Amy Peters, Glen Cove farmers market founder, musician, dies at 62

Amy Peters, a force in both the local food and music scenes, died Sunday after a battle with lung cancer. The Glen Cove resident, 62, ran Deep Roots Farmers Markets in Glen Cove and Great Neck, and was a founding member of the Nassau-based Rusty String Band.

Longtime friend Brandy Smith Duggan called Peters "a rock, an anchor, the big sister I never had. She was passionate about the things she loved, but always calm and steady."

Duggan met Peters in 2003 at a live performance of a band  Peters was in with her future husband, Dave Berg. "Soon after that I went to their house in Oyster Bay — the downstairs was like a studio for local musicians — and I never really left. She was the heart of a tight-knit music family, filled with a love light."  

Peters played mandolin in a number of groups, but the longest lived was the Rusty String Band, formed in 1991 by her and Berg, the guitarist whom she married in 2004, Jordan Mindich (bass) and Scott Gramlich (banjo). "We played bluegrass," Berg said, "but we were also all Grateful Dead fans so I coined the term ‘deadgrass’ to describe what we did."

Three years after they started the band, Peters and Berg became a couple. He was a trained musician, but noted that his wife "was extraordinarily, naturally gifted. In bluegrass, the mandolin usually plays the melody but Amy was a rhythm mandolinist, she was the rock of our rhythm section."

But Berg knew that performing would never entirely captivate his wife. "Her interests were wide and varied; music was just one of the many things she was good at. Over the years, her food advocacy work became her primary passion."

Peters was born in Miami to Marlene and Harold Peters, both deceased. She grew up in Jericho, graduating from Jericho High School in 1979. Berg recalled her telling him that when she was a teenager she would ride her bike to buy organic produce at Rising Tide Natural Market in Locust Valley. (The pioneering health-food store, founded in 1976, moved to Glen Cove in 1983; Peters worked there in the early 2000s.) After she graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 1984, she got involved in the environmental movement and become active in Slow Food North Shore, a local chapter of the national organization that "strives to create a world where all people can eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it, and good for the planet."

In 2011 she attended a Small Farm Summit at SUNY Old Westbury where she met Bernadette Martin, a pioneer of the greenmarket movement and the founder and former manager of the Long Beach farmers market, established in 2008. Martin recalled that when Peters took over the fledgling Sea Cliff farmers market in 2014, "she would reach out to me for advice about state rules and regulations, but it wasn’t long before we were collaborating. She had tremendous integrity; she knew what she was talking about and she would go out there into the farming community, find those new producers and bring them to a place where they could get more exposure."

During the pandemic, the Sea Cliff market lost its lease and Peters began searching for a new site. She and Berg were part of a group, Committee for a Sustainable Waterfront, that had opposed RXR Realty’s residential project at Glen Cove’s Garvies Point, losing two lawsuits against the developer. But, Berg said, "when Amy needed a place for the market, RXR reached out and she had to decide whether she wanted to work with Goliath."

RXR, Berg said, turned out to be a good partner and, in 2021, Peters’ newly renamed Deep Roots Farmers Market debuted at Garvies Point, overlooking Glen Cove Creek and Hempstead Harbor. One of the most beautiful and well-stocked markets on Long Island, its 2024 lineup included East End produce from Garden of Eve and Orient Organics, sourdough loaves from Johnny Breads, empanadas from Nellys, pastries from Three French Hens and much more. A sibling market in Great Neck opened in 2022.

"The market was her happy place," Berg said. "It fed her and, especially when she was diagnosed earlier this year, she just dug in, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. She only wanted to serve the community, had no interest in taking credit."

"Amy was a fantastic stepmother to my kids," he added, "but if she had a baby it was definitely the farmers market."

Besides her husband, Peters is survived by her siblings, Kim Peters, of Dallas, and Brad Peters, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, her half-sister, Nicole Peters, of Toronto, stepbrothers, Jordan Freed, of Huntington and Adam Freed, of Puerto Rico; and her stepchildren, Emily Berg, of Sea Cliff, Sasha Berg, of Stamford, Connecticut, and Aaron Berg, of Coos Bay, Oregon. There is no funeral service, but at noon Saturday, there will be a moment of silence at the season’s final Deep Roots Farmers Market in Glen Cove.