New Nordic Farm owners say, ‘keep it simple’

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on July 11, 2024.

Way out on a hill off Route 7 sits a sprawling property iconically marked by red-roofed barns that strikingly contrast with the Green Mountain landscape around them.

Inching closer to Charlotte, the noise of a bustling city begins to fade as chirps from the insects, crickets, and other wildlife fill the air. Those barns are more commonly known as Nordic Farm, a standing testament to what was once a booming dairy industry in Vermont.

Now, as two new owners close on the latest sale of the property, there is no extravagant plan in the works — not quite yet. Instead, the New York natives plan to do something much more grandiose: “Keep it simple.”

Benjamin Dobson and Kaspar Meier, a prominent farmer and a builder from Columbia County in New York, closed on the sale of the conserved property of just under 600 acres on July 2 after it spent more than a year on the market without any serious interest.

But according to Meier, the duo has taken up the challenge, “hook, line, and sinker.” They bought the property for $2.2 million, significantly less than the grand list value of $3.2 million.

A long history

The property has seen a frequent shift in ownership and ideas over the last decade, but at one point it was home to one of the state’s most prolific dairy operations with nearly 300 milking heifers during its prime. In 2004, it became the first farm in New England to install robotic milking equipment under the ownership of Clark Hinsdale III.

In 2014, Hinsdale sold the dairy operation to the farm’s longtime manager, Michael LeClair, who filed for bankruptcy just three years later.

The high-profile farm went through a few different owners who offered a variety of ideas for its future. In 2018, Andrew Peterson, owner of Peterson Quality Malt, partnered with a group of investors led by Jay and Matt Canning of Hotel Vermont to buy the property.

But the most notable endeavor came just three years ago from the entrepreneurial mind of Will Raap, the visionary behind ventures like Gardeners Supply and the Intervale Center, which has acted as a launching pad and educational resource for farms across the state.

The massive undertaking was forged under the name Earthkeep Farmcommon and was poised to usher in a new era of regenerative, diversified farming that balanced nonprofit research, innovation and education all within a single hub.

But when Raap died just a year later in December 2022, the plans were halted, and the farm found itself yet again at an unforeseen crossroads.

The property was listed for sale last April by the Raap family, who began working with land broker LandVest to find its next willing proprietor.

Back to its roots

Meier said the business partners were in no way looking to take on a new adventure, but due to some good marketing on the part of LandVest, they somehow serendipitously heard about the farm way across the state border just under four hours away.

“It just had our names all over it,” Meier said, grinning, his hands covered in dirt after spending a scorching hot July day working on the expansive property. “A lot of the locals are kind of telling me, ‘You know, this place has eaten many a man.’ That kind of makes me smile because it’s a challenge. And that doesn’t bother me.”

He said he was somewhat surprised that locals hadn’t snatched up a property like this sooner, and the price point made it a no-brainer once the opportunity presented itself.

“If it had been twice that, that wouldn’t be an option,” he said.

Meier has already relocated to Vermont and has spent the better part of six weeks cleaning up the place, which has been relatively vacant for years. But he said he’s already started to experience the Vermont charm, so to speak, especially in contrast to his home in Columbia County that he says has caved to development pressures over the years.

“Dealing with Vermonters here seemed easier,” he said. “It’s a little more straightforward. You can shake people’s hands and it seems you can be confident they’re going to do what they say.”

Both Dobson and Meier have farming in their blood. For Dobson, the list is seemingly endless. From managing farming efforts in the Hudson Valley and across the globe to spearheading research into the impacts of regenerative farming practices on carbon sequestration, he has had his hands in the soil for most, if not all, of his life.

Most notable are his efforts working with Abby Rockefeller, the eldest daughter of David Rockefeller and Margaret McGrath. According to reporting by the Hill County Observer in 2020, Rockefeller took ownership of an expansive property known as Old Muck Creek Farm in 2012 and began the long process of restoring the land, which had previously been used for pesticide trials, using regenerative and organic farming methods.

Rockefeller hired Dobson to manage farm operations, and they later become leaders in the hemp industry when the two launched Hudson Hemp in 2017.

Meier and Dobson have known each other for years, mostly since both families had been pioneers in the organic farming industry in the New York area during the late 1970s into the early 1980s.

For Meier, originally from Switzerland, his family moved to the U.S. in 1975, where his father became one of the early founders of Hawthorne Valley Farm, a fully diversified farm with a working dairy, pigs, chickens and a variety of field crops and vegetables as well as a cheese-plant and bakery.

Meier later joined his father, who was leading efforts around biodynamic tropical agriculture in the Dominican Republic at his banana and mango farm.

Although Meier has spent most of the last two decades in the contracting and building business, he said the opportunity to farm on a scale like this was ultimately what drew him back to his roots.

“I’m a farmer at heart,” he said. “That’s what I’d rather do than go build fancy places all over the place that are taking over the farms. Ben and I have a big benefit and we’ve been all over the world and worked in agricultural ventures all over the world in a different variety.”

A simple vision

For now, the duo doesn’t have any massive plans, and Meier has spent most of his time at the property mowing, clearing walking trails, and working to stabilize certain parts of the antique barn that sits closest to Route 7.

While it’s premature to say exactly what will happen in the future as ideas are expected to be ever evolving, in the short time, he said, it makes most sense to grow grass and hay for grazing.

“Because Vermont produces grass better than anywhere I’ve seen in the country,” he said. “You can feed more cattle per acre here than you can in many places. So, from that perspective, if managed well, there should be a lot of opportunities here. Maybe it’ll be a whole variety of animals, but we’ll go slow at first and not come in with fixed expectations of what exactly we’re going to walk into because it’s premature.”

Meier has been the familiar face around the property, while Dobson, who lives with his family just across the Massachusetts border, goes back and forth as often as possible.

“You can’t have a farm like this and all these buildings and these things and not tend to it,” he said. “The last thing this place would need is an absentee landowner.”

But for now, they are taking things back to square one, with the hope that in the future, the infrastructure can continue to be a support system and beacon of hope for other farms in the area.

“Because we don’t really look at this farm as something that’s just ours and for ourselves, we’re just kind of temporarily here to care for it and reverse course,” he said. “Plain and simple, the farm’s been looking hard for a future here. So, here we are. Back to square one.”

Other businesses that have run out of the newer barn on the property — a seawater shrimp farm, Sweet Sound Aquaculture and the House of Fermentology, an offshoot of Foam Brewers, along with several rental properties — will remain for now, he said.

During a time when more and more farms seem to be falling prey to an increasingly difficult market, the sale of Nordic Farm will hopefully sow new seeds into the agricultural realm, even just for a moment.

It certainly won’t be a walk in the park, but as Meier puts it, farming anything is never easy, and in some ways, that’s part of the adventure.

“We’re not better at anything than anyone else, other than we might have a different perspective and different life experiences, so we might just approach many of the things differently,” Meier said. “But we don’t have any exciting news for the town of Charlotte. We’re just farmers and we want to keep it simple. That’s the story for now.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: New Nordic Farm owners say, ‘keep it simple’ .