Woodbury, NY – Kiryas Joel Expansion Plans Still Chickens and Eggs

Woodbury, NY – Three years ago, all hell broke loose in southern Orange County when it was disclosed that Kiryas Joel developers had bought 140 acres just outside the village, known for decades as ACE Farm.

“I thought we’d be finished in three years,” said Tyler Etzel Jr., who runs the business with his cousin, Michael Grindrod.
How long will they keep going? Maybe two years, maybe five, Etzel said. Their landlords haven’t pressured them to leave, and when they do, he and Grindrod said, they must give at least 18 months notice.

Much has happened since that winter day when Etzel’s father, Tyler Sr., signed the property over to an upstate businessman, not realizing until later that the buyer was a frontman for Kiryas Joel’s real estate interests.
Some customers blamed them, or thought their business was now Hasidic-owned, and had to be wooed back.”We did lose business in the beginning, but we brought it back,” Grindrod said.

Soon there would be a pitched battle to stop Kiryas Joel’s plans to tap New York City’s water supply, and a crusade to form new villages outside Kiryas Joel. Local residents began selling their homes in droves.
Through it all, Etzel and Grindrod kept working, enduring the heated rhetoric in which their beloved farm was invoked. That sale set off a panic, but three years since the momentous sale is still pending, and ACE Farm is still doing what it has always done: produce tens of thousands of eggs every day for local markets and eateries.