New City doesn't have a restaurant with a forty-seat communal table, a wine pairing menu, and a guest chef flown in for the night. What it has instead is Cropsey Community Farm, a working vegetable operation at 220 South Little Tor Road, and this summer the farm is doing something no restaurant in town is doing: selling out multi-course dinners days in advance, under a historic red barn, with named chefs from outside restaurants taking turns at the stove.
If you've lived in New City for more than a season, you already know the farm exists. What you may not know is that the organization running it is barely a year old, and that fact explains a lot about why the calendar suddenly looks like this.
A New Operator Behind an Old Barn
Cropsey's land itself has been protected since 2006, when Rockland County and the Town of Clarkstown jointly purchased the 25-acre property on South Little Tor Road through the county's Open Space Acquisition Program to keep it out of developers' hands. For nearly two decades, the nonprofit Rockland Farm Alliance ran the farm day to day. That ended in December 2024, when the Alliance dissolved amid a dispute between its staff and board, leaving the county to scramble for a replacement operator.
By March 2025, the county had awarded a new one-year, $75,000 contract to a freshly formed nonprofit, the Rockland Community Farm Network, led by Sue Ferreri, the Alliance's former executive director. Ferreri had spent years doing retail turnaround work for brands like lululemon and Equinox before she took over the farm, and that background shows in how deliberately this year's programming has been built. As she put it in a recent Hudson Valley Magazine profile, "All of our events have an education and food element."
That framing matters if you're trying to understand why a vegetable farm is hosting ticketed dinners instead of just selling tomatoes at a stand. The dinners aren't a side hustle bolted onto a farm. They're the point, alongside the produce, the camp, and the workshops. Everything on the calendar is built to put people in the field or under the barn roof, not just to move product.
Two Chefs, One Field, Six Weeks
The clearest evidence of that shift is the farm's dinner series, which this summer has run on a tight, fast-selling schedule.
| Date | Event | Chef | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 10 | Lobster Feast at the Farm | Jason Ungar (Jason's Kitchen) | Whole Maine lobster, seafood boil, wine pairings, communal tables |
| July 30 | Paella Party at the Farm | Alberto Salas (Paella Party CT) | Tableside paella preparation, empanadas, farm-made sangria |
| August 20 | Farm-to-Table Dinner Under the Stars | Jason Ungar (Jason's Kitchen) | Guided farm tour, four-course seasonal tasting menu with wine pairings |
Both of July's dinners are already behind us as of this writing, and Ungar returns for a second turn at the farm on August 20, this time for a four-course tasting menu that opens with a guided tour of the fields the produce came from. The farm has also drawn other recognizable names in past seasons, including three-time Chopped Champion Chef Chris Holland of Kantina in Sparkill. The Paella Party listing noted registration would close early or sell out, whichever came first, and the Lobster Feast listing carried the same warning. If you're the kind of resident who waits until the week of to book, this is not that kind of reservation.
What makes the model work is the setting itself. These aren't restaurant dinners dressed up outdoors. Guests get a guided walk through the fields where the night's vegetables were picked, then sit down at long tables as the sun sets over the property. It's a format that a conventional restaurant can't easily replicate, because a conventional restaurant doesn't have the field.
What You Can Buy Without a Reservation
Not everything at Cropsey requires advance planning. The farm runs a weekly stand stocked with what it grows on site, including more than 20 varieties of tomatoes, alongside pasta, jams, dairy, eggs, meat, and other goods sourced locally. A CSA share is also available for residents who want a season's worth of produce without thinking about it week to week.
The U-Pick fields are the part most likely to surprise a longtime resident who's only ever driven past. The flower field has grown to include hundreds of varieties, and the strawberry and blueberry patch has a specific origin: second graders from two nearby Rockland County school districts planted close to 4,000 bushes there as part of a science curriculum, and the fruit is now available for anyone to pick, including the students who put it in the ground.
The Programming Between the Big Nights
Between the headline dinners, the calendar fills in with smaller, recurring events that don't need a reservation booked weeks out. Farm Animal Yoga sessions let visitors combine a class with time around the farm's animals, followed by browsing at the Cropsey Farm Market. Sip and Stem pairs flower arranging with a drink in hand. Limoncello-making workshops run seasonally. And Bunco at the Barn, a dice-game fundraiser with wine, a signature cocktail, and charcuterie, is pitched as low-stakes and beginner-friendly, no prior experience required.
For families, the farm also runs a Junior Farmers' summer day camp for kids ages five to ten, a program written directly into RCFN's county contract. This year's camp runs six weekly sessions from July 6 through August 14, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at $485 per child per week, with a different theme each week and the option to register for one week or the full run. Its final session wraps up this week.
Two Farms, One Contract
The same March 2025 contract that put Rockland Community Farm Network in charge of Cropsey also handed it a second property: DePew Farm, a 32-acre parcel at 101 Old Route 304 with a sandstone farmhouse dating to the 1700s. Rockland County had purchased DePew Farm in November 2024 for $2.9 million, using the same Open Space Acquisition Program that preserved Cropsey back in 2006, and the county folded both properties into RCFN's single farming and public-programming contract.
That's a different story than a nonprofit simply outgrowing its barn. It means one young organization, operating on a one-year public contract, is now responsible for two working farms in New City rather than one, with room to grow U-Pick fields, camp sessions, and the dinner series across double the acreage in future seasons, assuming the county renews.
Book Ahead
If there's one thing worth taking from a season at Cropsey, it's that the farm's calendar now runs less like a produce schedule and more like a small venue's box office. The tomatoes and the CSA shares will still be there if you show up unannounced on a Saturday. The chef dinners will not wait for you.
For residents who want the farm-to-table experience without the scramble, the practical move is to follow the Rockland Community Farm Network's event page directly and set a reminder when a new dinner date is announced. The farm has shown a pattern of naming a chef, opening registration, and closing it within days. Knowing that pattern is the only real edge a New City resident has.
If you're settled into New City and just looking for the next reason to get outside this month, Cropsey is it. And if a season of farm dinners and quiet weekends has you thinking more seriously about what your own property here is worth, or what else the neighborhood has to offer beyond one very good barn, Jacqueline Vasquez is always glad to talk through it. Let's connect, get your home valuation, or set up a buyer consultation whenever the timing feels right.