Beakuency welcomes Kevin Clark and Dallas Houston of Rose Hill Farm, a family-owned pick-your-own apple orchard in Red Hook, NY. Rose Hill Farm takes the entirety of the property and its surrounding community into account when making decisions, and approaches the orchard as a complex ecosystem where every element is interconnected. To them, birds are indicators of ecological health that provide “eyes out in the orchard.”
They discuss their approaches at the farm and their work with the Farmer Ecologist Research Circle, an initiative of the Hudson Valley Farm Hub and the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, which studies and acts on topics related to on-farm ecology. They share how this collaboration has deepened their understanding of the bird, plant, and insect species present and helps them track changes in biodiversity over time so they can adjust their practices. Their insights help us see how, through collaboration and community, we can move away from a mindset of conflict, let go of the need for total control, and move toward integration and a reciprocal relationship with the world around us.
Farmer Ecologist Research Circle website
Research Circle’s Mapping Flowers, Watching Bugs, & Building Habitat: Rose Hill Farm Report
The Birds of Rose Hill, a report blog post by Will Yandik
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Principles (EPA website)
This interview was recorded on February 12th, 2026, and originally broadcasted on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7FM on February 28th, 2026. The interview and transcript have been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Transcript
Mayuko Fujino: Thank you so much for taking time today to do this interview with me.
Kevin Clark: Sure.
MF: Could you briefly introduce yourselves?
KC: Yes. I’m Kevin Clark, the orchard manager here at Rose Hill Farm.
Dallas Houston: I’m Dallas. I have been working here for five, six years now, on and off, and I’ve done just about every job on here. I’ve worked with the cidery. I’ve done a lot of stuff with the orchard itself, and I run the farm sale in the summer.
MF: Would you also introduce Rose Hill Farm itself?
KC: Rose Hill Farm is located in Red Hook, New York, in the mid Hudson Valley. The farm was established in 1798. So it has a long history, and it’s one of the things that I don’t know everything about. But on a daily basis, I’m thinking about what we’re doing in relation to the history of this land that we have the privilege of working on. It was in the same family, the Fraleigh family, for six generations, and then it was bought by another family at the end of 2015. And I came here in 2017.
We have apples, peaches, plums, cherries, blueberries, apricots, quince, medlar. We have 225 different varieties of apples. And all of the fruits we have, not that big of a number, but we have a lot of varieties of all the various fruits.
MF: I read about how you approach growing fruit, and there was a mention of holistic orchard management. Would you describe what the idea is?
KC: Sure. It’s a very broad term, holistic, and it’s used by many different people and groups in various ways. When I personally think of holistic orchard management, it’s taking the whole bit of the land into consideration when we’re making decisions: what to leave feral, what to do with this field, that field, etc. And it’s really taking into account the entirety of the property. One reason for that is, how we interact with this land here goes beyond the fence and we have neighbors and a community and the people that visit here. It’s much bigger than just us. How we interact and treat this land has broad, broad impacts.
MF: I learned from Will Yandik (Green Acres Farm) that tree fruits, especially apples, are among the hardest crops to grow organically. But your approach is to foster a diverse, nutrient rich environment by building levels of organic matter in the soil, promoting a rich fungal under-story for our trees, a quote from Rose Hill Ferment website, rather than applying synthetic fertilizers. What is it made of when you say rich fungal under-story, exactly? Are they dead trees, or fallen fruits, or mulch, or …?
DH: A lot of places will use herbicide to manage weed growth. Something you have to think about, especially because we open up the orchard to pick-your-own. So we have a lot of people walking out there, and we can’t let weeds grow as high as maybe some places that don’t have that. We have to manage that a little bit more precisely than a lot of places. Herbicide often is turned to, and you’ll see a desert-like looking floor around trees. That’s going to discourage a lot of what we’re talking about in the rich under-story. And that will create a cycle in which you have to fertilize because you’re not letting a lot go back to the soil around the trees, and you’re having to add a lot of fertilizer to make up for that.
