Heirloom Harvest 

Homestead , Florida — As with every other career, people get into farming and ranching by accident, or by design. For one Florida’s most innovative farmers it was definitely the former – and the accident was tragic. A tragic accident in fact. Teena Borek has built a good business but she has some soul searching to do before getting her family involved.

“I like to be able to walk through these greenhouses where we’re growing arugula, take my hand, twist it, and bring it home.

“It has been a very interesting life. Never a dull moment.”

Martina “Teena” Borek strolls through her greenhouse, where she’s taking a chance on a new crop: arugula. It’s a leafy vegetable gaining popularity in salads, and it’s just one of the new crops she’s experimenting with for Steven Borek Farms.

Borek works the farm – just under a hundred acres – with her sons Michael and Steven junior. Like many small family farmers these days, she’s long since realized that innovation is the surest path to staying relevant – and in business.

“We have to try and find out the crops that produce the most for the highest value, to be able to make the farm survive,” she says.

She knows a thing or two about survival. In 1980, Her husband Steven, for whom the farm is still named, died in a truck accident at age twenty-four. That left Borek alone with the heavily indebted farm and their two young sons.

To avoid ruin, she had to transform herself overnight from a stay-at-home mom to a farm owner-operator.

“When Steven died, I had no background in farming,” she says. “We had a baby and a 2-year-old, and I either had to pay off that farmer’s home administration loan or lose my house. So really, the smarter thing to do was to keep being a farmer and keep farming.”

Not only has she kept her farm viable over the years, but Borek is now garnering awards for her prowess as an innovator. Florida’s Department of Agriculture named her their “Woman Of the Year” in 2004.

Her farm’s bread-and-butter products have been field crops like tomatoes, corn, beans and potatoes. But more recently, Borek has enjoyed success at identifying and marketing niche products. The one she’s most passionate about is heirloom tomatoes. She explains their growing popularity.

“An heirloom tomato is a tomato that's been generations in families coming from other countries, and what we do is we grow (them) here. People that come from Italy like the heirlooms that come from Italy. There's Russian heirlooms. They come from all over. And it's almost like having grandma's garden there, because that's the old tomato that she used to grow.

“They’re old varieties, and the old varieties are open-pollinated, and so they don't look pretty. They taste absolutely delicious. You'll see scarring. They're not perfectly shaped. But that's characteristic of an heirloom.”

Borek is growing twenty varieties of heirlooms. She believes when it comes to choosing which to propagate, it all comes down to taste. And she trusts absolutely in her own.

“I love the heirloom because of the taste. If I don’t like the taste of it, we never grow it again. That’s how we do it. If I don’t like the taste, we don’t grow it any more.

“I eat as I go along in the fields.”

About 50 percent of the nation’s domestically grown fresh tomatoes come from the Sunshine State. Florida agriculture standards for field grown tomatoes demand a consistently round product as part of the requirement for “shape.” Heirloom tomatoes, with their natural lumps, just don’t meet those requirements. Borek sidesteps the problem by raising her heirloom tomatoes in greenhouses.

It’s a big challenge, but there are bigger ones.

“We managed two hurricanes two months after we bought the greenhouses. And it’s taken us until now to actually come back into production.

“The only thing constant in life is change. And you have to be capable of change when you're on a farm.”

Borek’s now seem to be following in her footsteps, despite her hope that Michael would find a different career after college.

At some point, Michael may have hoped for that, too. But, he says, “When I was in school, I was planning on doing another route. But you always get drawn back.

“We all have different sides we manage, but we come together, and it’s nice to be able to work with my family.”

Running a farm is a career Borek never envisioned for herself, but she takes pride knowing she’s building a future for her sons – even if it is in agriculture:

“I planned on being a mother and working somewhere. I didn’t plan on being in agriculture, but it’s a good life.”