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The Lehigh Valley is home to lush landscapes.

Nearly 50 thousand acres in open space and more than 40000 acres of preserved farmland.

In this episode of Lehigh Valley Rising, we'll explore businesses that are flourishing in the agricultural industry.

Taking root in nineteen seventy six, Franklin Hill Vineyards is the oldest winery in the Lehigh Valley.

Twenty four wines, four locations and countless awards just begins to describe their success story.

We got a chance to get up to the vineyard and connect with owner and female entrepreneur Elaine Pinsky.

Mama Grape, as she's fondly referred to, shared with us what makes their varietals so special.

My name is Elaine Kavinsky, and I own Franklin Hill Vineyards for 45 years.

I went to Woodstock in 1969 with my children's father.

On our way home and in nineteen sixty nine Corvette, he wanted to live on A commune and my Heart sunk, I was nineteen years old.

I know I don't belong in a commune.

I know I don't share well.

I knew the marriage wouldn't make it, so I said, Let's live off the land On our own.

I knew how hard it was to be a single mom.

I decided to hire women.

Many a time you'd walk in my living room and there'd be some sick children on the couch watching TV with Gatorade and Ritz crackers, so the mother could work, but I thought I would allow women to put their children first, and in that way, the husbands loved me because they know their wife is happy and they know their kids are taking care of.

I was in my mom's backpack at a half a year old when this all started, so it's pretty long story for me.

It goes my whole life.

He's nice, got a yellowed sunburn, very beautiful sugars.

Delicious.

And we found this beautiful thirty five acre farm for fifty thousand.

In the sixties and seventies, Pennsylvania was not a grape growing region.

And Cornell University said We are experimenting with grapevines by nineteen seventy five, we'll have enough plants.

Why don't you put one of the first vineyards in in Pennsylvania?

We didn't have a tractor.

We didn't know how to farm.

I didn't even own a shovel.

So I borrowed a lot of friends there, tractors and their expertise, and we put in two acres of vineyards to start this new endeavor.

Nineteen eighty two.

We opened the winery commercially as the first winery in the Lehigh Valley since Prohibition, and here we are twenty twenty one.

The vineyard is pretty much remain the same, you have to take a long view when you're putting in a vineyard because planting four years ahead of time.

Franklin Hill Vineyards in Bangor, we have a 60 acre farm on the farm.

We have 15 acres of vineyard and we grow four different varieties of grapes at this plant.

Today is our first day of harvest out.

Here we have numerous people helping us pick.

We invite local residents in the area to retire people college.

Whoever's free housewives this morning get together early in the morning, around 6:00 or so and we set them loose.

Picking grapes here in the vineyard, What they're doing is they're taking all the clusters off the vines and putting them into the crates that we have laid out on the ground from there.

Jeremy and Scott are vineyard managers come around, they pick up the crates, they throw them into the Condola.

And then they take them down to the winery, and from there they distend them, put them through the crush and pump them into the tank for Bonny, our winemaker, to work her magic on it.

Bonnie Peiser as my head winemaker for 40 years, that's unheard of.

Having someone 40 years making wine as hard and physical and cold as it is.

We started to get a name with the wine called Sir Walter's Red, it's a Concord wine named in honor of my father who helped me out and dad didn't know anything about wine.

He would work for me in Strauss smoking a pipe, and it was called Sir Sir Walter Raleigh Pipe Tobacco, and his name is Walter Devinsky.

He stunk up my store, but he was free labour, so I had no choice.

I had to let him smoke.

And then when people would ask for different wines, like, Could I have a Chembur sin or can I have a pinot?

He'd give them Concord.

He had no clue and I'd try to explain that to him.

And Dad would say, Oh, people don't know the difference about wine, you know?

Hugh, again, was free labor.

But guess what?

He sold so much of the Concord wine that when he passed on, we renamed it Sir Walter's Red.

We sell thirty thousand gallons of Sir Walter's red a year, so my dad today is still making me money.