Our management practices, as someone who’s been out there engaging with it, relies heavily on weed whackers letting what we’d whack remain there, break down and return to the soil. So it’s a bit of a labor intensive method, but it’s well worth it. As far as the fallen fruit, we try to pick that up mostly. And that is another strategy to manage disease and in turn we have to use less chemical management because fallen fruit can sometimes act as a vector for disease if left. And so that’s another thing that we try to go and do by hand as opposed to relying on chemicals to either dry out and kill any disease that may be in those fallen fruits or have to manage the diseases that come up.
So it’s a lot of personal touch out there to try to do things that would happen naturally that would encourage a rich soil, that would also encourage a rich interaction with mycorrhizal, you know, all sorts of networks there which you want to facilitate because that’s going to allow a lot of nutrients to get spread, all these things shared. So it turns into a lot of extra labor that’s well worth it. And when you’re out there doing it, I think you’re very aware of it. Those are kind of the methods that we use to foster that.
KC: I would just add on, not all the trees and bushes here get wood chips, but all of the younger stuff that we’ve planted here since 2018, we put wood chips underneath the trees that break down into organic matter and feed that cycle, the mycorrhizal cycle. We spend a lot of time doing that. One, it helps to suppress the weeds. Weeds, in quotation marks. I have the belief that all plants that come up out of the ground are there for a reason. They tell us something about the land or how we’re managing that land. And part of why I like the weed whacking process is, you know, we’re sending that plant back into the ground and there’s a reason for that.
When I’m looking at the health of an orchard or health of a tree or what have you, and it goes back to the use of the word holistic, it’s like you’re stepping back and looking at a – hate to say bird’s eye view, but – you’re looking at the whole cycle of things underground, working with the things above ground.
I’m looking for life, you know, and whether that’s the life of the plants, the life of the insects. Bird life. And I think more life on the farm — and that even goes to human life – it’s very important how we, as an orchard, interact with the land. When the public comes on the land too. It just brings life to the orchard, you know?
We collaborate with the Farmer Ecologist Research Circle. It’s really a great group. And this will be coming up on the third year of it, and usually have meetings in the winter. Conrad wrote a beautiful thing about what the circle is all about, kind of the goals of the Circle. But in essence, it is like farmers that are interested in ecology. And then the ecologists are looking for farms where they can do research on. And so we put together projects, and then Conrad and Claudia, Anne and Will do work during the growing season and then report back and give feedback. It’s really interesting. I mean, those people are incredibly smart and fascinating. Two seasons ago, Will did a pretty extensive bird survey here just to get a baseline of what plants and what insects, what birds are found at Rose Hill Farm.
There’s a website called research-circle.org. They put blogs together, and then many of their findings were published. Conrad and Claudia, just a couple weeks ago, finished the report. I’ve scanned through it, and it’s gonna take me sitting down for an extended period of time and with focus to dissect it. And then they’re gonna come and dissect it with a seer. And then off of that information, you can think more broadly about the land and what you want to do or not do with certain areas. I think there can be, like, very practical conclusions from those data sets.
One of the reasons why I like working with the Farmer-ecologist Research Circle, or going on bird walks, or master naturalists walking around with us, is learning to identify things. And I think the more we’re educated on naming and knowing how these creatures or plants, what they’re doing, it educates us on how we do what we do. And it’s this reciprocal relationship that’s happening between farmer and land and people on farms and animals and birds and plants on a farm. It’s just life, it’s all happening.
DH: When you go to an orchard that doesn’t manage things necessarily with biodiversity in mind or with keeping a healthy soil in mind, keeping the fungal life going, you won’t see much of anything other than the trees alive, a lot of times. Kevin, you’ve talked about going to some places and some orchards that manage more conventionally use herbicides, and you don’t really see many birds at all.
And while that maybe seems like a good thing to someone who would say, well, I don’t want the birds eating the fruit anyways, you’re kind of stuck in this cycle of you are having to play the role of Mother Nature, you are having to do these things that happen naturally by adding synthetic fertilizer, by doing these things.
The bird presence here would be significantly reduced if we were to use certain management methods that are common — or were more common — because it discourages all the things that he just talked about, which birds rely on. They are an indicator of a lot of things. They’re like having eyes out in the orchard. And if you’re willing to learn the lessons that we’re learning from Claudia, and from people like her who are trying to come here and do surveys, trying to teach us what these things mean that we see out there, and what they’re trying to tell us, there’s actually a lot to learn about the health of your orchard — lessons that I think people sometimes don’t take the time to learn, because X, Y and Z, there’s a lot of reasons. It’s a hard thing to do to manage an orchard.
