For over a century, the Hamptons have been known as a summer escape for the American affluent, a bucolic dream of old money, wood-shingled estates and white linen wardrobes. The farmers hocking their wares at roadside stands are staples in this vision of the South Fork, harkening back to when its primary industry and identity was agrarian. Land was for growing things, not for parcelling into multi-million-dollar spec homes.
“It’s this prized Americana vibe of farmstand culture here, it is unlike anywhere else in the country,” Katie Baldwin, a farmer and co-founder of Amagansett farm Amber Waves, said. “People have told me, ‘I moved to Amagansett for Amber Waves.’”
Baldwin and her co-founder Amanda Merrow’s farm is a household name 17 years into farming, their trucker hats considered a status symbol with a certain Manhattan set. They’re not alone — Balsam Farms in Amagansett, Milk Pail in Water Mill, Pike Farm in Sagaponack and Round Swamp Farm, with shops in Bridgehampton, East Hampton and Montauk, have all built cult-like followings among the rich, the famous and the influencers. Produce grown in the well-drained glacial soil fills their baskets, alongside prepared foods whose prices seem not to have ceilings.
(In the case of Round Swamp, former Real Housewives of New York star Bethenny Frankel, who recently sold her Bridgehampton home for $5.2 million, has racked up millions of views on TikTok just for raving about the farm’s chicken salad.)
At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s a rare level of celebrity for farmstands.
That renown is in part thanks to prices that make most people gawk — a $30 two-quart container of berries, $120 lobster salad and $400 melons.
“People love farm field views.”
“It’s hard to read that news coverage,” Merrow said. “Even if it looks easy, everyone is paddling like hell underneath.”
In fact, once the economics come into focus, $400 barely seems enough for melon in a place where billionaires buy dirt for millions. Farms have to sell enough product in the mad dash from Memorial Day to Labor Day to sustain them through the rest of the year, and they have to do this on what you’d think would be some of the most expensive land in the country.
Yet over four decades, farmers, conservation advocates, local governments and private citizens have banded together to create extreme land use restrictions that effectively devalue land to the point where it remains affordable to farmers and unappealing to anyone else. This, in turn, restricts the supply of homes and inflates values of properties adjacent to protected farmland. It’s no silver bullet, but the careful honing of development code has protected the pastoral fantasy of the Hamptons, and the supply of expensive local strawberries.
The close view of how it all works is much less appealing than the displays of blueberries and heirloom tomatoes that draw the fans in.
“A lot of times when I talk about this, people’s eyes glaze over,” said Merrow. “It’s how we exist out here.”
Fallow fields
Lots of farmers have to navigate rising housing costs, labor costs, general economic uncertainty and a radical shift in the agricultural business. Bad weather or a bad crop could make the business go haywire. It is all high-risk — to tend the fields is to walk a tightrope.
But the biggest challenge in the South Fork is real estate.
As American wealth has grown, particularly in New York City, so too has the demand for homes in the Hamptons.
Property values have never been higher on the East End. Urban flight during the pandemic sent the market into a frenzy, and while it eventually mellowed, the new floor for pricing stayed. In January, Southampton’s 4-acre La Dune estate at 366 and 376 Gin Lane sold at auction for $88.5 million. In February, an oceanfront estate at 370 and 372 Further Lane in Amagansett sold for $70 million.
That’s not quite in budget for an upstart farmer. But even on the lower end, land in the Hamptons is out of reach. According to LandSearch, the average asking price for an acre of undeveloped land in East Hampton is $2.4 million. The average price for an acre of farmland in New York state is $2,525, according to AcreTrader, a farmland investment platform.
To make land affordable for the farmers, the towns of Southampton and East Hampton and conservation groups like the Peconic Land Trust devised a set of tools to effectively strip the value from the earth. It included a push to buy development rights for land, which restricts building on properties.
The purchases are financed with the Peconic Bay Transfer Tax, a 2 percent tax on real estate transactions that funnels directly into the Community Preservation Fund, or CPF. The booming real estate market means there’s plenty of cash on hand.
“East Hampton is fortunate to have high liquidity,” Merrow said. In addition to running Amber Waves, she sits on the board of the Peconic Land Trust and East Hampton’s CPF Advisory Board. “The town has a lot of power to move quickly.”
With the funding, East Hampton closed one of the largest non-commercial deals of 2024, dropping $56 million on 30 acres at 66 Wainscott Main Street from billionaire beauty heir Ronald Lauder.
Lauder had bought the land for $66 million in 2021 with the intention of preventing development. While land preservation is a lofty goal, it’s also often a self-serving one. Kieran Brew, an agent with Serhant, said homes adjacent to agricultural reserves can see anywhere from a 15 to 20 percent premium.
“People love farm field views,” he said. Lauder owns a home adjacent to the Wainscott Main Street parcel, according to published reports.
