Apr 24, 2020 3 min read

Keith Martin has an unwavering can-do attitude, initiated and fine-tuned during a childhood in Rices Landing.

“I started as a farmer, and I’m still a farmer,” said Martin, who learned long ago, through a tough agrarian existence, not to accept defeat regardless of the obstacles ahead.

“We don’t get up in the morning thinking we’re going to fail. It’s the opposite, actually.”

Farmers face a myriad of challenges, and tackling them tests their improvisational skills. Yet they usually triumph. Martin refers to this resilience as being able “to fix the tractor.”

But until six weeks ago, neither he nor any of his local peers had experience with the runaway vehicle known as COVID-19. The novel coronavirus has forced the closure or partial closure of thousands of Pennsylvania businesses not considered “life-sustaining.” Schools and hotels have been shuttered, and the operations of numerous restaurants have been limited to takeout and delivery orders, a fraction of their usual business.

The pandemic has had a significant impact on Martin and his business, Elysian Fields Farm, which processes and distributes purebred lamb products to high-end restaurants around the country and specialty food retailers in the Pittsburgh region. The Duquesne Club, a private club in downtown Pittsburgh, has been one of its top clients since 1992.

Elysian Fields is a 250-acre spread in Greene County, in Morgan and Washington townships outside of Ruff Creek. The business is incorporated as Elysian Fields LLC, for which Martin has served in a supervisory capacity for 31 years.

Closures, he said, meant “essentially that our revenues dropped 90% overnight. Dozens and dozens and dozens of restaurants around here closed, literally overnight.”

The farm had to lay off 10 of 32 employees, but for now Martin is paying the rest of the staff out of his pocket. He and partner Thomas Keller have applied for loans and other support, “but that is slow in coming,” Martin said recently.

They do have a revenue stream, however, and it is promising. Elysian Fields and two other farms have partnered to provide a weekly, online Small Farms Provision Pack, featuring lamb products and recipes from Keller and four other chefs. The packs can be delivered to consumers’ homes, with a percentage of the purchases supporting furloughed restaurant employees. Martin and Keller are in the third week of this endeavor.

“Everyone, as far as I’m concerned, is a partner of ours that we will engage,” Martin said.

The Provision Packs are an offshoot of the tractor analogy, he said. “We create solutions. Ninety percent of my business was immediately terminated, so we created solutions.”

There was a time, back in the 1980s, when he was creating financial solutions. Martin was a broker for seven years with Parker/Hunter, an established investment firm in the Pittsburgh area. He left as an assistant vice president in 1989, to return to Greene County and become involved with Elysian Fields.

He and Keller are co-owners of Elysian Farms LLC, which also has offices at Bailey Center in Southpointe. Ray Stockdale, of Ruff Creek, is the controller.

Martin, like the rest of the humanity, is astounded by the pandemic, seemingly a once-in-a-century occurrence similar to the global flu outbreak of 1918. “This is extremely frustrating for us because there is no solution. This is not a tractor in need of an overhaul.”

Yet Keith Martin pledges that at some point, he and Thomas Keller will be back in the driver’s seat at Elysian Farms.”

“There is no answer to this (outbreak), but we will be there this fall. We will survive this.”