On March 6 of this year, Gary and Pam Mount celebrated 50 years in a precarious business. A select list of distinguished guests, area elected officials, and longtime supporters of Terhune Orchards were there. Like many of the farm-to-table dinners they’ve hosted at Terhune Orchards, they did so in a classy way, with catered hors d’oeuvres, some Terhune Orchards’ wines in the afternoon, an array of cheeses, and of course, their delicious apple cider and apple cider donuts. At this informal gathering, prominent farmers in attendance included Jim Giamarese of East Brunswick, John J. Hauser of Hauser Hill Farms in Old Bridge and New Jersey’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ed Wengryn, who was raised on a dairy farm in Hillsborough.
The Mounts’ daughters, Tannwen and Ruwai, were there with their husbands and some of their grandkids. Gary and Pam kept their speeches short and expressed gratitude to the crowd of perhaps 50 people.
“One of the nice things about this place is all of this around here is preserved farmland,” Gary Mount noted at the outset of this interview for U.S. 1 Newspaper on his 81st birthday in May.
“On this side it’s preserved, on the other side it’s a county park,” he noted of his main property at 330 Cold Soil Road in Lawrence Township. His grandfather, George Mount, had a farm along Route 1 on land where Carnegie Center is now where he grew apples in the 1920s, Mount recalled. Mount and his wife, Pam, are ninth generation farmers, and their daughters are 10th generation farmers here at the expanded Terhune Orchards, now 250 acres. Over the years they’ve received dozens of awards and encomiums for their commitment to agriculture, smart planning, being good stewards of the earth and their longtime civic involvements.
Gary Mount, a 1966 graduate of Princeton University with a degree in psychology, served time in the Peace Corps in Micronesia, near Guam between 1967 and 1970 with his wife, Pam, before the couple returned to Princeton. They decided they would give farming a try, since Gary had a lot of experience working with his father, brothers, and uncles tending to apple trees.
Pam brought a background as an artist and writer and a flair for advertising, public relations, and community relations to their budding small farm. In the 1980s and ’90s, Pam served on the Planning Board for Lawrence Township and also served three terms as mayor. Gary was an instrumental part, through dozens of meetings in Trenton, in the creation of the state’s Farmland Preservation Program, portions of which have served as a model for other states.
In 1975 they purchased a farm that had fallen into disrepair. “When we first came here,” Gary Mount says, “for a while, we couldn’t even get into the house, so we lived in the repair shop across the street. My wife and her sister and I lived in the repair shop for quite a while.”
After some renovations in the old farmhouse, the repair shop they once lived in became storage for apples, he recalled. They quickly realized they didn’t have enough space, Mount explained, so in the early years he would truck his apples to farmer friends in South Jersey who rented him storage space. He looks back on those years in the 1980s with extreme gratitude to those bigger apple and peach growers in Burlington County and points south.
“Fortunately, I got to be friendly with some farmers down there and I rented space from them,” he recalled of his truck driving days. He credited Bill Heritage’s father, Howard Heritage, and also rented space from the Heilig Family, peach growers in Gloucester County.
“They were peach farmers so they had space during apple season. They were very generous, and I count them all as close friends to this day,” Mount says. “Today, I don’t store anything with Bill Heritage anymore because he’s full up storing his own grapes, making his own wines.”
Terhune Orchards is now the only farm in the Garden State equipped with controlled atmosphere refrigerated storage, so that thousands of apples harvested in late summer and fall remain fresh and ready for sale through the winter and into the following spring. Large apple operations in New York State, Michigan, and Washington State use this CARS technology, which sucks the oxygen out of a 40-foot-tall warehouse-sized fridge to preserve the precious crop over the winter. These apples are replenished through the winter and early spring months at the Terhune retail stand, which is open every day of the year except Christmas and New Year’s Day.
In 2003 they purchased a 65-acre property at 42 Van Kirk Road that hadn’t been used for conventional farming, so they jumped immediately into certified organic vegetable production, a process that normally takes three years.
Like Bill Heritage, the Mount family and their crew also made a slow transition to producing their own wines. New Jersey farmers know that diversification is key to success, and the Mounts tested and launched new fruits and vegetables slowly, always getting feedback from customers in their retail store.
Growing grapes and a variety of other finger fruits during New Jersey’s hot and humid summers can be very risky, but the idea of making his own wines fascinated Gary.
“It was a big step for us to transition into making our own wines,” his daughter Tannwen pointed out in the Mount’s kitchen at their extensively renovated farmhouse.
They began the process and experiments with various types of grapes that do well in hot humid summers in 2005. By 2010, they began selling bottled wine and opened a tasting room in an old barn. They began by growing six varieties of grapes. Today, they grow 18.
“When you plant your first few rows of grapes it takes a few years before you can harvest enough of them to begin making wine,” he explained. Like everything else at Terhune Orchards, Mount kept painstaking records of how the grapes were progressing. Birds become a nuisance in the vineyards and on nearby cherry trees each summer, so he and his team members wait for a calm day and, using a large roller that feeds the netting out, they hand place the rolled out bird netting on top of the rows of grapes and dwarf cherry trees.
A few years ago, Mount published a book of his recollections from nearly five decades in farming. “A Farmer’s Life” is a fascinating chronicle of the ups and downs of the farming life, a collection of vignettes seasoned with many humorous observations.
