Greenhouse/Farm
Ellen Talmage was in heaven - in her office, in her dusty overalls, on the phone with a client - when a worker peeked in and whispered a warning.
"There are some people outside who want to speak to you," she told Talmage, worry evident in her voice. "They're wearing suits."
Talmage got off the phone and strode to the door to confront her visitors. "Boys, you've gotta lose those three-piece suits," she told them. "You're on a farm. If you wear those suits, people are going to think we're being audited."
In a sense, Talmage's company - H.R. Talamage & Son, a farm enterprise whose roots run deep in Riverhead - was being audited by the suits, who came from George S. May International, a Chicago management consultant. They were there to tell the Talmage family how to restructure its business so it would survive another few centuries.
The Talmages have been on Long Island since 1640. Ellen's branch of the family has been operating Friar's Head Farm, named for a headland on the property's Long Island South shoreline, since 1850.
The past is everywhere at Friar's Head, in the 400 acres of broad fields and in the cluster of the family's houses. The future stands on four acres at the corner of Sound and Horton Avenues, where the Talmages have their greenhouses.
There are many other greenhouses in the area, all part of a growing business that is changing the face and fortune of Long Island farming.
Twenty-five years ago, Suffolk had 34,000 acres of potato fields and about 2.5 million square feet of greenhouses. Today, there are about 6,000 acres in potatoes and 15 million square feet under glass, said Ralph Freeman, floriculture specialist with the Cornell Cooperative Extension office in Riverhead.
Long Island accounts for more than half of the greenhouse and nursery stock produced in the state, with sales having risen from $42 million in 1982 to more than $125 million.
The nurseries luxuriate in a market that is as nurturing as a greenhouse climate. Long Island alone absorbs fully 80 percent of the plants its nurseries produce, Freeman said. The Talmages send their product as far south as southern New Jersey, as far north as southern Maine. "We're concentrated in markets along the shore," said Henry Talmage, Ellen's brother. "That's where the money is."
He does not share the common view that agriculture, either indoor or outdoor, is doomed here. "Everyone's going off into their own thing," he said. "Specialty vegetables, greenhouses, horses, vineyards, cut flowers. There's not much farmland out here lying idle. People are using the land."
Long Island is a sunny place with a mild climate, sitting in the heart of a wealthy region that provides a good market for its products. "The sunniest place in New York State is Cutchogue," Talmage said. "We have higher transportation costs and we pay more for electricity. But at least we have people to sell our products to."
Farming, like any business, has had to change to survive, as the Talmage farm's history shows. Friar's Head was born of adversity and survived by adapting. "My great-great grandfather bought it on the steps of the county courthouse, at auction, in 1850," Henry Talmage said. "We've been here since."
For most of those years, the main crop was potatoes. When places with cheaper land and less need of irrigation began competing, the Talmages supplemented the potato crop with cut flowers, which they shipped to the 28th Street Flower Market in New York City. "We had 15 acres in bulb," Henry Talmage said. "All daffodils."
When foreign cut flowers flooded the local markets in the late 1950s, the Talmages switched to greenhouse tomatoes - until oil-price increases made it too costly to heat the greenhouses. "My brother Bill got out of college in 1978," Henry said. "My cousin Bruce got out in 1980. They both came back to the farm. Bill got us back into the flower business. We had the greenhouses. We took the tomatoes out and started growing foliage plants and geraniums." At about the same time, they stopped growing potatoes; most of the Friar's Head fields are now leased to a sod farmer.
At first, as the Talmages made the rounds of the region's nurseries with truckloads of geraniums, the greenhouse strategy produced only middling results. Then the Talmages signed on as a licensee of Oglevee Ltd., a Pennsylvania farm that had been developing and selling geraniums since the 1950s.
"Just like Kentucky Fried Chicken," said Henry Talmage. "We own the buildings. They do all the sales and marketing. Oglevee sells through brokers. We commit on how many plants per week we will provide.
"We have about 58,000 stock plants," Talmage said. "We plant them in summer in the greenhouses. Through the winter and spring, we break off cuttings and propagate them. We sell them from September through the end of April to wholesalers, who sell them to garden centers. We root about 25 milliion geranium cuttings a year." In the spring, they also sell off the stock plants, and prepare to repeat the cycle.
Oglevee's also supplies geranium cuttings to Talmage; these come from as far afield a Mexico. At peak season, Talmage picks up 180,000 Mexican cuttings per week from Kennedy Airport. The Talmages also produce poinsettias under a similar arrangement with a California company that airships about 300,000 cuttings for propagation during the summer months.
H.R. Talmage is also diversifying to moving strongly into New Guinea impatiens - big, showy cousins of the garden-variety impatiens that border many a suburban driveway.
Until the management consultants came in last spring, much of this growth and diversification was haphazard. H.R. Talmage is a partnership. The partners are Henry and Ellen's father, John; their uncle, Nat; their older brother, Bill; and their cousin, Bruce. Henry and Ellen, along with another cousin, Doug, are managers.
There had been some division of responsibility - Doug handled transportation, Bruce handled the billing and business systems - but much of H.R. Talmage's operations reflected the enthusiasms of various Talmages rather than those of the marketplace. Henry ran the geranium business. Ellen started a line of perennial plants, which she ran as a fiefdom.
"The way the business evolved was, one person would have an idea and would go and do it," she said. "When I got out of Cornell, I didn't think I necessarily wanted to go to work for my brother. So I started my perennials business on a bare piece of ground."
That was 13 years ago, and the business prospered. Enthusiasm drove Ellen to add more and more plants; this year's catalog had about 1,500 varieties, including a number of native wild plants, such as beach grass, that are used to restore natural landscapes.
Then came the management consultants, who shed their suits but not their critical faculties for the weeks they were on the farm. The team leader was blunt with Ellen, saying, "This farm is not here to support your horticultural habits."
So these days, Henry is director of operations and Ellen is director of marketing. Bill is director of corporate development, charged with finding new lines of business. Doug is responsible for transportation and buildings. Bruce is director of finance and administration.
Next year's perennial list will be pared down to the best-selling 850 or so varieties, and Ellen will surrender their day-to-day care to staffers while she takes to the road to attend trade shows.
When she comes back to the farm, it will be to an office next to Henry's, not to her beloved office among the perennials.
"When I lived in my perennial office, people would come in to chat," she said. "I would never tell them to leave." The consultant strongly advised her to move to the main office, which she did. She still visits her old headquarters, she said, "but I go there with a mission now."
Change hasn't been a pleasure, but Ellen Talmage is convinced it is necessary. "I want this business to go for another five generations," she said. "And this is going to help."