Oregano elevators offers a more playful approach to wine.

We have wines that are fun and sweet.

But at the same time, we can offer something that has tradition and honors the the craft of what we do, so we we offer something for everybody.

We also own Social Still Distillery in Bethlehem.

Two thousand three.

Governor Rendell nominated me as the top 50 women in business.

That was the turning point because all these years was fluff.

You're just working every day trying to get your name out there.

And the big move came in twenty sixteen, where the Liquor Control Board decided to allow supermarkets to carry wine.

What's been the greatest thing lately is that we've grown into distribution, so our wines are available all through the state of Pennsylvania.

That is, the luck of small wineries is to be in distribution.

That means I only need one truck to go to the warehouse.

And on my seventy third birthday, my son bought me a brand new Mac truck.

There's a lot of romance and vineyards.

When it comes down to it, it's farming and we've got a lot of work to do.

There he is.

Now what I'm going to tell it.

I wear a variety of hats today.

I'm out here in the vineyard in charge of all the pickers.

So some days we're we're here planning, some days we're on events, Some days I'm making calls to our grocery stores, getting orders together for our delivery guy to do.

Some days I'm on the bottling line.

The culture is one that fosters growth.

And with all my staff, I might mentor them, but they mentor me.

From one family farming business to another, jandal farms and jandal land development company has built a history and a legacy within the Lehigh Valley that spans five generations, starting out with just five turkeys from a county fair.

This business has grown into a thriving and growing company that keeps family at the forefront.

For half a century, their grand champion, Turkey has been the featured Thanksgiving centerpiece at the White House and their real estate projects have created more than twelve thousand jobs in the region.

A success means being able to stay in business.

Success is having your family members in business with you.

That's been very rewarding for me.

Work in the family business is great, I mean, certainly not Easy, just got to keep everyday Working hard, long hours, long days, but enjoy it very much.

Jandal farms started with my father and grandfather back in the early nineteen thirties.

With my grandfather going to a county fair and purchasing five turkeys, he gave the five turkeys to my father and with the help of my grandfather over the years, populated the turkeys and continue to grow them.

And by the time my dad was in high school, he was managing them and going 500 turkeys while he was in school.

And my dad liked the breeding aspect of the turkeys, and so he won every grand champion event that he ever entered into.

He was a champion breeder.

The gentle companies are multifaceted where where agriculture, which is the farming and growing of the turkeys, its land development and a trait which we purchased six years ago.

But we've always been a seasonal operator focused around the whole body, turkey for Thanksgiving.

We're expanding to go more year round.

These are free range turkeys, as you can see, they get outdoor access at six weeks old pending weather, we don't want them out in storms, so chase them back in.

We have about nine total farms, about two hundred and ten Turkey barns, enough capacity there for about eight hundred thousand turkeys.

We grow all these turkeys on farm by our people with our own people.

We've been doing so since the mid thirties.

A big focus other than animal welfare would be sustainability.

We're in the process of building expanding a solar field that will offset about thirty five percent of our electrical demand produced on farm.

We're in partnership with a regional operator to take some of our turkey manure and our food waste produced locally and creating a methane gas that will capture clean and heat on farm as a renewable natural gas and then pump back through the public utility to heat homes regional offices.

I've worked with my father from an early age, I worked with my grandfather for many years, and so I learned a lot from the two of them and their work ethic has been great to learn.

Hopefully I passed a little bit of that onto my children.

I think I have the.

They work harder than I work.

The land development arm started in the early 60s, and that has expanded to multiple projects today.

Our family has developed real estate across the valley for for a long period of time and it's always been developed by the family.

Some of the projects to note is certainly the Buckeye Partner's office building in Lower Mackenzie Township.

Seventy five thousand square foot office building.

Home to three hundred employees on the residential side is Lee Hills in Upper Mackenzie Township.

