Suffolk Closeup: Hail the Long Island duck

And then there was one.

With the closing of the Chester Massey & Sons duck farm in Eastport at the end of last year, all that’s left of a Long Island industry, which in the 1950s consisted of more than 90 duck farms, is the Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue.

The good news, however, is that Crescent produces one million ducks a year and has survived and flourished through the decades by investing millions of dollars in waste treatment systems. Duck waste and its collision with environmental regulations crippled the industry on Long Island.

The Corwin family, which has run the Crescent Duck Farm for more than a century and made it the biggest duck farm on the island, sees a prosperous future ahead.

If you order that iconic menu selection — “Long Island duck” — anywhere between Philadelphia and Boston, including New York City and Long Island, Doug Corwin said last week, more than likely it really will be a Long Island duck, and from Crescent.

“Two thirds of the better restaurants between Philadelphia and Boston — River Café, Four Seasons, Starr Boggs, Stone Creek Inn [he continued with a very long list] serve our ducks,” said Mr. Corwin proudly.

The Corwins were among the original English settlers of eastern Long Island, arriving in Southold in 1640 “motivated by a quest for freedom to practice the Puritan religion,” notes the nicely presented history section on the Crescent Duck Farm website. The site of the farm has been in the family since the 1640s when the land was purchased by Matthias Corwin.

The nemesis of Long Island duck farms was Suffolk County’s first county executive, H. Lee Dennison.

Waste runoff from outdoor pens flowing into creeks and bays was a major issue for Mr. Dennison. When I began as a journalist here in the early 1960s, he criticized duck farms continually, concerned early on about nitrogen pollution of Long Island’s waterways.

At Crescent, however, its website notes, “in the 1960s the farm was dramatically upgraded in order to meet environmental responsibilities.” Doug Corwin relates how “we’ve spent a fortune” on waste treatment. There are no outdoor pens; all ducks are indoors. And after treatment, discharges are at “drinking water standard.”

Another big change happened in 1980 when Doug, a Cornell University agricultural sciences graduate, “began upgrading our breeding programs,” he said. “Prior to this, birds were selected on farming traits, such as good reproduction and growth.”

The upgrade changed this process so that selections were directed toward breeding the meatiest and most succulent ducks.

Doug explained last week that he developed a breeding program that not only resulted in more meat, but “we also left skin fat.” Competitors in the duck trade often have a “very dry product, not succulent or moist.” Passing on plenty of “skin fat,” he said, is key to duck succulence.

The major competitors now are in Indiana and Pennsylvania. Crescent accounts for 4.5 percent of duck production nationwide. Its ducks are to ducks what the Peconic Bay scallop is to scallops — very, very special.

Ducks were first raised in 1908 by Henry Corwin, a ninth generation descendant of Matthias, on what’s now Crescent’s 145-acre farm. He started by purchasing 30 “breeding ducks” that year.

As to the origin of what became known as the Long Island duck, in an article last year, Modern Farmer magazine told of how duck farming started here in the 1870s. Citing history in the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, it said “four white Pekin (now Peking) ducks successfully arrived on our shores from China for breeding purposes (at least 15 others did not withstand the voyage, another five survivors were promptly eaten).

After propagating in Connecticut for a time, they traveled on to Long Island, where they became the Adam and Eve of the future [duck] farming boom.”

Modern Farmer noted how Long Island duck became a “favored poultry” nationally “especially among restaurant chefs,” and by the 1960s Long Island farms produced 7.5 million ducks a year.

Crescent Duck Farm remains a family business. Doug’s father, Lloyd Corwin Jr., also a Cornell graduate, is still working on the farm. Doug and his brother Jeff work alongside their sister, Cindy (Corwin) Jackson, and their aunt Janet (Corwin) Wedel and two of Doug’s sons, Pierce and Blake and Jeff’s son Jeffrey Jr.

The Big Duck structure sitting alongside Route 24 in Flanders was built in 1931 by duck farmer Martin Mauer as an easily-identifiable structure from which to sell his ducks and eggs. Now Suffolk County-owned on Southampton Town land, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a U.S. landmark.

Happily, what it represents, the justifiably famous Long Island duck, is still with us, too.