We recently connected with Mark Stonehill and Miriam Goler and have shared our conversation below.

Mark and Miriam, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

At Full Circus Farm we use draft horses– 2 stocky and very blond Haflinger ponies– to plow and prepare the soil for planting. Before tractors, horses, oxen, and people did most of the hard pulling work on a farm. That’s the reason we still measure the output of engines with the unit “Horsepower.”

We choose to use horses rather than tractors as our method of cultivation because it’s more fun for us. To us, horses smell better than tractors. Horses can look at you and respond– they show us things and teach us lessons. One day they actually alerted us to a small fire in our field that we were unaware of. And, of course, there’s room for attachment. They you look at you with longing eyes and say “feed me” just like your beloved dog or cat.

We ‘re not Amish, Mennonite, or operating a “living history” farm museum where everyone’s wearing period clothing. We’re just small-scale farmers that see the beauty and utility of draft horses, and we value the relationship one can make with another species when there’s real interdependence: our business wouldn’t work without Sandy and Sunshine.

We’re lucky that horse-drawn equipment and trained draft animals are still available to us. There’s a thriving network of farmers, loggers and growers in New York and New England that are still using draft horses. Not to mention the Amish and Mennonite communities that are, on a much larger scale, preserving the tradition of draft power, and keeping it alive by manufacturing the equipment that us “English” teamsters often depend on.

Here at Full Circus Farm, we are using horse-drawn equipment– sulky plows, discs, harrows, riding cultivators and single-row cultivators– most of which were manufactured a lifetime ago, or more. They were built so well and so carefully maintained by farmers, that they have decades of use ahead of them still. It’s a marvel to see the workmanship that went into them. If you look carefully in the nooks and crannies, you’ll see faint hints of green paint on our equipment– perhaps their original coat. It’s fun for me to think about who put that coat of paint on, and what the world was like back then.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Full Circus Farm is basically a two person operation– Miriam Goler and Mark Stonehill. We met in high school on Chambers Street in the middle of New York City. We had lockers nearby one another. We had no particular interest in farming when we met. But we both shared a sense of adventure and a desire to explore both the built and natural worlds. First we explored what was close, with whatever means we had at hand: a pair of white and green student Metrocards and the shoes on our feet. With those, we really criss-crossed the city and learned a lot about the place we grew up and about each other too.

We also saw that New York City had strange things in the margins. In the nooks and crannies of every borough there were hens and roosters in the vacant lots and industrial corners, escaped bunnies or goats around the halal slaughterhouses. Some neighborhoods had vibrant community gardens others had horse-back riding. In the biggest parks of the outer boroughs (parks many times the size of Central Park) there were places that felt really wild, desolate, and un-city-like. We sought out the places that surprised us.

We went to separate colleges– Miriam to Cornell University to study environmental engineering and Mark to Macalester College to study Urban Geography. Engineers are a competitive bunch, and, ultimately Miriam preferred the more cooperative and laid back culture she found in her agriculture classes. Cornell has just created an exciting new major called “Sustainable Agriculture” and Miriam found an amazing mentor, an inspiring student-run organic farm, and a community of local food advocates that were making real change at campus dining halls.

Drawn to fruit production (and consumption), one of her first entrepreneurial thoughts was “Ugly Fruit Farm,” a farm that could advocate and change consumers’ problematic ideas that fruit must be “picture perfect” and sprayed with whatever is necessary to make it look that way. Miriam saw the need for consumers, including herself, to grow some of their own fruit, to see what their home-grown fruit looked and tasted like.

As it turns out, it looks and tastes very different than the shiny, mealy Red Delicious apple at the store. It’s a wide wide world, if you look beyond the supermarket. She discovered huge paw paw fruits growing on campus She discovered real uglifruit (the citrus), Arctic Kiwi, Mulberry, Medlar– one thing led to another. She toured beautiful farms run by generous, contented farmers and she caught the bug.

This was the start of our path to farming. Our treks across New York City were fun and convenient, but the adventure Miriam wanted after college lay outside of cities, where there was space for an orchard, a horse, or a cow. While Miriam had been studying how farms work, I was busy studying how cities work. There was a bit of tension building, as our career paths didn’t seem compatible, at first. I took jobs with the NYC Parks Department and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Miriam worked a horticulture job as well as with Just Food, connecting farmers with city food pantries. It was clear that fresh, healthy, local food just wasn’t available or affordable in many parts of the city.

Eventually I was talked into putting my toe into very cold water: we left New York City and moved to a little town called Springs, on the far tip of Long Island, taking jobs as farm workers at a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm called Quail Hill Farm. We weeded and hoed the vegetable fields for a full season, and it was hard work, but fun and satisfying. It definitely beat sitting at a cubicle. We worked on two more small farms, both in coastal Maine, and both using draft horses. By 2013 we were still very green but, after 4 seasons as apprentices, we had learned enough about farming to know not to take another apprenticeship. In the absence of managerial positions, we dove into starting our own farm on leased land in the Hudson Valley.

We started Full Circus Farm in 2014, having made a match with landowners through the Columbia Land Conservancy. We got right to work building our business: establishing our LLC, painting signs, finding customers, building greenhouses, erecting fencing, finding a family cow to milk, draft horses and equipment, and plowing an acre to plant into.