It's a two hundred and fifty four unit development which we're going to be selling finished lots to a national builder.

Another project worth noting is our dual brand Hyatt Place Hyatt House in Upper Mackenzie Township.

Very unique Project.

It's a two hundred and five key hotel, event centre and restaurant opening this fall.

This was an interesting one because quite honestly, our products, they were looking for a new site for their headquarters, Fortune 200 Company.

One appealing aspect to our products, of course, was was having a hotel close by.

We told them we would Build a hotel.

Great partnership.

Very excited about that.

Anyone that grew up here in the Lehigh Valley, a childhood memory is a treat, and in January of twenty fifteen my dad, we looked at it and thought about it and talked about it, and we, as a distributor of Turkey products into similar retailers thought, hey, might be a good idea.

When no one stepped up, my my dad, David did, and in August of twenty fifteen we acquired a treat.

For us to see it go away was wasn't a choice.

So this is our newly released chess born Mike and Ike, a true collaboration, this collaboration started about four years ago with my dad and and his friend, Ross Borne, owner and operator of chess born candies.

For us, he treats a staple in the community and likewise with with Jess born, so we thought collaborating both products together was a great choice locally and nationally, so we're excited about the new partnership.

It's important for us to be a good neighbor in our community here because we're going a lot of turkeys, it's high density agriculture here and our neighbors have been great to be around and we we appreciate them.

The Lehigh Valley, as is a big part of our success.

We couldn't exist without the employees here in the Lehigh Valley.

We couldn't exist without the property and the municipalities here in the Lehigh Valley.

I think, you know, you asked what the what legacy I think just to be known as a good neighbor and good family man.

Later on in the show, Dr. Georgette Phillips, dean of the business school at Lehigh University, will sit down with David Jandal and discuss the legacy he and his family have built over the years.

But now, from a proud legacy to a pioneering movement in Nineteen Forty New York City entrepreneur G Rodale bought a rundown farm in Pennsylvania that run down farm is now known as the Rodale Institute.

Rodale Institute's time has come.

There is a growing interest for regenerative organic agriculture, and it's a really exciting moment for for us right now for our work.

Rodale Institute, in partnership with the state of Pennsylvania, could quite possibly make this the Silicon Valley of organic agriculture.

When you look across the United States, we're now one of the top producers of organic food In the nation.

We have some of the largest organic food producers right in our own backyard.

We are backed by a state government that's investing in the future of Organic farming, are making this Place a very attractive place for entrepreneurs and for the food industry as a whole.

Organic is not a fad that is going to come in and go out, it was actually here before modern day conventional herbicide agriculture, so we're seeing the return of normal.

Overarching benefit to moving to organic agriculture is that we have a system that works with nature and not against it.

At the same time, we're educating people that are coming in here to learn farming, to learn about the research that we're doing and then to go out and implement that at their own farms or become advocates of what we're doing here.

The Rodale Institute is widely known as the pioneer in regenerative organic agriculture.

We were originally founded as the Soil and Health Foundation by Rodale G. Rodale put some words on a blackboard.

He said that healthy soil equals healthy food, equals healthy people.

And what he was really doing was putting us on a path to change the way we think about the food that we eat.

And the purpose of that was to kind of explore and experiment and research organic agriculture.

And so what we're ultimately about is helping to show consumers and farmers that how we treat the soil has everything to do with our ability to be healthy humans on a healthy planet.

Rodale took it upon himself to develop the science that was necessary for the United States government to adopt the word organic.

We dedicate ourselves to visiting every single farmer that we work with in person, so that allows us to develop an individualized plan so that they can come up with a path to transitioning to organic.

This is conventional lettuce over here.

It's part of four different systems that we study in the vegetable systems trials, so we do a leaf crop, a fruit and crop and a Root crop, and they all Get their start here in the greenhouse.

This is the organic lettuce over here, so they'll both be planted actually side by side in the field come spring.

