Why This big apple Restaurant Chain Is buying Its personal Farm

through subsequent yr, should you happen to have lunch at Dig lodge—a series of fast casual eating places in ny—the kale or Brussels sprouts on your plate may well be more than just local. it would have been grown on the chain’s personal upstate farm.

it’s the next step within the evolution of a series that calls itself “farm to counter,” serving the same native, organic elements as more upscale farm-to-desk restaurants, but at lunch counter costs. A handful of wonderful dining eating places personal their own farms—equivalent to Primo in Maine, Blue Hill in the Hudson Valley, or, quickly, the legendary Noma in Copenhagen, which is turning itself into an city farm. however Dig motel is also the first fast casual chain to do the identical thing. [Editor’s word: Blue Hill’s farm is owned through a separate nonprofit, the Stone Barns heart, that partners with them.]

Dig motel plans to use its farm largely as a “residing lab” to coach its cooks and to experiment with natural agricultural techniques and aquaculture in a greenhouse.

“we would actually love to develop our personal meals. that is ultimate control—your personal strategies, the way you think about things like crop rotation. but we’re never going to have a farm sufficiently big to reinforce what i would imagine our somewhat lofty growth goals,” says Adam Eskin, founding father of Dig hotel. “you have to have a supply chain for that.”

Dig lodge, which already has eleven locations in long island, plans to open 5 to 7 extra restaurants in 2016, together with one in Boston. whereas the brand new farm, planned for 50 to a hundred acres, will lend a hand provide these restaurants, the corporate desires (and needs) to keep working with the other local farms it already companions with. last year, the eating places used just about 250,000 pounds of kale, greater than it could have the ability to develop itself.

“We’re dedicated to working with our farm partners and people relationships that we have based. We’re still dedicated to purchasing carrots, and sweet potatoes, and Brussels sprouts,” says Taylor Lanzet, Dig motel’s sustainability coordinator. “which is now not going to change. but now we’ll set up ourselves in now not most effective figuring out what they do, and what their daily looks like in how they provide greens for us, but in addition to be a mover and shaker in changing what the farm-to-table conversation can seem like.”

The farm will experiment with totally different varieties of heirloom seeds, rotational and companion planting, and different organic farming methods. cooks and cooks—who’re educated to prepare dinner the whole lot from scratch, in contrast to cooks at traditional quick meals joints—will seek advice from the farm in order that they consider precisely how everything on the menu grows and to get concept for brand new dishes.

“it is to say, why do not we deliver all of our cooks and all of our chefs into a bodily environment that’s faraway from the restaurant and far from what will also be more or less the crazy surroundings of every day serving of shoppers—and produce them out to the sector and farms,” says Eskin. “Let’s get them to take note and examine and bodily have fun with the entire nuances around how the food’s if truth be told grown.”

the corporate is at the moment in search of the precise vicinity for the farm, someplace in upstate ny. “it’s truly essential that it is available to our home base in NY city,” says Lanzet. “that implies if we wish to invite our cooks and our cooks up, we want it to be two hours max faraway from them.”

The restaurant already sends its chefs on farm excursions of suppliers, however, with a farm of its personal, it’s going to be that you can imagine for longer, more in-depth visits and training. they’re also bearing in mind the possibility of web hosting dinners at the farm, or farm tours, for the skin world.

“this is a method to carry folks together, convey them into the dialog, and actually have it act as type of a cornerstone for building this community around how we take into consideration food,” Eskin says.

They plan to buy the farm this yr and harvest their first plants in 2017.