Welcome to the 2023 CSA

Welcome

We’re very excited to embark on our 3rd year in operation! Over the past three years we have brought thousands of people from our community together to share our love for sustainable agriculture, plant medicine, natural dyes, maple syrup, bees, timberframing, building with hempcrete, and of course local, chemical free food! This year we plan to continue our sustainable lifestyle workshops and csa program, and will hopefully be fully operational as a farm store as well. Thanks to members like you, we will have the pleasure of working the fields, growing fruits, vegetables and herbs, and keeping our farm operational and open to the public! The season will start with our Bee Keeping and Honey Harvest Workshop the 19th of March at 11am, tickets are available on our website. Following that we ill be hosting a mushroom growing workshop on Saturday April 22nd. In May we will host our first CSA Event which will be a farm tour and BBQ on the 20th from 11 to 2pm, this event will be the official kick off for the CSA and our members can take a tour of the farm and get to know each other, if anyone wants to bring a dish or a drink to share we encourage that! Stay tuned for more emails and updates about our workshops and events and if you have any questions please call Eric at 3126594803. Thanks and see you on the farm!

History

The Hempstead at Mountain Dale Farm is located in East Stroudsburg, PA and overlooks like iconic Delaware Water Gap. Mountain Dale Farm has been a working farm in the Poconos for over 200 years and vacation and agrotourism destination since the farmhouse was turned into a boarding house in the 1930’s. It was purchased in 2019 by Eric Titus White from the Swartz family whom lived and worked the land here since 1903. Before 1903, records are scarce, but farming records of grain sales dating back to the 1870’s from the George Hoffman Family were found in the attic, and a Timberframe specialist dated the log home to the late 1700’s or early 1800’s. The farm was well known for its honey, and was perhaps the oldest continuously operating apiary in the country, there are records of beekeeping here from 1918 on to today, when Eugene Swartz passed away at 104 years old he may have held the title of oldest living beekeeper in the US. (Interesting fact, beekeepers live on average 10 years longer than the general population). As the story goes, a traveling salesman in the 40’s convinced the Swartz family to buy some chemical treatments for their corn crops promising 

great results and higher yields, soon after using the treatment all of Eugene Swartz’s bees were dead. That was the first and last time any chemical treatments were used on the farm and only after the 50’s did they even permit combustion engines on the property. Though it was a tough lesson to learn, we today can be grateful for pristine soil unharmed by decades of chemicals. In 2020 the farm was certified organic and we like those before us pledge to keep the health of our soil, plants, air and animals, a number one priority. 

The CSA

A Community Supported Agriculture program has been operating on this farm on and off for over a 20 years, Gary Swartz was the first to adopt the model popularized in Germany. The goal of the program is to make more efficient and effective the growing and distributing of local produce to your community, It also helps to take the pressure off the farmer when dealing with how much to grow, and where to sell your goods, as well as the potential for crop failures. Community Supported Agriculture programs exist to create an opportunity for farmers to grow a predetermined amount of food for a group of people that will pay upfront for the entire season of produce, and in the event that a particular crop doesn’t grow well, the members share the risk. Our favorite part of the CSA is the community aspect. We love getting to know our members and families, we’ve create life long friends and hope to continue this as long as possible. We can’t say this enough, but we are so grateful for this opportunity to grow food for you and with you and hope that we can create a program here that lasts. We also love the parties and workshops and hope that this year the members can get together to plan and host some special events throughout the season. 

Staff

The most important part of the CSA is the staff and we have some incredibly special contributors that have worked these fields for decades. We look forward to welcoming our staff back to the farm this year and bringing in new passionate staff as the program grows.

Eric Titus White

Eric was born and raised in Sussex, NJ until 1990 when he moved to Marshalls Creek. After high school he attended Penn State University where he studied (infrequently) energy and the environment and found his passion for sustainability and environmental stewardship. After spending ten years in the middle east assisting the US government with post conflict stabilization he returned to his home town to find a piece of property to start growing hemp. Growing hemp was a gateway crop for Eric as it opened his eyes to the joys of farming, he soon went from one crop to raising livestock and planting any seed he could get his hands on. Eric still works in the Middle East to support his farming hobby and will be spending time in Ukraine  this spring focusing on agricultural demining, so anyone looking to help with feed the pigs while he’s out of country please reach out!

Gary Swartz

Gary was born and raised on the farm and knows more about the land and regenerative organic farming than most people on earth, we’re lucky to have Gary as our head consultant and even luckier to have him as our friend, he’s a wealth of knowledge and we hope that you find some time to pick his brain about our farm and its rich history. 

Donna Sonneneberg

Donna is a lifelong resident, teacher and artist from Shawnee on Delaware and the Pocono Mountains. You will see her working tirelessly as you pass the farm, there’s not many hours of the day where you won’t find her tending to the herbs, flowers and vegetables, or sweeping around your feet to help keep our CSA porch clean during pick ups. We’re grateful to have Donna back this year and although she threatens to retire we hope for our sake she never does! 

Karin Titus

Karin is a lifelong resident of Sussex, NJ and moved to the farm to assist her son in the daily running of the farm. She will often be found strolling the farm with goats and dogs and a few foster animals in tow. 

Urszula, Lewis, Zophia & Lukas Wolff

The Wolfpack are members of the CSA core group and without their assistance we would be lost! They have been members of our CSA since the day it opened and know the farm as well as any of us do. Urszula is a Radiologic technologist and Lewis is a Biologist, Their children Lukas and Sophia are certified vegetable tenders at our csa and farmers in training. If you would like to be a core group member and help with any of the CSA tasks, marketing, emails etc, please let us know. No really, call now!

Katie Calcaterra

Katie was a contributor to our CSA in 2022, She assisted with marketing work as well as our herb & flower garden and natural dyes workshop. Katie owns her own plant medicine company Big Love and will be concentrating on opening a brick and mortar store this summer and occasionally stopping in to check on our perennial gardens. 

Renovation

We’ve been renovating our farmhouse for a couple years now, and without meditation it would have been reduced to ashes long long ago!! (thanks kurt). All joking aside, the farm renovation has been an incredibly difficult project but the finished product will be well worth the blood, sweat, and tears. The entire home was gutted and another barn in disrepair was deconstructed to finish the home with handhewn oak beams to match those already there. It was also the first home in the country to be retrofitted with hempcrete, a 12 inch thick application of hemp and lime now insulates the home. Hempcrete is fireproof, and sound proof, and purifies the air as it passes through the alkaline lime! The finished farmhouse will be The Hempstead Bed & Breakfast upstairs and farmstore on the first floor. Our goal is to open the farmstore on weekends to sell our products from the farm such as eggs, pork, ferments, goats milk, plant medicine, hemp clothing, coffee and breakfast. On your next visit to the farm be sure to ask for a tour as I do love chatting about our struggles and victories with sustainable building.