Monday, April 28, 2025
Crossroads Farm at Grossman’s is a central part of the Malverne community, having played an integral part in the local history and economy. During the warmer seasons, the farm is a gathering place for locals, and during winter it closes to prepare the land for the next growing season of growing.
As the season-opening weekend, April 5 and 6, approaches, the Herald was invited to learn more about the farm, in between Hempstead and Ocean Avenue’s, and its operations.
Crossroads is a five-acre organic farm that practices sustainable regenerative farming techniques, such as using cover crops to naturally fertilize the soil. The public farm, which was purchased from the Grossman family by Nassau County in 2010, offers educational programs and volunteer opportunities as part of the Nassau Land Trust, a nonprofit working to conserve land across the county.
The farm store, which is open Tuesdays and Fridays from 1 to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., offers organic, locally grown products for sale.
Generations of the Grossman family have farmed the land. “It’s a bastion of life on Long Island from 150 years ago,” Operations Manager Michael D’Angelo said. “This land has never been touched — never been a building out there.”
“It’s a place of community engagement,” D’Angelo added. “To see how this place goes from being so quiet and then comes alive … When the farm store opens, and during the events, the stories we hear — 80-, 90-year-old people come tell us how their parents and grandparents would bring them here. You can’t find that anywhere, so it’s really just a gem of Long Island that we’re trying to reintroduce to people.”
“The community generates around the farm and within it,” Michael Alsheimer, a farm hand at Crossroads, said. “Seeing the kids come, watching them be a part of something I never got to be a part of growing up, it’s a great place.”
The farm is closed each January and February, as the staff prepares for the upcoming season. “The winter is really a moment for us to do a lot of capital improvements and projects on the building,” D’Angelo said. Inside, they schedule seed planting, prepare beds in the greenhouse, deep-clean the store, do maintenance work on their tractors. Outside, they prune the trees on the property to prepare for the spring bloom.
This year, workers built a new office in the farm store, and new picnic tables. They emphasized event planning this season, because community gatherings have grown smaller since the pandemic.
The farm will host a range of events this year, several of them multi-day activities. Beginning in May, there will be a food truck rally every Friday until August, and in June, the first Strawberry Festival is scheduled. Oktoberfest is celebrated in September.
“It started because we wanted to have community engagement,” Gabriella Carlo, the farm’s event planner, said. “A place where people go to relax and not feel stressed.”
On Apr. 5, the farm will celebrate opening day with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and throughout the weekend there will be food trucks, live music, hayrides and vendors as well as exhibitions where attendees can learn about, and sample, products made on the farm. Entry costs $15.
Crossroads works with several schools and community organizations on educational programs, including field trips on which students learn about farming and produce. “Thousands of kids come through the farm every spring, summer and fall,” D’Angelo said.
Each year the farm works with fourth-graders in the Valley Stream school district to make their own food. “We go to their classroom, they seed lettuce and we bring the lettuce back to keep in our greenhouse,” D’Angelo explained. “Then they come down to the farm in May-ish, plant the lettuce in the field, and then they come back in June and eat a salad.”
The farm also offers in-house programming for youth ages 4 through 14. Twice a week, kids have a chance to take part in farm activities. “When we have apples, they’ll make applesauce and apple tarts,” D’Angelo said. “They’ll go harvest in the fields and pick their own salad. The kids just can’t believe it — they’re like, ‘I thought stuff came with plastic wrappers on it.’ They can’t imagine you can just go pick it and eat it.”
Crossroads grows a range of crops that are sold in the store, from leafy greens in the spring to strawberries, corn, peppers, eggplant, and zucchini in the summer. Blacksmith’s Bread provides the farm with fresh sourdough bread, and other vendors sell their goods there. The store offers organic eggs, meat and dairy products, which are sourced from other local farms because Crossroads doesn’t currently have animals.
“We do as best as we can with the space, but we also work with other farms to help supplement,” D’Angelo said. “So we have a network of other Long Island farms, a couple of farms in the Hudson Valley area, and we’re able to barter and source from each other.”
“It’s a cooperative competition,” Alsheimer said, referring to Crossroads’ collaboration with other farmers in the region. “We have to help each other out.”
“Because there’s so few of us farmers, everyone takes care of each other. We all got each other’s backs,” D’Angelo added.
“We’ve totally gone through a revival in people caring where their food comes from and wanting to support local,” he said. He estimates that farm sold about 10,000 pounds of tomatoes last season — roughly two trucks’ full.
Crossroads has several initiatives to develop its community outreach. Each week it delivers 100 to 300 pounds of fresh, seasonal produce to Long Island Jewish Valley Stream hospital to be used in patients’ meals. It also provides farm-to-table ingredients for dishes served at Malverne’s Harvest House Tavern.
The farm’s staffers are local residents who are invested in the village’s success. “The health of the farm really mirrors the health of the community,” D’Angelo said. “When the farm is doing well, the community is doing well. It’s the heart of the community, but also the welcoming. You enter Malverne and it’s the first thing you see.”
“We’ve been working hard all winter, in the days where nobody’s here,” he said. “The opening is like a party for us, just to say that we’re open, come on down. For us, just sharing the farm with people, there’s nothing better.”
