Mecox Farmer Joins Exodus

If you were to paint the scene at the Water Mill auction marking the end of David Szczepankowski's career as a farmer, it would have been with a palette of earth tones.

Dull red barns. Threatening gray skies. Muddy brown tire tracks on the road to the farm. Scores of farmers in brown coveralls, denims, blue and green sweatshirts, green John Deere caps.

As development and the high price of land increase the odds against East End farmers, stories like Mr. Szczepankowski's have become more familiar. He himself has already begun a new career, one as closely connected to the market as farming, but, he hopes, with more promise - stock-brokering.

Meanwhile, however, an auction like the one held Saturday only happens every few years.

Some Were Just Curious

Hundreds of farmers, mainly from Long Island, braced themselves against the frigid weather and developing showers to get a look at what Mr. Szczepankowski had to offer.

Some came to buy the farming equipment he would no longer need. Others were there out of curiosity, wondering how much their own equipment might be worth if they too decided on a change of career.

"A lot of guys who thought they had $100,000 worth of equipment found out they didn't," Mr. Szczepankowski said matter-of-factly a few days after the auction. One tractor he had thought might go for $10,000 or $12,000 brought only $4,000, for example.

Low Prices

The auctioneer always started high, came down until he got a bid, then started going up again. Standing on the sidelines, farmers muttered about the brand of a particular machine or grumbled that a truck had gone for too much, a tractor for too little.

"It's a little sad," Jim Pike, a Sagaponack farmer, admitted after the auction. "Sad that nothing brought that much money, and sad to see someone so young go out of farming." Mr. Szczepankowski is in his 30s.

Low prices are reportedly the norm at Long Island auctions, for a number of reasons.

"Nobody wants to go over the bridge," Lawrence Osborn of Wainscott guessed. The Throgs Neck and George Washington Bridges lie like an obstacle course between the Island and the farmlands of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York.

Land Is The Problem

In the past, much equipment bought on Long Island had to be fumigated before it could be taken elsewhere, another expense and an added deterrent for off-Island farmers. That was thanks to the golden nematode, a notorious potato pest indigenous to the Island, now believed to have been eradicated.

The ink in Mr. Osborn's small notebook was bleeding in the rain as he recorded the selling price of various pieces of equipment - a bean picker, a tractor, a 1966 truck.

"In Pennsylvania, equipment's more expensive," Mr. Pike said.

"Yeah, they actually use it. They really farm," Mr. Osborn piped in.

The two lamented a farmer's biggest need and greatest problem today - land and the lack of it. "There's none of it left," Mr. Pike declared.

"It has to stop somewhere," Mr. Osborn said. "There's a few of us diehards left. Right, Jim?"

Later, Mr. Pike cited a statistic he had read. "Eighty percent of the fruit and 70 percent of the vegetables grown in this country are grown on land facing development pressure."

Another Subdivision?

The Mecox Road farmland and barns that Mr. Szczepankowski rented from the Babinski family are being sold as well. The fate of the land is not certain.

The property is in escrow right now, and there has been talk of a housing subdivision with some acreage set aside for farming, or perhaps a horse farm. But Enzo Morabito, a real estate broker with Sagaponack Real Estate and Auctions, has seen plans for the farm and says neighbors can expect a maximum-density small-lot subdivision.

"It's not a pretty one," he said. "It's not what I would do."

The East Hampton farmstand Mr. Szczepankowski ran on the corner of Stephen Hand's Path and Montauk Highway since he was 13 will be gone next year, too. The State Department of Transportation will use the roadside spot it occupied to expand Montauk Highway enough to make a turn lane for Stephen Hand's Path.

A Tough Year

Two weeks ago, Mr. Szczepankowski and his wife, Susan, spent the last days at their stand.

The year had been one of the most difficult he could recall, said the former farmer. He had moved to the rented land in November 1995, after his father decided to put the family's Wainscott farmland on the market.

This year's growing and harvesting had been particularly rough in the wet weather, Mr. Szczepankowski said, and the one crop that did well almost across the board - potatoes - had a bleak showing in the market.

