When 41-year-old Joshua Morgenthau graduated from Yale with an art degree almost 20 years ago, he couldn't have imagined that his masterpiece would be saving his family's apple farm and turning it into an operation that generates $4 million per year.
Morgenthau shared with CNBC how he went from an aspiring artist to becoming a successful farmer.
In 1913, his grandfather founded Fishkill Farms, which was passed down to his father, Robert, and then to Joshua in 2019. Although he grew up in Manhattan, Morgenthau spent many summers there. "I really fell in love with the place," he said.
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A few years after he'd graduated from Yale in 2006, the farm was struggling financially. When its manager retired, the family had to make a big decision.
Morgenthau called it a "make-or-break moment," where they could cut their losses and sell the farm to real estate developers or go all-in and try to save it. Despite having no experience, he volunteered to take over running it.
"I didn't have any agricultural training or think this was what I necessarily was going to do," he told CNBC. "But it was very important for me to see it continue as a farm."
Morgenthau said he became even more motivated to hold on to the property after learning how quickly farmland was disappearing. He pointed to a statistic from the American Farmland Trust that showed developers were buying one farm every three days in New York state.
"That tide is not one that reverses," Morgenthau said. "At the end of the day, I feel a sort of duty to preserve the land and keep going here."
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He faced an uphill climb. Farming is a notoriously difficult business under the best of circumstances, and Morgenthau admitted to CNBC that he had to navigate an "extremely steep" learning curve. He began doing in-depth research on sustainable farming and horticulture.
Morgenthau initiated the turnaround by leaning into a side of the farming business his family had gotten into several decades earlier: letting people pick their own fruit. He said that Fishkill Farms began letting neighbors pick their own apples for a fee in the 1980s as a way to sell imperfect fruit that grocery stores or wholesalers wouldn't buy.
Morgenthau said his father resorted to that as "an act of desperation," but they ended up making more money on that side of the business than they did selling wholesale. "This was an outlet that allowed us to cut out the middleman and to get customers and the local community coming to the farm," he told CNBC.
Morgenthau now offers reservation-only "package deals" ranging from $48 during the week to $58 on the weekends. Groups of up to five can pick half a bushel of apples in a bag supplied by the farm. He said Fishkill Farms generates about 50% of its annual revenue during peak apple season in September and October.
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Fishkill Farms also has a "full-day experience" where guests enjoy live music, hayrides, and a corn maze during peak season. "We sort of switch what we're doing from being farmers to running a bit of a carnival, or a festival," he said.
Morgenthau is also focused on adding new revenue streams to the farm, which now has a store featuring local products and a hard cider bar, as well as strawberry and cherry picking in the summer and plans for cut-your-own Christmas trees in the future.
Morgenthau told CNBC that revenues at Fishkill Farms have increased from around $350,000 in 2008 to $4 million in 2024, but he knows that depending on pick-your-own fruit for the majority of the farm's income is "untenable" in the long term.
"The goal has been how to shift our business away from one season to an all-season business," he said. "We're moving in that direction, but it takes time."
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Image: Shutterstock
