Small-Scale Farmer Brings Free-Range Meats to Harrison

The Pepsico Farmers Market features vendors bringing all types of fresh, locally produced foods. From beets to sour cream to fresh baked breads, the market also offers a variety of all-natural meat products from Northwind Farms.

Richie Biezynski, owner of Northwind Farms, decided to take a leap and make a permanent move from Queens to Tivoli in 1981 to pursue his dream of becoming a farmer.

He now travels to Harrison once a week, often with his wife, to sell sausages, whole chickens and custom orders ready for pick-up at the town's first farmers market.

The farm has more than 200 cows and pigs, and thousands of chickens, turkeys, guinea hens, ducks, rabbits, goats, lambs and cornish hens.

But unlike most of the meat you find in the grocery store, Biezynski treats his stock with compassion.

"I love animals. The animals come first," he said.

Biezynski's lifelong passion both for farming and animals is exemplified in how his livestock are raised on a free range and how they eventually make it to Harrison's farmers market and to the dinner plates of residents.

Biezynski recently explained to Patch the difference between the cultivation of chickens at Northwind Farms compared to large-scale, mass-produced farms that contract with grocery stores.

Biezynski explained that commerical farms decrease their feed costs by injecting young chickens with growth hormones.

A large-scale production could have 800,000 to 900,000 chickens in a flock and, by using hormones so the chickens are the size of a nine-week-old at only seven weeks, the farm is saving on two weeks worth of feed.

For nearly one million chickens, that can be a substantial amount of money, Biezynski said.

At Northwind Farms, animals are treated much more humanely. They're free to roam the grounds, eat feed free of herbicides, and are never subject to growth hormones.

While you may be paying slightly more per pound for a chicken than at the grocery store, the benefits of buying local, eating hormone-free chicken, and supporting New York State business seem to outweight the monetary cost.

With 29 years in the business of farming livestock, Biezynski predicts changes in the way large-scale poultry is produced. He said that companies, facing increased costs for transportation and feed, would save money by outsourcing to China.

Outsourcing meat production though, could be detrimental both for consumers' health and palates.

"The further you are from your source, the less likely you are to be getting what you think you're getting," Biezynski said, noting that consumers currently don't have any way of knowing the origin of grocery store meats.

"The place of origin should be labelled," he said.

But on a package of ground beef, smoked meat, or turkey from Northwind Farms, no country of origin packaging is necessary, since consumers can rest assured their meat came from just 95 miles away on a free-range farm in the northern Hudson Valley.

The Pepsico Farmers Market is held from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. every Tuesday until November at 800 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, just down the street from the entrances to the Pepsico Corporate Headquarters and Purchase College.