For years we lived the good life of the lowly-taxed in Park Slope. I’ll never understand why we paid a fifth of the taxes we pay upstate, for a Brooklyn property that was worth three times the one we have up here. Brownstoners, enjoy it while you’ve got it.

Upstate, it’s another story. It’s as bad as Montclair up here, at least if you have land.  High taxes are the main reason we gave up our original fantasy of 30 or 40 acres of sprawling woods, and a major reason we came over to Greene County. $20K in taxes every year? No, thanks.

But we still wanted to figure out a way to have our lean little acreage pay for itself. There is the farming exemption (wherein if you make $10,000 in farm-related sales, your property is taxed at a much lower agricultural rate, rather than at a market rate), but that seemed ambitious to us, unambitious gentlemen farmers that we hoped to be.

So we stuck with a familiar formula: the tenant. We did this in Park Slope, with our third-floor tenant paying almost the entirety of our mortgage. Couldn’t we go the same route upstate, just to cover our taxes?

Yes, we thought could, because we found a property that had an annexed barn apartment, which we renovated, and then sought to rent out.

We already knew we wanted to offer the rental as a farm stay. I’d been reading about farm stays for years. A friend in Delaware County (another Brooklyn transplant) is neighbors with this nice farming family, who offer a high end farm stay through a program called Featherdown. (more…)

Upstater is thrilled to announce the debut here of writer Larissa Phillips. She’s an ex-Brooklynite who escaped city life for a farm in Greene County. Each week, she’ll offer us some insider knowledge about living upstate, from the best spots for produce to how to manage a vacation rental. This week: how and why she traded a brownstone for a farm house.

Before we moved upstate, I was an unofficial cheerleader for life in Brooklyn. Diversity! Culture! Community! Prospect Park!

It seemed like the best place in the world to live and raise a family, especially for a suburban refugee like myself.  We would probably still be schlepping around Park Slope if I hadn’t slowly, over the course of several years, become completely and utterly obsessed with the idea of living on a farm.  I tried to soothe the obsession within city limits. We had backyard chickens, we planted a fig tree and raspberry bushes. I worked on school gardens. Nothing helped. It just got worse. By the end of our time in the city I was suffering from a serious case of what I think of as a farm fugue.

To enter a farm fugue, in which the victim wanders for hours, days or years seeing nothing but heirloom chickens and Berkshire spotted pigs and compost bins (and obsessively searching upstate real estate sites), consider taking the following steps:

1. Start with a membership at the Park Slope Food Coop, or at least become a regular at the farmers market.
2. Read farmy lit by the likes of Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver and Kristen Kimball.
3. Try to garden in your tiny row house backyard, despite the towering oak trees that block the sunlight for all but two hours every day. Be almost completely unsuccessful, but put pictures up on your blog and Facebook of the small handful of produce you reap here and there.
4. Feel increasingly uneasy about your children’s bedroom consisting of a 60-square foot allotment in the corner of your home office.
5. Begin taking the hunt for parking spaces personally.
6. One day, visit a farm way out in the country, where chickens roost in the trees, and heirloom sheep graze in a vast meadow with beehives on the far side. Feel already a little rattled, when you round the corner and see the horses. Horses. Feel a long-buried equine passion begin to force its way, like a little sprout seeking the light, up through the concrete bunker you poured over it back when you were 13.
7. Spend the next several days somewhat psychotically pricing horses and farms on the Internet.
8. Spend the next three years slowly convincing your partner to leave the city.

After many years of discussion, we finally moved upstate almost two years ago. We started out by renting a house in Columbia County, while we sold our Park Slope house and hunted for a farmstead.

Our needs: a farm house of 2000 square feet or so (With a dining room! And a linen closet! And a bedroom for each child!), barns or outbuildings, on at least 10 acres. If we could have woods, pasture and water, we’d be very happy. If it could be horse-friendly, my life could become complete. Since we would still work part-time in the city, we needed to be within a half hour of the Hudson Amtrak station. We quickly realized that if we went over to the wilds of Greene County we could actually afford what we wanted.

And, on a brutally hot July day in 2010, we found everything we’d hoped for:  a 15-acre property with a farm house, a crumbling hay barn and a two-bedroom apartment in a converted barn. A stable, a riding ring and pasture completed the package. We just had to add horses, which we quickly did.

Of course we didn’t find out until later that there were some things we should have wanted, and other things we might have not wanted…  but that came later.

We four — me, my New Farmer husband Chris, our 12-year old son Ernie and our 8-year old daughter Megan — now live the life of upstate farmers. We homeschool our kids, we garden, and we have a self-sustaining chicken flock. (And, yes, we eat our chickens.) (And, yes, our kids are okay with it.) (Mostly.) Our goats will give birth in May, and we have new chicks in the brooder. The hoop house goes up next weekend. And the ponies are doing their thing, burning hay, being cute, giving rides.

Our iPhones and Brooklyn Industries accessories might give us away to the savvy Park Sloper, but, really, I think we’re blending, people, I really do.

As I mentioned last week, the proverbial one [piece of real estate] that got away for me was a bungalow colony in Sullivan County, put on the market before the real estate balloon of the mid-2000s.

The good news is that there are a number of other colonies and camps for sale upstate–all faring better than the places on Vanishing Catskills–and I came upon Taylored Real Estate in my search for a new property. Not a great UI on the site, but there are a number of colonies, camps, old hotels and resorts for sale. They range from $3.9 million for an old 225-room resort in Liberty, N.Y. (behold the beauty of pink carpets and sky-sized crystal chandelier) to $345,000 for a fixer-upper resort with 10 buildings on 60 acres in Greeneville, NY.

There are plenty of camps and bungalow colonies at prices in between–somewhere between the $1 and $2 million range, which, split among at least 10 folks, hovers in the realm of affordable even for freelance writers. I have yet to find one that I’m willing to drag my pals up to see, but I’ll be looking. Has anybody else considered buying a colony or camp with pals?