But the birds, their presence tells you a lot about the health of things. Or even the presence of specific birds can tell you a lot. And if you’re able to take the time and learn what those things may be, you can actually benefit so much and learn so much about your orchard from that. And so, super grateful to have people like Claudia, who we’re working with, because that kind of invaluable information. And we’re still at the beginning stages of learning from these experts. But it’s remarkable every time you realize how much the insects and the birds, what they have to say, if you’re willing to actually listen.
MF: What birds do you get here, and why are they here?
KC: We saw the Bald Eagle this morning. I would say there’s a variety of birds. Sometimes on our bird walks, we’ve, in an hour, seen over 20 species of birds.
DH: What’s cool about the birds here is we have both year round birds that live here and we have migratory birds that just stop by. And for both of those, as far as the kinds of year-round, we get a lot. There’s a huge presence of woodpeckers, which obviously are going to be both stuff that we have to deal with because they’ll sometimes cause damage to the bark, like sapsuckers. But they’re also literally taking insects out of that tree. That’s something I’ve done myself. You have to sometimes remove an insect from a tree, you know, they’ll bore into the bark of a tree and cause trouble. And so, you have a woodpecker out there doing your job in some respects. Obviously it can go both directions.
We have hawks. There’s a kestrel overwinters here. We have a Northern Harrier that we’ve had a long relationship with. Pheasants, turkeys, all sorts of birds that are the same one that we see all year. So we know we have these kinds of permanent residents. And then there’s a stopover year after year for so many migratory birds. And I think it’s the more you see what you’re supposed to see, what’s supposed to be in the area, the better.
We see this huge spectrum of things that are supposed to be here this time of year. These are the migratory birds that are coming here this time of year. And they choose to come here, they choose to make this a stop, which, I would consider a privilege, because they have a lot of options. And they have a long journey and it’s a very hard life, you know. So they give a lot to us. And we try to give a lot back to them. I’m a birder, I love birds, so it’s a pleasure just to see them here. But it’s not just because they’re beautiful that we love to see them here.
MF: Some of those birds that you just mentioned seem to feed on the ground a lot. It must have something to do with the way you manage the ground?
KC: Sure. And one reason we really appreciate the hawks and those types of birds is that voles can be a real problem in orchards.
MF: Do they chew on trees?
KC: Yeah, they eat the bark and can girdle the tree and kill the tree. And we rarely see damage from voles. And I think a big credit of that is predatory birds eating them.
MF: I learned in a report by the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences Research and Extension programs that American crows, House Finch and European Starlings are common problems for orchards. Are they around your farm a lot as well?
KC: Yes. And our philosophy has been – birds do like, say the blueberries, take a fair percentage of blueberries. And when we go down to the blueberries, a lot of times we hear the birds on the perimeter almost angry that we’re in their food. You know, it’s quite comical. And even the last couple years, we’ve seen damage on the peaches and the plums, we’ve been able to balance, being able to have the birds. At some point, we may entertain bird exclusion netting over certain areas. It wouldn’t be the whole thing, but they can do quite a bit of damage. They love cherries, sweet cherries. And I’ve been out there in the evening and just see them rise out of the tree, and you can’t even begin to count how many. And that’s how you know the fruit’s ripe. (laughs)
DH: They know, yeah. They wait until it’s perfectly ripe and then they have some. Yeah, we have quite a bit of a starling presence here. I see them every day, out there right now, too. They’re actually on the ground, plucking any fruit that we left up. They’re trying to get to that along with the deer. We always assume we’re going to lose some of the birds, and we don’t want to lose too much, but we’re okay with that on some level, especially because — and this kind of goes back to the word “holistic” — the cider operation we have allows us to use damaged fruit. Even if there’s a little bit of damage on the fruit, it’s not gone to waste. We’ll harvest that and we’ll put it into our cider. Ultimately nothing goes to waste in that way. And so that’s reassuring.
MF: Do you think having this biodiversity management in your land somehow controls the starlings or crow population a bit? On some farms, you see a massive flock of starlings.
