By Dan Sullivan
The ties that bind.
For nearly 30 years, Lakeview Organic Grain has been providing organic livestock feed grains, bagged feed, animal supplements and crop seeds to the organic community throughout the Northeast.
Customers and farmers who provide raw materials to the mill are like family, and the business has helped new and existing organic farming operations in the region flourish.
In an April newsletter, Lakeview owner/manager Mary-Howell Martens announced all that would change: “After nearly 30 years of supplying feed to Northeast organic farmers of all sizes, we have decided it is time to let others carry this on and direct our efforts elsewhere.”
Martens, who largely steered the ship — more recently with help from youngest son Daniel — intends to focus more on other endeavors, including writing, teaching and being a grandmother.
Her husband of 38 years, Klaas Martens, while still very much involved in the day-to-day operation of the farm — with 1,900 acres of organic grain crops, edible beans and hay under cultivation — is also applying the brakes some, as the dynamic couple helps eldest son Peter build his rapidly growing organic food-grain business, Seneca Grain and Bean.
They plan to transition ownership of their dairy farm and 65 milk cows to a young couple currently leasing the operation.
Neither can imagine fully retiring.
In the Beginning
Mary-Howell was a grape breeder at Cornell, and Klaas was a lifelong farmer with an ag degree from SUNY at Cobleskill when they tied the knot in 1986 and began farming 500 acres of corn, wheat, soy, and hay conventionally under government programs.
Realizing that crop/acreage combination represented a financial dead end while becoming increasingly wary of conventional ag chemicals, they began farming organically with diverse crop rotations in the early ’90s.
By 2001, the USDA Certified Organic label was on the horizon and the sector was taking off, close to home in no small part due to the Martens and their willingness to share their success and knowledge with neighbors. The Martens had also become regular workshop and keynote speakers at organic farming conferences across the country.
They saw an opportunity to vertically integrate and fill a niche by providing organic feed to dairies, poultry farms, and others transitioning to organics. They purchased an old Agway mill in Penn Yan, 5 miles from their farm.
Eric Glasgow, who, with his wife and a crew of 30, runs the 240-acre Grey Barn & Farm creamery and bakery on Martha’s Vineyard, said Lakeview and the Martens were instrumental in helping him get started when he pivoted from international oil sales to farming 15 years ago.
Grey Barn, “a typical New England Farm with a backbone of dairy,” Glasgow said, milks 45 Dutch-Belted and Normande cows and makes cheese, sold directly to customers and distributed nationally. The farm also raises pigs and has a small egg-laying operation. “In the early years, I definitely leaned on them [the Martens] to a certain extent for some advice or thoughts on things,” Glasgow said from his farmstand, where business was already brisk as tourism season kicked in. “I didn’t have experience or any of my own specific knowledge to apply.”
In its newsletter to customers, which took the tone of saying goodbye to an old friend, Lakeview included a list of alternate organic animal feed sources in Vermont, New York and Pennsylvania.
“I’ve been out to Penn Yan, and I’ve had dinner with Klaas and Mary-Howell,” Glasgow said to underscore the personal relationships Lakeview has held with its customers.
“This is a story, I think, that encapsulates where the organic movement has been for the past 30 years and perhaps where it’s going,” Mary-Howell said from her office inside the mill. “It’s changing direction, and we see this as an opportunity for us. We see it as opportunities for others.”
Son Daniel, who has been running the mill's grinding operation for the past five years, is ready for other endeavors, including helping his brother Peter grow Seneca Grain and Bean, the food-grade side of the family enterprise.
A few years ago, the family invested in a state-of-the-art grain cleaning facility. “It is just taking off,” Martens said. “There are so many opportunities with bakeries, with flour mills, with consumers, with all sorts of people who want to grind their own grains and have a source of fresh, local, organic things to eat.”
Lakeview Organic Grain has been instrumental in growing that community and the farmers who serve it. Products have evolved to include bulk dairy feed, chicken feed, pellets of small animal and poultry feed, specialty feeds like no-soy chicken feed and customized rations. “We’ve done this for years, and it has been successful,” Martens said. “It’s allowed an awful lot of people to do what they’ve wanted to do. They’ve wanted to raise chickens, they’ve wanted to raise pigs - we’ve been able to supply the feed. When we started, there was nobody else doing it.”
When the couple began the endeavor, they could easily sell their soybeans in the tofu market, but there was no market for their rotational organic crops like corn, small grains and oats. “That’s why we started grinding feed back in the mid-’90s,” Martens said. “We needed a way to use up our rotational crops.”
And the first organic dairy farmers needed organic feed.
“We thought, ‘No big deal,’ we could provide the grains,” Martens recalled. “A friend of ours had a mixer-grinder on his farm and a small feed truck, and he could deliver them, and that was that. It was just a simple thing to do. But that market took off very fast, outgrew the capacity of our farm and his farm, and we bought this facility from Agway in 2000.”
Agway was going bankrupt, she said, and the mill had basically been abandoned. With no small amount of elbow grease, ingenuity and retrofitting, Lakeview Organic Grain was up and running in 2001.
Within a year, Lakeview added two employees. The following year, they had their own truck driver.
“We kept adding on and upgrading equipment,” Martens said. “It has been a wild ride, and it has been a hard ride, but it’s been very successful. We’ve had great customers and people and loved working with everybody.”
She added that 60% of the mill’s customers are Mennonite or Amish and Lakeview is a women-run business. It has been an interesting and rewarding cultural learning experience.
Now, other companies grind organic seed, and Keystone is about to open a brand-new automated, computerized organic feed mill in Seneca County.
“There are others in the business,” Martens said, “and we see that it’s time for us to focus our work, our resources, more on our sons’ interests; let them drive the ship and move on from what we’ve created here.”
Not Going Away
Lakeview Organic Grain will continue as a brand that focuses primarily on seed sales of cover crops, small grains, and crop mixtures.
“The number of organic vegetable farms in the Northeast who need cover crops is essentially unlimited,” Martens said.
Paul and Maureen Knapp own and operate Cobblestone Valley Farm in the Preble Valley of Central New York. They milk about 60 cows on the diverse, fourth-generation dairy farm, which also raises pastured poultry, beef, and pork. They were one of the Martens’ first organic feed customers.
The Knapps said the Martens represent the true spirit of organic farming.
“That’s kind of what the whole organic community has been about ... everybody pitches in and helps help out one another,” Paul Knapp said. “Somebody’s doing something. You ask them how and why, and they’ll tell you. You try to fit some of those pieces into your puzzle. Klaas and Mary Howell have been right there since the beginning doing those sorts of things. They’re great proponents of organic agriculture and very willing and free to share information.”
“They’ve been mentors to just about everybody in the organic community if they’re willing,” Maureen Knapp added. The Knapps expressed both admiration and amazement for Lakeview’s dedication to its customers over the years.
“On more than one occasion, we would call a feed order in on a holiday, maybe a Friday or a Monday that’s a holiday, just thinking we’d get the answering machine and just to get a jump on it to get an order in,” Paul Knapp said. “And Mary-Howell would pick up the phone, and she’d be there in the office.”
This article was originally printed in Lancaster Farming and was reprinted with permission. Photos provided by the author.