The Museum as Edible Complex

We paid the teenage girl three dollars for the audio tour, slipped the little listening devices around our necks, and we were off to explore the place. This familiar scene could have played out at the Met or any other traditional museum, but instead we were about to tour the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a sort of living museum and monument to sustainable food production.

Approximately 30 miles away from New York City, and just north of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, the Stone Barns Center sits on 80 acres of property donated by David Rockefeller and his daughter, Peggy Dulany. The Center, which opened to the public on May 2, is set within Pocantico, the 4,000 acre country estate established by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

The focal point of the Center, amid a sweeping landscape of fields, woods, and gardens, is a complex of beautiful stone buildings built in the Norman style, dating from the 1930s. The buildings surround a wide courtyard that is entered through a dramatic, peaked archway. Directly across from the entrance is the restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, housed in a former cow barn. To the right is a café, also operated by Blue Hill. On the left, what was once the hay barn now serves as an educational center where lectures and workshops will be held. Two massive silos made of stone rise up just beyond the far end of the educational center.

We had dinner reservations at the restaurant, but we came a few hours early to explore the Center and the grounds. Before we started on the audio tour, we stopped into the café (also operated by Blue Hill), which sells soups, sandwiches, and snacks, as well as a selection of jarred seasonal vegetables and preserves. We sat outside, where there are tables in a long breezeway facing the courtyard, and cooled off with a cold, creamy asparagus soup and iced tea.

The tour has about thirteen stops. We were warned before we started that not everything narrated on the recording was yet in place, so we followed it loosely, exploring the grounds at our own pace and punching up codes for narration here and there.

The Center has plans to raise a variety of heritage breed and commercial livestock, including Berkshire pigs, Bourbon Red and White turkeys, Cotswold sheep, Rhode Island Red Cross laying hens, Cornish/White Rock Chickens, Holstein calves, and Simmental and White Park cattle.

The first animals we encountered were along the main drive as you first enter the Center’s grounds. Along the side of the road, behind an electric fence, a small flock of sheep gathered inside and around a modern-looking canopy shielding them from the sun. In the distance we made out some chickens.

As we walked on one of the dirt paths and spotted some cows grazing, the audio tour kicked in with a description of the philosophy of the Center’s livestock program, which is based on letting the animals roam free and feed on a “salad bar” of grass. As the pasture is slowly consumed, the animals are rotated to different areas on the farm to continue feeding.

Departing from the script, we ambled up a path behind the main outdoor growing fields over to the calving barn, eagerly anticipating a view of calves and “Mom.” “'Mom' is something called a mob feeder,” promised the Stone Barns Center Web site, “a 15-gallon barrel with nipples around the circumference. There are two placed in the pasture, where the calves can nurse.”

This sounded like a must-have photo opportunity, but to our dismay, not only was the barn blocked off with a “not open to the public” sign, but when we snuck over anyway for a closer look, there didn’t seem to be anything going on. When we got back to the Center, a member of the staff duly informed us that the calves had not yet arrived, but would be coming in the next couple of weeks.

Heading back towards the main complex, we passed through the courtyard again and then headed down to the greenhouse, which was one of the highlights of the visit. Located at the foot of a sloping hill below the main entrance of the Center, the greenhouse is a 22,000 square foot facility that is designed to grow up to 35 varieties of fresh produce. The soil was woven with strips of various shades of green, from bright green curly endive to darker baby arugula and huge blossom-like heads of radicchio with wide green leaves and purple veins.

It was near five o'clock, and this was starting to make us hungry. We wrapped up our tour here, returned our listening devices, and headed out to Tarrytown to kill some time before our dinner reservation. Coming soon, a report on our dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

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