Terhune Orchards continues to publish a newsletter to stay in touch with customers, old and new. They estimate there are several hundred thousand visitors to the you-pick and other farm operations each year. “A Farmer’s Life” is a collection of many of those old newsletters, along with some newer ones about opening the wine barn and grape and blueberry harvesting operations. The book can be purchased online or at the farm store for $16.95.
Was Mount nervous about transitioning more of his acreage into a grape growing operation? Wasn’t investing so much money into grapes a gamble?
“It was a combination of the business we already had, just like when you start planting potatoes, you plant something else,” to back it up, he explained, “in this case it was grapes. We began with three acres and now we have nine acres of grapes.”
Daughter Tannwen explained, “This is how we operate here at the farm, we test something out, we give it a try on a smaller scale,” she said, noting they started out with an old barn and a small tasting room. Once the wine tasting room became something of a success, they built a bigger barn with an expanded tasting room and places for patrons to sit down and enjoy the music on weekend afternoons.
She added: “It’s all part of a bigger picture, we’re not just selling bottles of wine, we’re selling a whole experience, having music on the weekends, and it’s all part of a bigger package we use to welcome new customers to the farm.”
To be sure, from day one, both Pam and Gary — given their roles in creating the Farmland Preservation laws in New Jersey — have always believed in making their farm a semi-public place, opening up their acreage to you-pick operations, festivals, wine tastings, music on weekends, and a wide range of educational activities for adults and children, “a community center,” if you will. To that end, they’re open, through dedicated staffers, 364 days a year, and closed on Christmas Day.
Unlike so many other harried farmers around central New Jersey, Gary Mount has the luxury, through smart labor management over the years, of being able to answer his cell phone almost all of the time. When you call Gary Mount, his phone rarely goes to voicemail.
“When people call and they want to talk to somebody we’d better be able to answer the phone,” Mount said. “It used to be just me, and I would answer the phone and I would talk and talk. But now with my two daughters — since I’m hard of hearing — they’re very diligent in answering questions for people.”
The addition of the expanded wine barn in 2016 “has been a really great family venture but also drawn in a whole new customer base,” Tannwen explained. “We’ve gotten new customers for fresh produce from having the wine barn open.”
Today, the Mount family and their extended crew, some of whom live on the farm sites amounting to 250 acres, grow more than 60 crops, 35 varieties of apples, and they bottle and serve 18 types of wine at Terhune Orchards.
Apples are by far and away their largest crop, followed by peaches, all the way down to production of okra, which has the least amount of acreage. Terhune Orchards employs about 40 full and part-time employees year-round, but during the growing season, that number doubles to 80 people.
Tannwen added, “we do a little bit of everything. Our model is we want to sell direct-to-consumer as much as possible and be able to offer a lot of variety.”
As Tannwen leaves the Mounts’ on-site farmhouse to go pick up her kids from school, Pam Mount comes down to join husband Gary at the kitchen table. A talented public speaker, writer, artist, and community organizer, Pam, who suffered a fall last year, said she had something to add: “One of the things we’d like to say is we’ve been farming for 50 years now. Our two daughters are farming with us. It’s important for people to realize there is a future in farming in New Jersey, even now. Certainly we are interested in seeing our grandchildren continue to farm, and they can do that and still make a decent living for themselves and their families; it’s not like you have to be poor to be a farmer. If you work at it and work smart and have preserved land, then you don’t have to worry about it being sold before you’re ready. It all works out if you have preserved land.”
Terhune Orchards, 330 Cold Soil Road, Lawrence. Farm store open Saturday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Winery open Friday, noon to 8 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. 609-924-2310 or www.terhuneorchards.com.
Upcoming Events
Sunset Sips & Sounds. Live music by Zuko Phillips Cohn & Starr. Light fare, wine, and wine slushies available. Friday, July 18, 5 to 8 p.m.
Weekend Music Series. Live music from 1 to 4 p.m. by Brian Bortnick. Lunch fare, homemade treats, ice cream, and wine by the glass available. Saturday, July 19, noon to 5 p.m.
Weekend Music Series. Live music from 1 to 4 p.m. by Jerry Steele. Lunch fare, homemade treats, ice cream, and wine by the glass available. Sunday, July 20, noon to 5 p.m.
Read and Pick: Peaches. Read books highlighting peaches followed by an educational component. Everyone picks a small container of peaches. Register. $12 per child includes all materials. Tuesday, July 22, 9:30 and 11 a.m.
Sunset Sips & Sounds. Live music by Foglight. Light fare, wine, and wine slushies available. Friday, July 25, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Pam’s Annual Freezing, Canning, and Preserving Class. Free. Rain or shine. Register. Saturday, July 26, 10 a.m.
Weekend Music Series . Live music from 1 to 4 p.m. by Ragtime Relics. Lunch fare, homemade treats, ice cream, and wine by the glass available. Saturday, July 26, noon to 5 p.m.
Weekend Music Series . Live music from 1 to 4 p.m. by Bill O’Neal & Andy Koontz. Lunch fare, homemade treats, ice cream, and wine by the glass available. Sunday, July 27, noon to 5 p.m.
Sunset Sips & Sounds . Live music by Mark Miklos. Light fare, wine, and wine slushies available. Friday, August 1, 5 to 8 p.m.