By adopting this style of Agriculture, you're helping to clean Water, you're helping to improve soil health, you're preventing soil erosion and all of those things.

If you look at them from an economic standpoint as well, they do have numbers to them that are beneficial to farmers.

What we're doing here is really large and impactful, but at the basis of it, it's it's farming.

All of that comes with equipment breaking down issues with fields being too wet or something like that.

Mother Nature doesn't pull any punches on us either.

One of the things I'm most passionate about, and that's our education.

I think farming is, like, really important for connections, and each person is something a little bit different.

So when I go on my own career path, I think that's really important to know.

I'm from California and my parents own a three acre farm.

It's been pretty much in my blood since I was born.

Every year, as we take on a cohort of interns, it's a working internship and we essentially teach them the farm while giving them kind of a really academic collegiate level classroom experience.

At the same time, they work on a farm.

They raise vegetables, grains, animals.

We go to a classroom.

They receive lectures from my team, myself and some of our PhD researchers.

We hire in third party contractors to help us with things that we don't know how to do.

Like, I've never opened a business At the very top.

You have your Income and then your cost of goods sold comes right out of that income.

I think it's a really great immersive program that really gets people going, and I can almost guarantee that the people that stay for two years through the second year of fellowship program are guaranteed to be farmers opening their business.

Our campus here just outside of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, is open to the public seven days a week.

Though we are a research campus, this farm has a lot to see, and we invite you to come to our visitor center.

Grab a map, go out and take a self-guided tour Because we're a nonprofit, when you come to the property and go to our events, you're actually supporting the research and education that we do here.

We have really have something for everyone.

This is a hidden gem.

We often call it here on this end of the Lehigh Valley.

We want people right here in our own region to know that we're here and we exist for them as much as we exist for our global communities.

And there's no reason to not come out here.

We have a beautiful property and there's a lot to do, so come on out and visit us.

From outdoor farming to indoor verticals, what grows here changes everything.

That's the tagline that battery farming uses Bowery Farming is the latest addition to agricultural businesses in the Lehigh Valley.

They are an indoor farming entity whose approach to agriculture is revolutionizing the industry.

We sat down with Barry's chief commercial officer Katie Siegel at their new Bethlehem facility and talked about the innovative transformation that Bowery is leading.

Welcome to Bowery behind us, what we have going on is the construction and development of an indoor vertical farm that will be fully operational in early twenty twenty two.

This means we are taking what was once non arable land and creating and producing a farm that can grow fresh local pesticide free produce three hundred and sixty five days a year for the community it serves.

When the Bethlehem farm comes online, our network of farms will actually produce the equivalent of 20 million clamshells a year.

It would take traditional farming five million square feet to produce that same amount of produce.

So we are a completely self-contained farm.

We're completely Enclosed Indoors.

We grow our Crops from floor to ceiling and use LED lights to mimic the spectrum of the sun.

We have a proprietary operating system.

We call it the Bowery OS.

It uses sensors, data automation and technology to control the duration of light, the intensity of light, the nutrients and the water.

We are gathering this data.

Twenty four hours a day, seven Days a week.

So when you think About scale and expansion, we can actually create a new Farm, plug it Into the Bowery operating system.

And it's as smart or if not smarter than the previous farms, because it's benefiting from all the data the other farms have completed.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, will be the location of our third commercial farm.

We're excited to tap into the workforce.

Here we are creating year round green manufacturing jobs.

The U.N. projects that by 20 50, the world population will reach nine to 10 billion people.

That means we're going to have to grow 40 percent more food in the next 30 years than we do today with fewer resources, less arable land.

So we need to think of a different way to strengthen and fortify our food system.

And we believe indoor vertical farming and Bowery is a part of that.

Perhaps the most recognized farm in the Lehigh Valley is jandal farms.

At the helm of the organization is David Jandal, who has led the company through its evolution that includes turkey farming, real estate development, beverage distribution and philanthropy.

