credits to toward her degree studying, absorbing, and applying what she learned to her own ambitions.

“Care” became a big word in her vocabulary, and her soul, she says. “Care for animals, the land, what grows on it, how it’s grown, and care for the community that consumes it.”
First, though, there was the issue of Baylee’s fortune in student loan debt to deal with. “I owed many, many thousands,” she says, adding, “I had no assets except my dog, nothing in the bank, no credit card. I was driving a borrowed clunker of a car. My credit rating was so lousy, I couldn’t qualify for a loan.” Still, she remained resolute.

Baylee and Quinn had been looking around for a place to begin their dream of a shared future. Vermont? Maine? Both were known for welcoming new, mostly younger farmers interested in the organic and sustainable ethos to challenge the giant industrial operations that relied on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and far more heavy equipment than human beings. But even the smallest farms they saw seemed either undesirable or out of financial reach.

Baylee and Quinn stand by their farm sign on Beaver Brook Road, Lyme, Connecticut.

When, in 2013, they visited the Connecticut River Valley, Baylee heard the siren song of the winding roads, the stone walls, orchards, and wild fields that long ago had been cultivated. The couple introduced themselves to farmers and farms in Stonington, Ledyard, Waterford, and Essex. Baylee applied for a job as farm manager at Upper Pond Farm in Old Lyme and ended up leasing the property for eight years.

In July 2015, as an anniversary present, Baylee bought tickets to a farm-to-table dinner at White Gate Farm in East Lyme. There she and Quinn met the proprietors, Pauline and David Lord. “They were so generous and encouraging,” Baylee says fondly, giving Pauline credit for making the connection between her and Rod and Deborah Hornbakes. The Hornbakes were working with Land For Good, a New England regional connection service to preserve their property in Lyme, then known as New Mercies Farm. Baylee, Quinn, and the Hornbakes soon found they had much in common. Not long after, the Hornbakes began the process of transferring their property to Baylee. The purchase was completed in 2019 and the property renamed Long Table Farm.

It’s been hard, heavy work ever since. Baylee and Quinn share equally in the labor, with Quinn shouldering maintenance of machinery and various construction, along with being the farm’s public face at farmers’ markets. Baylee, in addition to being a dab hand at running a tractor, also keeps the books, writes the grant applications, and lobbies in Hartford on behalf of small farms. For both, ten-hour days are the norm in the off-season with fourteen hours required daily from spring planting season until the early-dusk days of winter.

CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) participants and farmers’ markets patrons see the bountiful, healthy crops Long Table Farm produces—70,000 pounds of vegetables alone last year. But there are also endless, less obvious ongoing tasks, among them: monitoring and maintaining the health of the soil and water, creating needed compost out of weeds and scraps, erecting and tending the three existing greenhouses, maintaining tractors and other necessary equipment, installing the underground sprinkler system, scouring the internet for needed gear at affordable prices, writing and posting a weekly newsletter to inform 150 CSA member families and farmers’ market patrons of what’s available, working with state agricultural authorities to advance the cause of small farmers and planning for future expansion, taking and teaching courses on holistic management and the integration of animal and plant animal food production systems, and visiting schools to deliver their message of the importance to the community of sustainable agriculture.

Crops thrive year round in Long Table Farm’s high tunnels.

Baylee is undaunted. “I love growing healthy, flavorful food for people,” she says with energy and utter sincerity, adding, “I love being really tired and dirty at the end of a workday.”

She even expresses pride and pleasure in having mastered the art of writing grant proposals—a task on which she spends many hours at all seasons of the year.

Her first success came in 2021 when she was awarded a hefty $50,000 grant from the Connecticut Department of Agriculture to help build a barn to store equipment, gear, and food, plus provide upstairs living quarters for Baylee and Quinn. The barn was framed by professionals, but—to keep costs down—Quinn, with the help of YouTube, knowledgeable friends, and other willing hands, did the electrical work, plumbing, dry wall, HVAC system, and cabinetry. He also did the interior framing of the upstairs rooms.

Thirty-thousand dollars in additional funding came from selling five-year CSA memberships. Another grant funded the in-ground irrigation system, and most recently, Baylee was awarded a $50,000 grant to get started on a composting operation that will be open not just to CSA members but to other local residents. “Right now Lyme’s garbage gets trucked to Ohio. It makes much more sense for us to keep it here and turn it into useful, beneficial, needed compost.”

The composting project is but one of Baylee’s hopes for the future of Long Table Farm. Short term, she sees carving out access roads to their fields, getting to “no till” status on their land, and finishing part of the barn as a processing facility for vegetables, eggs, and meats. Long-term, she and Quinn hope to install a licensed kitchen in which to produce ready-to-eat meals from vegetables, grains, and meat grown on the property.

For now, Long Table Farm is a work in progress. “We’ll never be White Gate Farm,” Baylee volunteers, acknowledging the pristine beauty of her mentors’ property. Instead, her ultimate ambition is to use ethical, sustainable, and regenerative practices to provide nearly all the food needed for one hundred local families.

Bayle prides herself on paying decent wages to all who come to work on the farm, but she takes no salary for herself. Instead, she says, at the end of the year, if there’s a profit on the books, she takes some of it to pay off her remaining debts—both student loans and the mortgage on Long Table Farm. Government student loan forgiveness has helped on that front, adding proudly, “Every penny that’s left goes back into the farm.”

“It’s a business,” declares Quinn. Indeed. So perhaps it’s the combination of his financial acumen and Baylee’s social consciousness and devotion to soil-enhancing practices that has allowed Long Table Farm to become a resounding success story in both realms in just a few years. Where once they depended on sales to restaurants, they have now built a coterie of loyal CSA subscribers and farmers’ markets clients, with both constituencies growing each year. “Our customers appreciate the quality, taste, and nutritional value of what we grow,” Baylee says, adding, “I love caring for this place, this community where people can come to reengage with food and the land.” It seems she—and Quinn—have found exactly the niche they were looking for.

Janet Roach is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where she taught writing at the Graduate School of the Arts. She had earlier careers as a journalist and Hollywood screenwriter.