Bethel Hobbs Community Farm founder Ann Pellegrino, inspired by her own struggles, gives back to the community

In April 2007, Ann Pellegrino said she was driving to her Centereach home when she saw people in need living in the woods and walking along Middle Country Road.

The sight took her back to a time a decade earlier, when she was single with three kids aged 2, 6 and 10, juggling two nursing jobs without a car and relying on canned meals and nonperishables from local food pantries.

“Things were hard, and money was tight,” she recalled. “I had to be able to feed them and sustain their little bodies.”

By 2002, Pellegrino had remarried and started getting back on track. When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she said she quit working to care for her full time.

It was after her mother went into remission that Pellegrino said her “eyes opened up” to what was going on in her own neighborhood.

So she rented a rototiller and pulverized her backyard — a manicured haven with an in-ground pool, a slide and a cabana — to start planting seeds. Much to the bafflement of her husband, she said, when he came home to a destroyed lawn.

Asked what she was doing, Pellegrino said, “People are hungry, I need to feed them!”

That sudden calling she felt only grew from there.

15 FOOD PANTRIES

For 17 years, Pellegrino, 57, has devoted herself to growing, harvesting and distributing fresh, organic vegetables, herbs and fruit to people living in poverty as the founder and director of Bethel Hobbs Community Farm. The nonprofit, consisting of Pellegrino and a small but dedicated band of volunteers, operates on about 5 acres of a sprawling 11 acres of historic farmland on Oxhead Road in Centereach.

Each year, they provide between 75,000 and 100,000 pounds of produce to 15 food pantries across Suffolk County, including St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church in Selden and Smithtown Gospel Tabernacle.

But in 2007, the farm sat neglected and overgrown. The property had been owned for seven decades by the Hobbs family, after James Hobbs, a farm laborer from Georgia, purchased it in the 1920s. His son, Alfred, later inherited the farm, and it prospered for decades — until Alfred’s death in 1996 at 90 years old.

What is now the last remaining farm in Centereach was left, in accordance with Alfred Hobbs’ wishes, to Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Setauket, where he was a member, under the condition that the land would only ever be used for farming.

But “legal complications” surrounding the will led to a “delay in transfer” and the property was vandalized and fell into disrepair, according to the Town of Brookhaven.

Meanwhile, Pellegrino, launched on her mission to feed the needy, said she realized quickly that her backyard was not big enough for her vision. She thought of the once-functioning farm she passed all the time.

“I was like, ‘If we find out who owns that farm, we could feed a lot of people,’ ” she said. “Everyone thought I was crazy, but I just kept going forward.”

Pellegrino said she approached church officials and was ultimately granted permission to farm on the site. The project, under the name Friends of Hobbs Farm, started in July 2007 with a 50-by-100-foot plot, a donation of 240 tomato plants and no water or electricity. By 2008, Pellegrino said the farm had its first harvest of zucchini, yellow squash and cucumbers, which was picked up by Lighthouse Mission in Bellport.

“It’s truly been a miracle, a quiet miracle,” said the Rev. Gregory Leonard, 75, who retired in 2020 after 26 years as the church’s pastor. “[Ann] has been a blessing not only to the church but to the greater community.”

FRESH DELIVERY

Harvesting usually starts before dawn Monday through Friday, with trucks picking up the vegetables each morning and delivering them to the pantries the same day for optimal freshness.

Some of the annual crops include zucchini, lettuce, carrots, beets, cabbage, arugula, tomatoes, cucumbers, collard greens, Swiss chard, onions, scallions, garlic, various herbs, sweet potatoes and eggplants.

Pellegrino said her mission was always to give people in need the healthiest level of nourishment — recognizing that is not always attainable for those on a limited budget. A constant motivator for her has been making sure kids are properly fed, she said.

According to Island Harvest Food Bank, a Melville-based hunger-relief organization, more than 90,000 school-age children live at or below the poverty level on Long Island.

“That’s our next generation,” Pellegrino said. “If we’re not feeding their minds, what are they actually able to pay attention to?”

'BECAUSE OF HOBBS’

Ken Carmel, the director of Grace Care, the community outreach program within Genesis Church in Medford, said Hobbs Farm’s contributions are “an amazing lifeline” to the hundreds of people he serves on average every week. A majority of the recipients are older and wouldn’t normally have access to nutritious meals, he said.

“Because of Hobbs, these folks have a much healthier alternative, and they’ve been a tremendous resource to us,” he said. “I couldn’t speak higher about a human being than Ann, and we’re ever grateful for her core of volunteers.”