KC: Don’t see things in excess. I’ve never seen starlings in huge, huge flocks of them.
DH: Yeah. Not hundreds. You know, we’ll see groups of 30 to 50. You know, right now there’s a nice group that’s hanging out. That’s about 20 to 30 starlings that I’ll see on a daily basis. They’ll start chattering. But I think the diversity of the birds that we have actually helps keep that in ring because we have these hawks that are present, we have these larger birds that are present. They’re fighting their own battles, that we don’t even know about, with each other. But this is their domain in a lot of ways. And so no one thing can take over. And I think that’s an important balance. That balance will strike itself. We don’t have to force that. As we nurture the land, we try to leave a lot of areas unfarmed. That balance should strike itself. That, I think, is kind of what you’re getting at a little bit. I think if you had a situation in which you didn’t have birds of prey present, you didn’t have a large diversity of birds, you might have an overpopulation of starlings. They might come in and say, this is a great place for us. We don’t have to worry about anything. We’re not in any kind of territory. So I think, absolutely, it keeps things in check and the balance.
The balance that strikes, you know, we don’t have to force any balance. The balance that exists in the world happens here, because we let it happen here. And I think that is a huge factor, definitely.
KC: Owls. I forgot we have owls.
MF: Barred owls? What kind of owls?
DH: Definitely Barred. We have a master birder who we’re friends with, who comes and blesses us with a lot of knowledge. I think Screech Owls were mentioned.
MF: I read somewhere else about hummingbirds, that they can eat the insect that comes specifically to blueberries, bats and hummingbirds.
KC: We see a lot of hummingbirds, bats here in the evening. There was actually a hummingbird visiting regularly outside the farm stand for quite a while.
MF: So they must be benefiting from those insect populations.
DH: Absolutely, yeah. We have amazing displays of Barn Swallows. We’ll have an incredible presence of swallows in the summer that will feed over certain blocks of trees. And they’ll be, I don’t know, it’s hard to even know the number. It’s an incredible thing to watch. They’re getting all these insects that are above the trees they’re feeding. And those insects are there because of the rich plant matter that we’ve cultivated. And it helps us too, because you’re getting mosquitoes, they’re getting all sorts of things. So it’s this thing that continues to benefit. And that’s one of my favorite things to watch every summer. It is those displays of just incredible feats that provide a lot of pleasure too. But definitely, like the hummingbirds, we have yearly visitors that return that are just like, so incredible to see.
MF: There was a mention on the website that the Rose Hill Farm decided to adopt a practice that promotes biodiversity at one point in its history. I’ve been feeling like it’s kind of easy to forget talking about why, because we think, like, why not? But when you talk to people out there who are not necessarily interested, they don’t share that same feeling of why we have to do this. Why do you do things the way you do?
KC: I think the owners and us, we wanted to nurture and manage the land as best as possible, Want to honor the land, honor the land’s history, honor the people that took care of the land before us and also, you know, looking forward as well if we’re doing the best we can on any given day and year and whatnot. It all adds up, and will serve the current community as well as the future generations. Hopefully that there will be a place, you know, it’s kind of this continuum of wanting to, not just have a production farm, but have a piece of land that has production on it. But we’re also nurturing and taking care of in a way that encourages biodiversity, encourages people to come here taking care of it the best we can.
In 2018, we had full intention of managing the farm and becoming an organically certified farm for all the fruits. We cut out synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, cold turkey, 100%. In that year, in some sense it was an epic failure. We learned a tremendous amount because, any insect infestation or any disease, we saw everything here and in abundance. Cedar, apple rust, apple scab, leaf blotch, all the leaf diseases. By fall, a good percentage of the orchard was defoliated, the fruit was rotten, anything that remained was small. And we ended up closing early, and lost a significant amount of money. So we backtracked a little bit and re-calibrated what was practical in terms of some of the management decisions here.
Last year we became Eco-certified and we follow very, very rigorous IPM practices. I think in doing that, it offers customers some assurance, we’re answering to a protocol and a body of other like-minded people that are trying to have an orchard or perennial system, and do the best we can when it comes to management decisions. So it’s something concrete that we can offer and people can dive into the protocol as much as they want. It’s a transparent program.
