Fate of LI's Last Duck Farm Hangs in the Balance of Newly Hatched Ducklings

The future of Long Island duck farming now depends on roughly 3,700 newly hatched ducklings.

Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue, the last of its kind in a category that once defined Long Island agriculture, was forced to close and cull its entire flock in January after bird flu was detected on the farm. While no human cases were reported, the farm had to close until all traces of the virus were eliminated.

Doug Corwin, owner and fourth generation duck farmer, weighed permanent closure, but decided to give it one last shot with the roughly 10,000 duck eggs he and his staff were able to save.

“I’m going to do my best to restart this place, but I’m not going to get it again,” Corwin said. “If I get it again, I’m done. We’ll make this real estate instead. This was heartbreaking enough once, I just can’t imagine doing it twice.”

While 10,000 eggs seems like a lot to the layperson, Corwin said, it’s not nearly enough to produce a full farm flock, and the 3700 that hatched, even less so. Corwin said there is a roughly 50/50 ratio of males to females, and it will take the females roughly six months to be able to lay eggs. It will take about three generations from the current hatchings to get to flock level again, and Corwin anticipates fall 2026 could be the earliest possible reopening date for Crescent.

These ducklings are all that’s left of the Crescent duck genetics Corwin and his family have spent generations perfecting.

“We wouldn’t have survived if we didn’t make our genetics a bit different than our competition,” Corwin said. “There are various marketplaces for duck: upper end restaurants, Asian trade, and retail trade, and the last two there tend to be price buyers, so aren’t exactly the type of customers that really addressed us all that much because we can’t compete on a price for price basis for the with the Midwest. So we’ve done everything we can with our genetics to make them different – meatier, with enough succulence that there’s a lot of taste still left there.”

Corwin has been advocating for a bird flu vaccine for his flock, but he’s up against his competitors in the larger poultry industry who largely oppose it.

“This is a big fight between various parts of the meat industry,” Corwin said. “Broilers produce chicken meat. A broil industry is dead set against it because they’re worried about trade restrictions taking away their export markets if there’s a vaccine approved in this country. Whereas this little duck industry is being decimated by it. The egg laying industry is being decimated by it. You can see that with the price of eggs right now.”

But it’s passion that’s motivating him to give it another try, as Corwin does not want to see Long Island duck farming become a thing of the past.

“If I didn’t have the community support, if I didn’t have the regulators tring to work with me and help me, if I wasn’t fighting just to try to stay in business, I’d be a lot wealthier just closing this place down,” Corwin said. “But I don’t really care about that. We own 140 acres here. I’m sure it’s worth money, but I don’t care about that. I want to be a duck farmer. There’s an awful lot of pride to what we’re doing. I was a little kid during the heyday of this industry. I’ve watched the suburbanization of Long Island. We fought against the tides, and spent a fortune in waste treatment and developed a duck that was able to give us a premium. And I really feel for all these old farmers who went out of business.”

The community isn’t quick to give up on Crescent, though. A fundraiser was held at Tellers: An American Chophouse in Islip on Friday, Feb. 28, and raised nearly $50,000 for the farm. It was organized Michael Bohlsen of the Bohlsen Restaurant Group — which owns Tellers — and as many as nine Long Island chefs, one of whom, Francis Derby, is the grandson of Lou Gallo, a duck farmer who closed his business in 1987.

“It felt good that here he was rooting me on, and his family was there,” Corwin said. “Seeing the younger generations there rooting me on was cool.”