Pellegrino, who was honored in May as the Suffolk County 2024 Woman of Distinction for her revitalization of the farm, said she generally spends upward of 60 hours a week at the property, often staying late into the night with headlamps on.

‘ARMY’ OF VOLUNTEERS

But she’s quick to add, “It takes an army to run this place.” She’s particularly grateful for her two main volunteers: Retirees Elaine Gaveglia, 81, who is in charge of dividing the food for the pantries they distribute to, and Mary Ann Macaulay, 71, who’s “here before the worms are up” harvesting.

Outside of rototilling and some tractor work, she, Gaveglia and Macaulay do everything by hand: planting the seeds in the greenhouses in February, readying seedbeds, digging holes, laying drip tape for irrigation, watering and covering plants with plastic, placing paper and pins between the crops, mixing soil, weeding and picking vegetables until the first frost brings the operation to a halt, usually in November.

“This place is blessed, I swear,” said Gaveglia, of Centereach.

After 12 years as an editor at Dayton T. Brown Inc. in Bohemia, Gaveglia said she was laid off in 2010. She started volunteering at the farm in 2013 after reading an article about it.

“I absolutely love it,” she said. “It’s peaceful, you hear the birds, you feel the wind. And dirt is actually really good for you physically!”

Macaulay, who also lives in Centereach, was a full-time caregiver for sick family members for nearly two decades. After their deaths, she said she felt lost until a visit to the farm in 2020.

She now volunteers there five days a week, starting at 5 a.m. “I’m caring for lots of people in a different way, and that makes me feel good,” Macaulay said.

FARMSTAND, FESTIVAL, FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS

Pellegrino said the nonprofit supports itself by hosting a seasonal farmstand through the state Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program and an annual fall harvest festival in October, as well as fundraising and grants through the Town of Brookhaven.

Groups also often volunteer to pick vegetables and help around the property. Faith Argeroplos, 28, recalled spending summers at Hobbs throughout her elementary and middle school years, where she learned how to plant seeds, harvest and fix irrigation. She said she also found her purpose in life, especially when she’d drop food off at pantries.

Today, Argeroplos is a NextGen pastor at Genesis Church. She said she brings kids from her church’s youth program to the farm to volunteer and regularly picks up food for distribution.

“What’s really significant about Hobbs is that it gives dignity to the people the food is going to,” Argeroplos said. “They’re not getting bottom-of-the-barrel leftover stuff from the grocery store — but the best of the best.”

Speaking about Pellegrino, she said, “Ann isn’t a normal person — she’s outstanding in character, and as a young girl, to see a woman who is so strong and devoted to the vision she had for something changed my growth as a person.”

But even after all these years of leadership, Pellegrino still doesn’t consider herself a farmer. When she started, she said she had no prior experience beyond basic gardening.

“I didn’t know anything from anything . . . My husband didn’t even eat vegetables,” she said with a laugh. “It was just about utilizing this property to help other people.”

WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBILITY

On a recent Sunday in October — as a group of Stony Brook University doctors picked sweet potatoes alongside Gaveglia — Pellegrino and her husband, Greg, 56, walked together through the farm’s Garden of Ephraim.

The wheelchair-accessible space with raised beds opened on the property in 2014 through a grant secured from the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

Pellegrino said the site and a sensory garden built last year for guests with special needs are meant to ensure all visitors are “able to come to the farm and feel welcome and comfortable.”

The garden beds are sized and placed in such a way that someone in a wheelchair can easily reach the plants and turn from one bed to another. The area around the beds is paved so wheelchairs don’t get stuck in mud, Pellegrino said.

She was moved to create the garden after her son, Christopher, became paralyzed from the neck down following a car accident in 2011. She saw how difficult it was for him to navigate the garden in his wheelchair, but after the new space was installed, she said he was able to return to the farm often. He died in 2018 after experiencing a brain aneurysm.

“For a while there, life got really hard,” she recalled. “I remember talking to him and saying ‘I think I need to give up the farm.’ He was like, ‘Mom, you can give up the farm, but you can’t give up the wheelchair garden. You gotta keep that going.’ ”

Greg Pellegrino has also supported his wife’s efforts. Though he may have initially been shocked when he arrived to find his lawn ripped up, he appreciates the work she has done to help the community.

“She has such a huge heart, and she’s for people,” he said. “It was very, very sudden in the beginning, and it’s a lot of hard labor . . . But nothing was going to stop her. And it’s mind-blowing how many people rely on this food for their families.”