Bethlehem Environmental Commons (BeECO) is a grassroots nonprofit founded in 2025 with support from Pace University’s Food and Farm Law Clinic.
Guided by a volunteer board of community members, BeECO partners with the Town of Bethlehem to implement the Vision Plan for the Historic Heath Farm, ensuring the land is thoughtfully stewarded for public benefit.
The farm occupies a unique position at the urban, suburban, and rural edge, where neighborhoods and developments meet prime farmland. The site's proximity to Albany places it at a strategic crossroads connecting major cities across the Northeast via key north-south and east-west routes. This location is ideal for developing and demonstrating collaborative, sustainable food production, value-add processing, and innovative projects that support next-generation farmers.
BeECO promotes next-generation farmers, local food systems, conservation, and climate resilient agriculture. Additionally, we aim to deepen connections between residents and the land through volunteer engagement, educational programs, outdoor recreation, and community wellbeing activities.
We bring farmers together with shared access to land and resources, creating a system where they can grow, earn, and contribute to a resilient local food system.
Around this work, BeEco invites the wider community to take part. Through seasonal events, hands on experiences, and opportunities to follow the growing process, people can connect to where their food comes from and understand the role they play in supporting it.
This connection builds both enjoyment and responsibility, strengthening a community that values local farming as a shared and meaningful way of life.
Independent farmers
Shared infrastructure
A community connected to its food.
It is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we are learning, speaking and gathering on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican and Munsee Lenape people, who are the indigenous peoples of this land. Despite tremendous hardship in being forced from here, today their community resides in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all.