Buy local: Farm stand spotlight – Kozak Farms

After more than 30 years of selling his product to surrounding farm stands, most often supplying local cauliflower and broccoli, Tom Kozakiewicz, otherwise known as Smiley in the farming community, has decided to open up a stand of his own.

Smiley owns Kozak farms (shortened down from Kozakiewicz for simplicity), a third generation, 55-acre property, one mile west of the Cherry Creek golf course on Reeves Ave in Riverhead. And 20 of those acres are solely dedicated to two vegetables almost as native as potatoes in Long Island cuisine: broccoli and cauliflower.

Kozakiewicz was originally nicknamed ‘Smiley Jack’ by his high school baseball coach. But over time, ‘Smiley Jack’ cut down to just ‘Smiley’ and it just stuck because it fit his blissful demeanor.

And besides he says, “it’s better than frowney.”

Every morning starts the same for Smiley: after he checks his orders, which are usually left on his home phone, he’s barefoot and toe-deep in his field, hacking away with his machete, knocking off heads of broccoli to be either delivered or picked up by 8 a.m.

“It’s usually done by 8 a.m.,” Smiley said. “Sometimes I get a late start.”

Or sometimes, the orders are enormous.

“My customers come just about everyday,” he said. “They know I will have it and they know I’ll have a good product.”

“But it’s not like it used to be,” Tom said. “We used to cut like crazy.”

In the late 1980s to early 90s, when Lewin Farms in Wading River was 70 percent of Kozakiewicz’s business, he remembers times when he had orders for 900 heads of broccoli one morning and another 1,000 the following day, most of which he cut with only the help of his mother and father.

“We needed to take multiple trips with two different trucks,” Smiley said. “The most we could take at once was 300. My mother would pack the broccoli in the bed of the truck while me and my father threw it to her. I remember feeling like my lungs would collapse.”

“Lewin Farms pretty much paid off one of my mortgages,” he laughed.

But it’s not that way anymore because most farms grow their own; but if they don’t, expect them to have Smiley’s product on the shelves.

Today he regularly supplies Briermere Farms, Anderson’s farm stand, Reeve Farm, and a bunch of others on the south shore and further west up the island. Smiley considers his business more “nickel-and-dime” so pacing his crops is essential.

“We transplant about every 8-10 days so that I always have a fresh crop coming in,” Kozakiewicz said. “It’s not like I plant a lot you just plant one block then another block and so on. So in the same time I will have crops that are just planted and crops that are ready to harvest.”

Customers would ask him “why does your broccoli taste so good?”

“Well,” he would reply, “It’s because it’s fresh. Most of the stuff you see in grocery stores has been sitting there for days or frozen for months.”

His produce isn’t left in a barn for days or even overnight; it is cut fresh every morning, which is what keeps his customers coming back. And, he has made broccoli and cauliflower available nearly year-round, something you rarely see as they both are a vegetable that thrives more efficiently in fall climates.

“I plant in the greenhouse around March 1st,” he said. “And the first plants go out in the field around April 20th.”

The last transplant from seedbed to field for cauliflower and broccoli is late August to early September. And with a 65-day grow period, it usually is available through thanksgiving and into December in some years, depending on the weather.

The weather could be a farmer’s best friend or total enemy. And it’s not just the cold, it’s the heat too, Smiley says.

“The ideal temperature during the day for cauliflower and broccoli is about 80 degrees so when it’s 95 degrees during the day, the crops may end up not looking so good,” he said. “Even the heat-tolerant varieties don’t fare too well.”

“It’s always wait-and-see.”

Just like it will be with his farm stand.

He’ll add a roof to one of his trailer beds and put it out in front of his brown house in about a week when his tomatoes are ripe, mounting too a money box for self-sevice.

“I figured I should give it a shot,” Smiley said. “Now with the three new golf courses, there is so much traffic on the road so maybe I can get some people doing their weekly grocery shopping at my stand.”

“Now that would be nice,” he said, smiling.

Available on his farm stand will be: cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, red potatoes, white potatoes and yukon gold potatoes.

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Michael Hejmej
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