David joined Dr. Georgette Phillips, dean of the business school at Lehigh University, for an in-depth conversation on the secret to his family's business.

David, thanks so much for being with us here today.

Great to be with you.

You know, as a real estate person, I tend to focus on risk in a very different way than You probably Focus on it in an agricultural sense.

What is the risk that you are facing in your agricultural side of your of your business?

Good question.

Agriculture by nature is very risky.

A little story if I can.

My father as a as a young guy at in his early 30s, he worked hard.

And, you know, this is what I look at and when I when I try to teach my children.

But he was working hard in the operation with his, with his father.

They were they were partners at that point and he would work all day long, either in the office or on the farm, operating and harvesting crops during harvest season.

And then at night, he would bring the equipment in and work on the equipment, whether it's in the plant or farm equipment at night and for most of the night.

And he'd get very little sleep.

He needed very little sleep.

And so, so unfortunately, one night in his thirties, he was working on equipment and his armed guards got caught and he lost his arm in a farm equipment accident, repairing the equipment at night.

And so that really caused him to to rely more on the cerebral side of his of his body.

That's really when he started on the acquisition of land, the acquisition of bank stock and learning more about banks and bank stock.

And so.

So you talk about risk.

He he paid the ultimate risk and and he he I credit my dad with really the, you know, the luxury of where we are today in the business, right?

Wow.

What a Story.

My dad would acquire farmlands, really not for development, but to grow crops to raise turkeys.

This was all in the Lehigh Valley, all In the Lehigh Valley.

And so in the mid-sixties we were raising, they were raising about 200000 turkeys a year.

Wow.

At that point.

And so so my dad was looking to acquire farmland so he could raise crops.

He would purchase bank stocks, leverage the farmland to buy more bank stock than leverage the bank stock to buy more farmland.

And the development side.

We had one land development from the in the early sixties that he started.

It was a residential development, so we got into it.

We had a water company and a residential land development company, residential land development that he that he was expanding and that was generally through the 80s.

In the mid 80s, the Lehigh Valley started to grow a little bit more, and that's when the farm lands that had been acquired.

He started a little bit to dabble in a little of land development.

Was there any discussion within the family as to which way the company should go through the turkeys or through the land development?

There was never any discussion about which way should we go?

Agriculture is the foundation of our business.

He considered on the side, but really never looked at as a as a land development company, right?

Where are you seeing the growth in the future?

Well, we're seeing it on all aspects.

We today we have about 65 different projects residential, industrial, commercial and hospitality.

And the Lehigh Valley is a great place to be.

It's a great place to raise families.

Businesses certainly are attracted to the Lehigh Valley because the great workforce that we have here in L.A. have Ali right, and it's just a great place to be.

So where we where we see the the expansion Lehigh Valley is really on the residential in the hospitality side.

Well, what is the role of the Company in philanthropy?

We think it's very important to be very active in giving in the Lehigh Valley, and we do so.

We do so in the Turkey business with with Turkey products, we do so in the land business.

More most recently, we contributed 18 acres for an elementary school to the local school district.

About 15 years ago, we were involved in the startup of a of the American League of the Lehigh Valley, and that's a baseball field for the physically, mentally challenged children of the Lehigh Valley.

And we're very proud of that.

Yes, absolutely.

If you could go back in time and give yourself.

Some advice.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Well, great question again.

I always listened to my father and my grandfather, and if I could give myself any any advice today from back then, I would say, listen to them more and listen to every single thing that they ever taught you and try to implement it because everything that they ever did and taught me as a youngster came to be true.

Wow.

David, thank you so much for joining us today on Lehigh Valley Rising.

My pleasure.

I'm Georgette Chapman Phillips.

Back to you, Valerie.

Thanks, Dr. Phillips and David Jandal and you for joining us as we celebrate the success of these growing businesses and a growing region for all of us here at Lehigh Valley Rising.

I'm Valerie Bittner and thanks again for watching.

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