"In the fall, I still had a chance of the potato business panning out," he said, noting that had the market turned around, he could have made some money. Instead, it dropped off even further, meaning nobody was going to be cashing in on what was otherwise an excellent potato harvest.

"We worked awfully hard this summer," Mr. Szczepankowski reflected. "To do that without making any money just doesn't make any sense. I was beating my head against the wall with this farming thing."

Keeping A Connection

Despite the couple's love of the land, all the signs were pointing to one thing - it was time to get out. They hauled away the farmstand for the last time and on Saturday he sold off the tools of his trade.

Mrs. Szczepankowski hopes to maintain her connection to farming. She is planning to expand an existing wholesale produce business, dealing with farms on the North and South Forks and in Riverhead.

"It supports the continuation of agriculture, which is important to me," she said. She is also part of a group that is trying to establish a cooperative of organic growers.

Her husband's new job will mean some big changes, even down to wardrobe, he laughed last week. Rubber boots and jeans go into the closet and suits and ties come out.

Though he has had a long-standing interest in finance and buying stock, he will miss farming, said Mr. Szczepankowski. "If I had my druthers, that's what I'd do, but I'm also tired of working hard and not getting anywhere."

Three Generations

Last week, as he readied his equipment for the auction, it wasn't without emotion. Three generations of Szczepankowskis farming on the South Fork ends with him. His father was a farmer and his grandfather, who emigrated from Poland, was as well.

"The sad part is, I feel like my grandfather came here from another country, couldn't speak the language, and he made it. How in the world can I seem not to be able to do that?"

His decision to get out of agriculture was made easier, though, knowing there was little choice.

"If I have a really bad year, I can't pull through," he said.

Thought Of Maryland

The Szczepankowskis had considered buying a farm in Delaware or Maryland, where arable parcels are much larger and local governments, said Mr. Szczepankowski, are "more pro-agriculture," but the risk was too great.

"Those people know what land is valued at just like we do here," he said. "They're not giving it away."

"We're running our business on a shoestring here; there, it would have been more difficult. Why do we want to get involved in a mortgage when we don't know where the money's going to come from?"

The rolling views of East End farmland, and the fresh produce available in season, is in part what attracts many second-home owners to settle here, but Mr. Szczepankowski said he was not ready to sacrifice his economic well-being to help maintain a good vista or a way of life.

Not So Romantic

"They want the farmland, but they don't want the farms," has become a kind of mantra among local farmers who find themselves at odds with some newer residents' demands to keep down the dust, the spraying, the noise.

Farmers feel there is a tendency to romanticize their occupation and at the same time hand them the responsibility for keeping agriculture going as a way of life against all odds.

Mr. Szczepankowski put it in far more practical terms. "If you do it for a living," he said, "it's not a way of life. It's the way you make your livelihood."

"When you're young, a couple of dollars in your pocket is okay, but as you get older . . . you can't do it when you know it's not a lucrative business."

Development Rights

Mr. Szczepankowski thinks the government pays only lip service to agriculture.

"[They] don't care about the farmer. They care about his land and what's going to happen to it, but they don't care if I leave or another guy leaves."

Open space referendums may help preserve farmland, he said, but they do little to help the farmer continue to work that land.

"From a farmer's point of view, it's a silly thing. . . . What do you do after you've sold the development rights at a discount to the government? What if things don't go well and you have to sell?"

Selling the rights does give farmers some money up front, but, Mr. Szczepankowski said, the most the property can draw afterward might be $8,000 or $10,000 an acre for horse farms.

"Compared to $100,000 an acre, that's not much money," he said, adding that selling to developers simply made more financial sense.

Nature Of The Beast

Idealize all you want, said Mr. Szczepankowksi, but farming is "difficult and expensive." Over and above the cost to rent or buy land comes the task of marketing a crop at a fair price, and then actually getting paid for it.

"That's the nature of this business. A lot of people are just absolute crooks," he said, shaking his head.

There has long been an edge among farmers as well, because, though they may share some common concerns, they are also competitors, for both customers and a shrinking amount of land.

Mrs. Szczepankowski thought she sensed a sign of change at the auction Saturday, though.

"There's much more sense of camaraderie among the local farmers now," she said. "It's kind of like they know the ship is going down and they have to hold on to each other."