Our Story

“I grew up always helping with the family vegetable garden, but when I was 15 I took full responsibility for it. This meant I would lay down the foundation of the garden with fertilizer, lay out all the garden tarps, and plant all the different vegetables, organizing it in the best way possible to maximize the yield from each crop. I tested a variety of different crops to figure out what plants grew best in our soil. After doing this for multiple years, I noticed that each year we would have hundreds of pounds worth of vegetables go to waste because it was more than our family could eat, can, or freeze. This disappointed me every year because I put so much work into growing the crop in the first place.

This led me to the idea of selling produce to local restaurants, so I called a local pizza shop in 2020 that decided to purchase about 5 bushels of tomatoes and peppers from me that summer.

In 2021, I built a farm stand but did not market it well enough to sell anything off it, however I continued selling produce to the pizza shop.

In 2022, I made "Farm Stand" signs that drove traffic to my stand and ended up selling enough to pay for a good chunk of my fall tuition bill and I was still able to give my family more produce than we could handle. I also opened a DBA as Ludlow Farms WNY after my brother's farm stand (Ludlow Farms CNY) and my grandparents farm in Pennsylvania (Ludlow Farms).”

- Ben Ludlow