Central Bridge Farms: 100 years and Counting. (And Time to Celebrate.)

Every farms has its story. This is John and Mattea VanDerwerken’s chapter. Family, faith, and Black Angus on a Centennial Farm.

Some of the VanDerwerkens’ Black Angus relax on pasture in front of a backdrop of fall foliage. They didn’t know it, but they were the stars of Central Bridge Farms’ October 3 Centennial Celebration.

When Mattea and John VanDerwerken welcomed their third son, Boone, at 5:28pm on April 17, 2026, it was in the same bedroom his great-grandfather was born in 99 years ago.

With his brothers, Boone became the fifth generation at Central Bridge Farms, a place where the land and our responsibility to it informs every decision and where family and community are everything. 

And in 2026? 

Mattea and John VanDerwerken are the fourth generation on Central Bridge Farms. Their three sons are the fifth. Milestones marked with family, neighbors, and friends at the October 3 Centennial Celebration

A New York State Agricultural Society Centennial Farm.

All of it something to celebrate. And with neighbors and friends and generations of VanDerwerkens, they did with an autumn-themed farm-to-table dinner, pig roast, live music, line dancing, farm tours, and a bonfire, all against the backdrop of old black and white photos and shared stories of those who came before them.

Everyone was invited to the Centennial Celebration and nearly everyone came.

Mattea: “It was a way to say thank you.”

John and Mattea VanDerwerken have been running the family’s Central Bridge Farms since 2022, working to create a new model for success with a future that includes selling their beef (pastured-raised Black Angus) directly to consumers, and diversification, adding a farm store, high tunnel, flowers, gardens, scratch-baked baked goods, chickens, and pigs even as they’re growing connections with other local growers at the Delmar and Colonie farmers markets.

No one went away hungry; snacks preceded a farm-to-table dinner. It all came from connections the VanDerwerkens made at farmers markets.

Add John’s job with NYS Farm Bureau, his health scare last fall, and three young boys…

But the two were destined for the life they’re living now.

Neither ever wanted to do anything else. They met showing cows at the Cobleskill Fair (Mattea grew up in Selkirk, a second-generation farmer with her own Black Angus herd), graduated SUNY Cobleskill with ag degrees, married in September 2020, and almost immediately started building on what had come before them, renovating the old egg barn into the farm store. 

They invested in genetics, began pasture rotations, and split calving season into spring and fall groups.

Always working, always thinking, always making connections and supporting other local small producers like themselves.

The Centennial Celebration was a way to thank the Central Bridge community for its support over the past 100 years.

  They tell their story on a website that pays homage to the family history with a timeline that begins in 1926 (when Elon R. VanDerwerken established the farm as a dairy), and runs through May 2023, when their first son, John R. was born, the first of the fifth generation. Even now, it’s all family-run with John’s dad, Mark, handling the hay.

John: “He kept it open for me to step into,” even when Mark and his oldest son, Robert, were deployed to Afghanistan in 2012. That’s when John first began managing day-to-day operations alongside his grandfather, John R. 

Cowboy boots outside the bounce house.

Roger VanDerwerken, John’s uncle, jokes that the barns had paint and electricity before the house, but it’s also true, something that kept the family’s options open through the Great Depression, the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, and today as agriculture changed and changed and changed again. And again and again and again. Infrastructure to build on.

John: “To see this all survive 100 years…I imagine everyone of those people in front of me, in line, keeping it going. It was always something I wanted to come back to. We’re not self-made at all. We stand on their shoulders.”

Missing from the Centennial Celebration was John’s grandfather, a farmer to the end: When he was 85, Grandpa John helped Amish builders raise a barn on the foundation of a three-story  barn built during the Great Depression (and innovative for its time), as Central Bridge Farms transitioned into a chicken farm with, at its peak, more than 10,000 chickens. 

“I always thought he’d be here for the 100th year.”

But Grandpa John died on October 6, 2022. He was 95.

Before he died, he’d passed his records on to Mattea. It’s a family joke (true) that no one else was ever allowed to touch them. And he probably couldn’t have found a better caretaker of the family’s history.

Mattea: “They took such care to preserve their history for the next generations. When you think of agriculture over 100 years, how much it changes and the tough choices they had to make. We’re very religious. John’s calling is to be a farmer. Our calling. From God…You couldn’t drag me off here. We’re stewards of God’s creation. We’ve been entrusted to run this business.” 

John: “Everything we do is done with intention.” They don't have the land to get bigger, but more importantly, that's not something that aligns with their values: making the best and most ethical use of their resources–including their land and animals. 

“We see ourselves as stewards of the land, our livestock and our community.

It’s a story they hope one of their sons will want to continue.

This is their chapter.

Want to write you own chapter on the land? Schoharie County’s Ag Development Office and SEEC both have resources you can check out.

Contact the writer at patsynicosia@gmail.com