The fear of promising one’s very first CSA customer a bountiful, or even middling, harvest, cannot be understated. We had never grown a field of veggies of our own, and never in this new spot. We knew very few people in the area. We both had serious cases of imposter syndrome, but pushed forward and tried not to be shy to ask for help when we needed it, which was often. We showed up to every community event we could– library events, historical society meetings, local church groups, and tried to both blend in and stand out in our very small town. After all, we needed to get to know a few people if we we planned to feed anyone.

Our business has changed little since that first, intimidating season. We still grow organic vegetables for wholesale and retail sale (tomatoes, garlic, herbs, greens), and we graft and grow organic fruit trees and plants of all types– apples, pears, asian pears, figs, raspberries, strawberries, etc.. Our nursery has outpaced our vegetables, and is the more profitable end of our business. We also have stayed true to the spirit of the farms in Maine where we learned real “homesteading” skills. We grow as much for our family as for market, and feeding ourselves well is as much a priority as turning a profit.

Today, 10 years down the road, we’ve built an amazing base of customers and friends. We feel really special ties to the community here in Pine Plains and Millerton. As young people we moved to a new place every year for 4 straight years, and when we landed in the Hudson Valley we were so ready to stay somewhere awhile and put down roots in a new community. Starting a forward-facing business can really anchor business owners in a community very quickly.

Today, we are ready to buy our own land– another terrifying/exhilarating adventure. The prospect of buying a farm in a spot so acutely unaffordable feels as daunting as any of the initial steps we took in our careers as farmers. But, with years of experience and a supportive community behind us, we are better prepared for adversity now than we’ve ever been. We’ve been here before, in this hard place. The experience of running any business, especially farming, is really defined by hitting roadblocks and navigating around them. We’re excited for the journey.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2023, our farm, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of others across New York and New England, flooded. It was not the first flood we’ve had here. Our farm lies at the base of a small mountain, tucked in next to a beautiful wetland. It’s teeming with life and the soil is rich bottomland, but it’s not a safe place to farm. Serious erosion upstream of our farm creates a devastating flash flooding when we have large rain events or prolonged downpours. These catastrophes are becoming extremely common due to climate change.

We woke up one July morning to our 4 year old’s question: “Why is there water there, Mommy?” She was looking out the window at a generous flood of thick brown water surrounding our buildings and crops. Our childrens’ bedroom, which we thought was safe, was leaking at the corners. The quaint, babbling brook that runs past our barn was roaring down the driveway and through our home. I made the mistake of opening the front door, quickly shutting it and cursing my stupidity. At least I was wearing muck boots, and it was already plenty wet inside.

Since that flood (our second major flood), we’ve dropped our CSA, and taken a year to pivot and revisit our business plan– something we should have done after we had kids but never made the time for (uh, we were busy). The CSA –Community Supported Agriculture– model involves the consumer sharing the risks of agriculture with the farmer. In a bountiful year, customers get more, in a less fortunate season, they get less. In this case, the likelihood of another season-ending flood felt like an unreasonable amount of risk to ask our customers to share with us.

We’ve switched to using more wholesale outlets and are considering a Seedling CSA– in which we help our customers source plants, plugs, seeds and tools to make their own gardening efforts easier and more fruitful. The knowledge we can share with our customers is now our greatest and likely our most profitable offering. It’s not easy to find a gardening mentor– someone who you can pick up the phone and consult with when you’re frustrated by a pest or disease affecting your crops. It’s a niche we may explore and find that it suits us and serves our customers as well. It certainly furthers our goals of helping people eat healthy, local food. Growing in their own backyard is even better than us growing their food in our field.

We also have started to incorporate pruning fruit trees and consulting on people’s gardens and farms into our business. Niche services such as fruit tree pruning are simply worth more than, literally, small potatoes. We grow beautiful, local, organic potatoes, but, as they phrase indicates, they aren’t worth so much, and small growers like us don’t produce them very efficiently. It’s tough when your values and dreams run up against an economy built on commodification. As a small business owner, you have to be nimble and willing to change plans when your gut and your profit-loss statement are in agreement that part of your enterprise isn’t making sense. We still grow potatoes– just a small amount for ourselves. And I’m quite happy with that. I also love pruning fruit trees and enjoy being paid very fairly for my pruning work all winter. I’m happy with that too.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Word of mouth, and building strong relationships with our customers has been the only strategy we’ve put great effort into. We don’t do magazine ads, we put very little effort into social media or website updates. We are a little old-fashioned, and we’re honest with ourselves about that. We recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and maybe one day we’ll have a profitable enough business that we’ll choose to hire folks to help us with the marketing pieces that we don’t enjoy as much (like setting up an online store, or being more active on social media).

Pouring a lot of energy into customer relationships has been very effective for us. We are a tiny business in a tiny town– we give a lot of hugs, we really listen to folks, and we really share what we’re going through as well. We try to be as open and honest and generous as we possible can. We really rely on people liking what we’re doing, appreciating our approach to land stewardship, animal husbandry, and food production, and wanting the experience of knowing where their food comes from in a much more personal way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fullcircusfarm.wordpress.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fullcircusfarm/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fullcircusfarm/

Image Credits

Peter Pierce photo credit for photo of Mark and Miriam posing together in the vegetable field