DH: Yeah, I would add to that that I think the reasons for doing, the reasons for managing things the way that they have been managed are always evolving, as we learn. You know, that year, I wasn’t here that year, but I’ve heard a lot about it and it served as a huge learning opportunity.
And I think that continues to be the case. The Eco-certification was a huge step, and I think it’s a great program. I highly recommend people check it out, because like you mentioned, it is incredibly hard to have an organic orchard here. And I think there are other things that you can do that get to the same goal that are practical, and it doesn’t have to be organic or non organic, black and white.
And so we’re always trying to get into that gray area and work as much as we can to promote the health of the trees, to promote the health of the land, and to also have a successful orchard and try to balance those things with the full knowledge that we are at the whim of weather, we are at the whim of these trees. You can’t ever predict what’s going to happen. The only thing you can do is try to respect it the best you can. And it has rewarded us. That’s what’s rewarded us, is doing that. So I think that feeling comes later, you know, once you’ve worked with the orchard a while, you start to have other reasons for doing what you’re doing that continue to evolve and deepen.
MF: Well, that’s a philosophy that can be applied to any other part of life. You see a lot of people who would say, like, why bother? I could say because I like birds. But there's so many people on the side of nature conservation who talks about their love of nature in such a hateful manner where they, you know, vilify the other party who don't see the importance of holistic approach to management or anything. But I can’t really always be harsh on those people, because some people would be like, ‘I’m trying to bring food to my table. I can’t care about anything more.’ How do we talk to those people and say this is why it’s important? It’s just so hard to answer—why bother?
DH: To other farmers, it’s almost harder to ask that question sometimes. Or to have them answered.
MF: And again, I can’t blame them because like you were saying earlier, the schedule is so crazy at farms, I can’t blame anybody for not caring about birds when they’re running such a difficult business.
KC: It goes back to like the whole, you know, it’s like birds are part of the whole, insects are part of the whole humans, everything. A mentor of mine, and I repeat what he taught me several years ago: Orchards are one of the places where culture and nature intersect very, very strongly. You won’t go out into a wild forest and see an orchard. It’s a man-made creation. So how we interact with an orchard and nature at the same time is fascinating. Challenging the whole nine yards, I guess. But I think about that all the time, culture and nature and, and how we fit into all of that.
DH: Yeah. And I’ll say for what you were saying, I think things like what Claudia and Conrad are doing are the way to kind of change that conversation. Because it’s very hard to farm anything, and when you feel like you have support, and when you feel like you have the resources to maybe open yourself up to accepting the birds, or accepting the things that might seem like it’s you versus this. I think it’s phrased a lot as it’s farmers versus pests, versus birds, versus disease. These are things that have always been here. And it can feel really overwhelming if you don’t have a network and support and information. And they’re doing that, they’re laying that groundwork and they’re having those conversations with farmers. And so they are doing that really, really incredible work.
And I think that through things like that, the conversations will actually start to change and people will open themselves up to that, once they feel like it’s not just me alone trying to manage this thing that feels so hard to manage and my livelihood is so dependent upon it. That will always be the case.
When you don’t feel alone, you feel like you have a community you can depend on. When things go wrong, you can get help. People will be, I think, operating in a little bit less from a place of viewing all these things as destructive, taking money, taking time, and viewing themselves as just a part of this. Human beings are not this exception, I think, we are a part of this world. And as much as farming is this human creation, it takes place amongst all these pests and disease or insects and all these things that exist, invasive things, and you have to work with that. And I think it’s actually a lot harder to work with it when you view them as your enemies, even though it can feel like that’s the only way to view them sometimes. I think, letting go and letting yourself become part of this larger picture, even though it requires some relinquishing of that feeling of wanting to control everything and is really scary.
And I think the only way people are going to do that is to have people like Claudia and Conrad in these communities, in these conversations that will provide support when you’re doing something scary and you’re not alone in this. So I think they are doing what has to happen. That’s the beginning of those conversations. And I truly think the work they’re doing will result in that change.
MF: And thank you for doing this work, too, and being part of that conversation and the developments.
KC: Thank you so much for having us.
MF: Thank you so much for this.
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