EMERGING ENTREPRENEURS

	TRR photo by Charlie Buterbaugh Barney Zipkin, owner of Horizon Farm, will give students a chance to participate in the basics of life. (Click for larger image)

An age-old educational standard

By CHARLIE BUTERBAUGH

LIVINGSTON MANOR, NY — In a valley along the Willowemoc Creek sits Horizon Farm, a small-scale organic educational farm created to teach groups of students the value of cooperative farming.

Horizon’s owner, Barney Zipkin, grew up on a small farm in Westchester County, where he said he learned creativity, perseverance and accountability.

“We want kids to experience the necessities of life and to take what they learn here and apply it to their everyday experiences,” he said.

He prizes stories from his childhood, like the time the horse’s leg fell through the floor of the trailer, when lambs were born or maples were tapped for syrup in the spring. While he sometimes resented his responsibilities, he came back to farming in his early 40’s, and he is determined to deliver the experience to children who have not participated in an environment where animals and people have no choice but to depend on each other, an environment where noteworthy stories happen every day.

The farm will soon offer daily, multi-day, weekly and full semester programs to students from Kindergarten to high school, beginning with parent-child weekends on July 4 to 6, 11 to 13 and three weekends in August.

The facility includes a dormitory, a recreational hall and adjacent industrial kitchen, hay and livestock barns, three beehives, a swimming pool and Zipkin’s home. Several spring-fed ponds will help sustain the raised bed gardens that, at the bottom of a hillside pasture, are ideally located for sun exposure.

Horizon Farm can host up to 30 students at a time, and they will share daily responsibilities of keeping the farm alive, such as planning and preparing meals, making cheese, tending the garden, picking vegetables, feeding horses, milking cows and running the farm stand.

	TRR photo by Charlie Buterbaugh Chris Rieger lives at Horizon Farm and will oversee farming practice and educational programs. (Click for larger image)

Chris Rieger, who began working for Zipkin just over a month ago, will manage a great deal of the operation. He is in the course of cultivating a network of double-dug raised beds, built up by the compost of already existing soil and collected manure of the farm’s animals and topped with collected maple leaves. Three donated Belgian workhorses will be used to till and hay other parts of the 95-acre farmland.

Rieger has eight years of experience in organic farming, though he said he will continues to experiment with new methods of utilizing materials of the earth to fuel the farm.

“In a world of pre-packaged goods, we want to create an experience that shows children the other side of life. We want them to learn that if the cow is not milked early in the morning, it will get an infection. We believe that parents will be pleased when they see what their children have learned at the farm,” Zipkin said.

He bought the property just over a year ago when it was in a dismal state, he said, though numerous contributors have helped bring the unique property back to life, including Home Depot of Middletown and Will Hardware of Livingston Manor.

Horizon will eventually host groups of students between March and November, comprising a full yearly cycle of agricultural production.

For more information call 845/439-4901 or visit horizonfarm.net.