When I catch up with June Farms owner Matt Baumgartner, he’s on his yearly escape from the frigid upstate New York winter, taking calls from his Miami condo.
My first question to him is one that he frequently throws out to guests on his recently launched podcast, Farm Therapy with Matt Baumgartner: On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you right now?
“Because I’m in Miami and I’ve been getting some sun…,” the New Hartford native says, “like, a five.”
It’s the kind of candid answer—unvarnished, a bit risky—that’s part of the Matt Baumgartner package. It’s indicative of the hard-driving, tell-it-like-it-is personality behind a decades-long, hit-filled career in hospitality. A career that has not come without personal costs.
If you’ve watched June Farms, the Prime Video reality show shot at Baumgartner’s highly successful agritourism project in West Sand Lake that was released late last year, you know that the farm boss doesn’t have much of a social or romantic life. Two and a half years after the filming of the reality show wrapped, Baumgartner tells me he’s still single.
“I’m fairly lonely,” he says. “I have a very difficult time putting on a fake face anytime things aren’t going perfectly in my business. It comes across as buzz kill. And I don’t want to be a buzz kill. So oftentimes I find myself becoming very reclusive.”
In one episode of June Farms, Baumgartner is on the verge of real tears as he explains to a bride why a newly installed “enchanted forest” wedding location on the farm is far from ready. This is a man obsessed with getting the details right.
While his need for perfection may translate to self-inflicted isolation in his personal life, when paired with his intuitive sense for what the next big thing will be, it becomes a formula for professional success in the notoriously capricious world of hospitality. If landing his own national TV show wasn’t validation enough that Baumgartner’s on the right track with June Farms, there’s this: This year, his venue was voted Best Family-friendly Farm and Best Wedding Venue by the readers of his hometown magazine. Clearly, in business, he’s doing something right.
If you zoom out on Baumgartner’s track record in the Capital Region, the pattern is hard to miss: He has a freakish ability to read the zeitgeist early, then build something that feels inevitable in hindsight.
In 1997, Baumgartner, then a recent Union College grad, helped usher in the era of the “big burrito joint” when he opened the hugely popular Bombers Burrito Bar on Albany’s Lark Street with $15,000 he won playing poker at Turning Stone Casino.
“At the time, there wasn’t a Chipotle; there wasn’t a Moe’s,” he says. “I had traveled to Boston and went to a place called Big Burrito, and I was like, this place is amazing. We need one in Albany.”
And that was just the beginning. Baumgartner went on to open Noche, a briefly successful nightclub in Albany’s Warehouse District, back “when nobody was there.” In 2009, after noticing how soccer fans love to congregate in pubs, he took a risk and converted Noche into the German-inspired Wolff’s Biergarten, which quickly took off.
At the time, the Warehouse District was still evolving from its industrial roots into a hub for cool bars, breweries, and restaurants. Baumgartner snatched up several key properties in the neighborhood on the cheap, including a building he converted into a pair of loft apartments where he still lives, as well as the buildings now occupied by Wolff’s, Thatcher Street Pub, Tanpopo Ramen, and Lost and Found Bar and Kitchen. As a landlord, he was able to dictate the kinds of businesses that could set up shop, effectively becoming one of the main architects of the area. In fact, he says he was actually the one who coined the moniker “Warehouse District” on his former blog, Friday Puppy.
In the years that followed, Baumgartner and his partners went on to expand Wolff’s Biergarten into multiple locations—including outposts in Schenectady, Syracuse, and Troy—turning a single neighborhood bar into a regional brand. In total, Baumgartner established 14 restaurants and bars across the 518 and beyond.
And then he went and bought 120 acres of farmland in West Sand Lake.
Baumgartner purchased what’s now June Farms in 2015 with the idea to use the land to raise meat for his restaurants. But he quickly realized that he was too attached to the animals to send them to slaughter. “I didn’t realize how intense it would be for me to be the person making the choice to kill an animal, so it required me to pivot,” he says. And, true to his trendspotting tendencies, he’d discovered a much more profitable business model: agritourism. Farms all over the Hudson Valley and Capital Region have also figured out that moneyed tourists drive a lot more profits than crops or livestock.
By 2021, Baumgartner had sold off both the Wolff’s and Bombers names, relinquishing operating control of his bar-and-restaurant empire (although he still owns eight properties in Albany) and allowing him to focus fully on June Farms. Since then, what started as a “gentleman’s farm” has grown into a place where people pay to step out of their lives and into a curated version of pastoral living—think grazing highland cattle, wandering chickens, and adorable goats, combined with rustic-chic touches like a high-end bar inside a wooden barn structure, plus Airstream trailers, lodges, and “wellness huts” that can be rented on Airbnb. (The grass-roofed Hobbit House is especially popular.) While staying at June Farms, guests can participate in a number of activities, including cow brushing, morning animal feedings, and the famous goat yoga sessions.
Then there’s the wedding business, the focus of the Amazon reality show (which, at press time, was nominated for Outstanding Reality Program in the GLAAD Media Awards). June Farms offers some glorious locations if you’re going for that wedding-in-the-country vibe. And many couples are—the farm is almost entirely booked out for weddings through 2026.
As a whole, the project has become the biggest bet of Matt Baumgartner’s life. He estimates that he’s poured more than $5 million into the property since purchasing it in 2015, when it was nothing more than dirt and trees. Over time, he’s added around 15 structures to the farm, including the Pony Barn Bar & Restaurant, where many of the wedding receptions take place.
Eleven years later, the Airbnbs are occupied, weddings are booking up, and the animals (and guests) are happy. Now, Baumgartner says he’s shifting his growth strategy for the farm away from new infrastructure and toward leveling up the guest experience.
The future, as he sees it, is all about wellness.
“I’m just really aware that wellness is what a lot of hospitality is moving toward,” he says. “I want to create more experiences that encourage people to put away their phones and connect with themselves or other people.” This March, June Farms will host a Renewal Wellness Retreat that’s billed as an “all-inclusive, three-day mind and body reset on 120 acres of farmland.”
In that vein, the one major capital improvement Baumgartner does plan to do in 2026 is install a pool. He plans to start a summer membership program that will give guests exclusive access to the pool and all of the wellness classes offered on the farm, for a flat fee.
That, and he also wants to insulate the barn, erect a permanent catering tent, and find a new caterer for the 2026 season. Oh, and the Town is requiring him to widen his driveway from 10 feet to 20 feet—a project that’ll cost around $400,000.
The truth is, building the dream never stops. Baumgartner can’t help it. Like most entrepreneurs, he’s forever mulling over the business in his mind: Growing it. Improving it. Making it more profitable and easier to manage, all while also still considering other—ahem—opportunities.
“I’m considering going back to Bombers and reopening that,” he tells me. “There are a lot of people that really miss that brand. And I’m sort of missing that life a little bit.”
But even if that plan comes to fruition, June Farms isn’t going anywhere. Baumgartner’s dedication to perfection may come at the cost of his own personal and/or romantic fulfillment, but he wouldn’t trade the satisfaction of watching countless couples realize their dream wedding at June Farms for anything.
“I’m not leaving here unless I get kicked in the head by a horse or have some kind of traumatic four-wheeler accident,” he says. “I actually dream about going out like that. I want to work on the farm for as long as I can do it.”
