Cobblestone Farm
- Ginger Jenne
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
by Nicole Zappone @TheChronicleCT
MANSFIELD — What began as a family hobby quickly became a Farm CSA for one family in Mansfield. On summer days, you can find Diane Dorfer of Cobblestone Farm CSA in her fields tending to crops or greeting members. If she isn’t in one of those spots, she is cooking in the kitchen. In the colder months, Dorfer visits schools to assess their progress on produce collection during the offseason. She also inventories what she needs to order for seeds for the upcoming season.
Before starting her farm business eight years ago, Dorfer grew food for her family. During that time, she brought kids from the daycare she ran out of her house into the fields to show off her passion for growing produce.
Today, Dorfer sells veggies to local schools to help kids develop a passion for what they eat and encourage them to try new things. Through her CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), Dorfer provides for over 100 shares to families and community members who support her business each year.
While working with local schools, CSA families and community members, Dorfer collaborates closely with Chef Mariah Popeleski-Tilley from the Mansfield Public Schools.
Popeleski-Tilley and Dorfer have known each other for years, before she began working for the public school system. The Field to Tray program in the Mansfield Public Schools collaborates with local farms, such as Cobblestone Farm, to provide produce year-round for the district’s cafeterias. In the program, the school gets food from the farmers and then they can create scratch meals.
“We’re just trying to really celebrate the local food we are using,” Popeleski-Tilley said. “We’ve been doing it for years and years, but we find that not everybody realizes that we use so much local stuff.” The schools get food from Mountain Dairy in Storrs, Cobblestone Farm in Mansfield, Cloverleigh Farm in Columbia and several other local farms.
What inspired Dorfer to collaborate with the Mansfield Public Schools was partly because her kids had gone through the school system. “It felt great in so many ways to be able to create produce,” Dorfer said. “In the beginning, it was very new for the schools and there were a number of parents who were strong advocates for getting more local farm products into the schools.” Dorfer said, at the beginning, she secured a grant to help build collaboration between her farm and the schools.
Cobblestone Farm CSA, which is located at 87 Bassett Bridge Road in Mansfield Center, grows everything that can be grown in Connecticut. “There are some farms in Connecticut where they are growing 10 to 20 acres of the same crop and so they have fairly reliable fields,” Dorfer said. “In general, I don’t want 500 pounds of tomatoes harvested in one day, but sometimes it happens.”
Dorfer said she got into farming right out of high school. “Earlier in my life, I was more interested in native plants and landscaping,” Dorfer said. “When I was at the end of my time at UConn, I could not afford to buy the food I wanted to eat, so a lot of what I was growing shifted toward produce and went from there.” Dorfer said she felt the need to grow her own food to meet her own needs and those of the people she was living with.
“A typical September harvest day would include sweet peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, some winter squash, summer squash, kale, lettuce, different mixed greens, scallions, carrots, beets, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, celery, radishes,” Dorfer said. “What’s being harvested in September is different from what is being grown in June.”
During the colder months, Dorfer will work on planning, seed orders, equipment repairs, financial projections and recovery (deep cleaning her home, taking naps, she said.) Dorfer’s work season is full-time, running from mid-March through mid-December. “Once the ground freezes for real in the winter, late fall, that is a nice cutoff and there is only so much you can do after that,” Dorfer said.
Growing up in Bristol and graduating from Bristol Eastern High School (class of 1993), Dorfer got her first full-time job at a nursery center, where her passion for agriculture really blossomed.
During her time at UConn, Dorfer studied Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In between high school and college, she took a break. “When I started at UConn, I did not have any career goals,” Dorfer said. “I had done a variety of things.” At the same time, Dorfer and her brother were between homes and ended up living together in Willimantic. Her brother was a student at UConn and Dorfer decided that going to college would be fun.
“Being a college student was a lot easier than working full-time minimum wage jobs,” Dorfer said. “After that one class, I enrolled as a full-time student, and I never left. I did not plan on staying in Connecticut, but it’s really great around here.”
Popeleski-Tilley said the relationship between her and Dorfer is really unique. “She and I have known each other long before my role here doing farm and table work together,” Popeleski-Tilley said. “I think her being able to text me, saying I have this amount of food, will you take it? It’s helpful to her, and it’s helpful to us. I don’t think a lot of districts have that kind of relationship with their farmers.”
Some of the meals served to students include chicken fajitas, chicken pot pie, grilled cheese and soup, French toast bake made with local syrup and prepared foods like chicken tenders, burgers, and more. “We try to make a lot of things from scratch,” Popeleski-Tilley said.