No matter the reason, private citizens looking to preserve land are a boon to farmers, the town and the trust. But plenty of sellers eschew altruism in favor of the best offer. That’s where the towns run into trouble, as it can’t legally pay more than the appraised value.
“Properties change hands for more than appraised value all the time,” Merrow said. “If you have a family who wants to sell to the highest bidder, then it could be the town in competition with a developer.”
In cases where the town comes up short, the trust and private donors step in. That’s how the trust pulled off the $48 million purchase of 27 acres of Topping Farm in Bridgehampton last year, according to published reports. The land at 181 and 305 Halsey Lane was listed for $70 million in 2023, and marketed as a development site for up to eight homes.
The trust cobbled together $18 million of donations, including from former Coach CEO Lew Frankfort, to buy the tracts, and Southampton’s CPF contributed $30 million to buy the development rights. As part of the deal, the restrictions on the land go beyond simply “no mansions.” It cannot be utilized as a tree farm, horse farm or a winery, and it cannot sit fallow. This is what’s known as an affirmative farming covenant, and it’s how the towns and trust are keeping farmland out of private estates.
Sharpening the tools
The affirmative farming covenant is the final boss of land use restrictions. It ensures that the land will produce food in perpetuity, and is coupled with protections that restrict the resale value. Between the mandate to farm and the knee-capped price growth, it is one of the only ways to make acreage in the Hamptons unappealing to the uber-rich seasonal residents.
It also finally brings down the price per acre to within reach of farmers, according to John v.H. Halsey, the founder and president of the Peconic Land Trust. In the case of the Topping Farm land, the trust is working on selling it to farmers from its apprenticeship program for $26,000 an acre, Halsey confirmed, down from the $1.8 million an acre the trust paid.
The covenant emerged as a response to an unpredicted outcome of the Hamptons’ first efforts to preserve farmland. Even with development restricted, wealthy owners shocked the farmers and the towns with how they used the parcels.
“We grow it, make it, bake it and sell it.”
“I can think of three baseball diamonds that are on ag reserves,” Halsey said. Private vineyards, equestrian facilities and sprawling lawns are allowed on protected land without an affirmative farming covenant. Halsey estimated protected land can sell for as much as $300,000 an acre, too much for a farmer but a bargain to nearly every other Hamptons buyer.
“They’re not bound by the economics of agriculture,” he said.
But as anyone in real estate knows, land is worth what a buyer is willing to pay.
“At the start of these conservation tools, there wasn’t foresight that there would be this market for land that you can’t even build on,” Merrow said. Very quickly, “the land trust and the towns started to see that land that was intended to be set aside for agriculture was leaving production, laying fallow.” No new homes, perhaps, but also no fertile fields.
Gone with the potatoes
Before everything was berries and lobster salad, the fields sprouted potatoes.
“In the ’80s, everything was potatoes,” Dan Heston, director of agricultural programs with the Peconic Land Trust said, explaining that Long Island has some of the best, most acidic soil for potato growing in the country. Forget Idaho: “The potatoes want to grow out here.”
Heston, a farmer, remembers when Long Island potato growers wholesaled their crop to large distributors, he said. But it got too expensive to ship the spuds out, and the business of farming was changing. Nationally, the number of farms has dropped from a peak of 6.8 million in 1935, to 1.9 million in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The American Farmland Trust estimates 2,000 acres of farmland are lost to non-agricultural uses every day. Baldwin sees the East End as a microcosm of the dire national portrait of American farming. Many family farms, including in the Hamptons, lose acreage to the federal inheritance tax every year.
“They don’t have a million dollars to pay in taxes,” Merrow said of local family farmers. “All of their wealth is in their farmland.”
To survive, Hamptons farmers have shifted their strategies.
“Maybe it’s desperation,” Heston said. “You get really clever.”
Their plans run the gamut from adding farmer’s markets or trying community-supported agriculture memberships where customers pre-pay for a share of the season’s yield. Other farmers have discovered that value-add products like cheese, baked goods, preserves and sauces are where the money can be made.
“We’re keeping the market in house,” Baldwin said. “We grow it, make it, bake it and sell it. It’s a more sustainable business model.”
They’re also picking fruit and vegetables higher on the price pyramid.
“People are transitioning into crops that have the highest value per acre,” Merrow said. “Cucumbers and baby greens and heirloom tomatoes — things that are beautiful and expensive.”
That’s the final piece of the puzzle, and the detail that inspired the headlines in the first place.
Farms in the Hamptons depend on patrons paying $25 for a bag of granola and $18 for a jar of local honey. And of course they’ll pay, especially after the millions of dollars spent by the town and donors to keep the farms around. Because the existence of the farms, with their cracking heirloom tomatoes set on worn wooden shelves, their pies coming out of the oven, is part of what makes this one of the most expensive luxury real estate markets in the country. Residents spend millions on homes just so that they can pop into the local farmstand on their way to the beach. It’s a luxury.
“The East End of Long Island has always been about the farms,” Trotter said. “People just want to preserve that.”
