Katie Baldwin has an answer ready when people ask what Amber Waves Farm is actually building toward. "It's fully baked into our plans for the next decade to scale our workforce training and to really be a leader of regenerative organic farmer training in the country," she told Southforker this summer. "We can train people and launch them so they can start an Amber Waves model of agriculture in their community."

Most residents who stop at the Main Street market for tomatoes and a loaf of bread know Amber Waves as a farm stand with a good café attached. Fewer know that its actual output, the thing Baldwin and co-founder Amanda Merrow have spent eighteen seasons building, is farmers. The vegetables are the visible part. The apprenticeship program underneath them is the part that keeps producing new farms around the East End, and this year it produced more interest than it ever has.

The Lease That Can't Be Flipped

Amber Waves exists on land that cannot be sold to a developer, a vineyard, or a horse operation, no matter what the market would pay for it. Baldwin and Merrow met while apprenticing at Quail Hill Farm under Scott Chaskey in 2008, and by 2009 they had secured a three-year lease on 7.7 acres from the Peconic Land Trust, right behind the old Amagansett Farmers Market. They renewed that lease several times, then in 2016 signed what the Peconic Land Trust confirms was the first enhanced agricultural easement in the Town of East Hampton. The terms are specific: the land must stay actively farmed, its resale value is capped, and if it ever changes hands, it can only go to what the easement calls a bona fide farmer of food. No sod. No viticulture. No nursery stock.

That single agreement is why Amber Waves has been able to grow from one acre of production in 2009 to 45 acres today, spread across Amagansett and East Hampton. It is also why the apprenticeship program matters more than a seasonal internship listing suggests. When the land itself can't be repositioned into something more profitable, the only way the operation scales is by scaling the people who know how to farm it, and by helping some of them go start farms of their own.

Why the Line to Get In Just Doubled

For 2026, roughly 200 people applied for nine apprenticeship spots. Baldwin has called it a strong application year, and applications have doubled year over year. When she asked her current apprentices why, the answer she heard most often traced back to the last five years spent largely on a screen, and a want to feel, in her words, tired in the body at the end of a day of real work.

That surge is worth setting against where the program stood just three years ago. At its 15-year mark in 2023, Amber Waves had graduated 50 apprentices, and eight had gone on to start their own farms or food businesses. By this season, alumni have passed 70, and at least 15 have launched their own operations. The graduate class grew by less than half in three years. The number of new farms it seeded nearly doubled in that same stretch. Whatever Amber Waves is teaching, more of it is sticking.

Where the Graduates Actually Went

Two of those spinoffs are close enough to visit this week.

Isabel Milligan apprenticed at Amber Waves in 2017 and went on to co-found Feathertop Farm in East Hampton, which launched in 2024. James Burke and Andie Fortier, who came up together, started Sand and Soil Farm in Amagansett in 2020, farming land leased through the same Peconic Land Trust relationship that anchors Amber Waves itself. A third graduate, Amanda Stefan, took the model all the way to Oregon and started Wild Gully Farm there, which says something about how far this one apprenticeship class has traveled without losing its shape.

Sand and Soil began on a single leased acre from the Peconic Land Trust and has since grown to three acres, a certified organic operation that also farms a plot at Nick and Toni's in East Hampton. Feathertop runs on a simpler weekly rhythm: order by Friday 5 a.m., pick up that same afternoon. Neither one advertises itself as an Amber Waves offshoot. You have to already know the apprenticeship history to see the through-line, which is exactly why most people who shop at all three don't realize they're buying from the same lineage.

What Changes If You Already Shop Here

None of this changes what a Saturday morning at the Main Street market looks like. The line is still the line. The tomatoes are still the tomatoes. What changes is what your membership dollars are actually funding. In a 2025 interview, Merrow and Baldwin described the farm's finances plainly: every dollar the market brings in gets routed back into four things, children's education, apprentice training, food access, and keeping the fields open to the public. That structure is also why the farm has been able to donate more than $100,000 worth of vegetables, flowers, and prepared food to six local pantries in a single year, alongside teaching thousands of children in its outdoor classroom.

If you want to extend your support past the Main Street stand, both graduate farms take members directly. Sand and Soil's CSA runs a flexible share with pickup twice weekly in Springs and East Hampton. Feathertop operates on a stricter but simpler cadence, order and collect the same week, no membership commitment required. For residents already juggling a CSA share from Amber Waves, either one is a five to ten minute drive that puts a second, related farm on the weekly rotation instead of a trip to a grocery chain.

The farm itself has told interviewers it now stays open close to the full year, closing only for a couple of weeks in late February, which makes it one of the few Main Street businesses that doesn't fully retreat once the summer crowd thins. Weekly compost drop-off, run in partnership with the Town of East Hampton, has also become part of the property's regular rhythm for residents who want to send scraps somewhere useful instead of the trash.

The Part That's Easy to Miss

Amber Waves is often described as the most democratic institution in a hamlet defined by exclusivity, a farm stand where the wait in line treats everyone the same regardless of what their house on Further Lane is worth. That's true, but it undersells what's actually happening underneath the market tables. An institution that trains nine new farmers a year, on land that is legally barred from ever becoming something else, is not just serving Amagansett's present. It is deciding, one apprenticeship class at a time, who grows the region's food a decade from now. The doubled applicant pool this year suggests that decision is about to get more crowded, in the best possible way.

For residents who've watched Amagansett's Main Street evolve season after season, this is the story worth following closely: not which storefront opened next, but which farm someone trained here is about to start next.

If you're weighing what it means to put down roots in a hamlet where the land itself can be built to outlast any single owner, the team at The Lori Schiaffino Team can walk you through what that kind of permanence looks like on the real estate side, whether you're evaluating a property near preserved farmland or simply want to understand how Amagansett actually works before you commit to it.