New Haven Independent

Patrick Horan was doing a brisk business at New Haven’s downtown farmers market on Wednesday on behalf of his family’s Waldingfield Farm. The energetic 38-year-old former hedge fund employee cautioned against seeing his dramatic career shift, at a time of market collapse, as a way of doing penance through vegetables.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m very much pro-capitalist. It was just time to leave.”

The place he left was the Niederhoffer Capital Management Company. Horan worked there until 2006 managing the back office. What this meant, he explained, was making sure there was cash behind the trades and doing the necessary paperwork. He made a good salaried living, married, lived in Brooklyn. He was even able to pursue an acting and film-making career in his off time.

“Honestly,” he said, as he bagged a quarter of a pound of peppery arugla for one of his many regular customers, “it was better than waiting tables. It was just time to go.”

What Horan returned to, however, was no mere start-up. A 159-acre farm in Washington, Connecticut, has been in his family for generations. His brother Daniel had reclaimed it as going concern in 1990; Horan had been periodically involved along with his twin brother Quincy.

Wwhen he returned form New York, it was with a business plan to turn the certified organic vegetable farm into a different kind of concern.

Not much was lost on the guy in the back room.

“I learned a lot, of course, about risk and leverage, and being temperate” he said, “because so many of those guys in the hedge fund business didn’t have a clue where their trades really ended up. My brother, well, he’s a farmer strictly, and I run the office. Beyond that, I decided we would take the farm and make a brand out of it.”

He recently launched a separate but allied business. Its first product is a marinara sauce made from the organic heirloom tomatoes, which are the signature item of the Waldingfield Farm. “We bring the tomatoes to Palmieri’s on Hamilton Street in New Haven, which is one of the last companies that process them to make the sauce.”

Other products are on the way, he said, with as many ingredients as possible coming locally. The new business, as the old, is infused with the same values: Small carbon footprint, grow it and sell it from Boston to Brooklyn is his mantra. It appears to be happening, along with a profile of the company in an upcoming Connecticut section of The New York Times.

“Look down this whole row of farmers,” he said between sales of his broccoli and Baldwin apples. “People here are not doing it for the money, but because it’s something they love.”

Not to overplay the comparison between hedge funds and haricot — but a sense of being on the rising tide of some important new cultural trend also emerges in Horan’s enthusiastic delight in selling his products.

“Chefs may have been the cultural icons of the ’90s,” he said, as he filled one customer’s order for Japanese kubocho squash. “But organic local farmers are the culture heroes of this decade. I mean they’re not better than other human beings, but they’re doing what they love and what’s important for right now.”

The meltdown on Wall Street, he said, was not only a set group of individuals’ fault, but our faults as well for wanting such instant gratification. “Do you know the reward that comes from the slow process of watching a field of tomatoes ripen and ready to go in August? Immense!”