Nothing makes peaceful news headlines quite as dramatically as pictures of tanker-loads of milk being dumped into a manure lagoon — particularly when such news clips follow pictures of nearly empty dairy cases in the supermarket. A serious imbalance of raw milk supply and demand has become collatera...

On www.eurekalert.org on March 2, 2020, McGill University published an article titled: “Widely used Weed-killer Harming Biodiversity.” The article’s subtitle states that glyphosate-based herbicides comprise the class of weed-killers most commonly used by the world’s crop growers. According to Canadi...

Monday afternoon I took 13 soil samples. Immediately upon returning home, I spread out each of the samples on newspapers on card tables on our front porch. Early this afternoon, all samples appeared to have dried sufficiently overnight to screen successfully. After screening, the separated soil was ...

On March 6, approximately 175 people attended the all-day 2019 NOFA-NY Dairy and Field Crops Conference. This Conference, held at the Holiday Inn of Syracuse/Liverpool, also served as the annual membership meeting of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY). In addition to att...

Most U.S. agronomists agree on one major cause of global warming (or climate change if you prefer that term). That is the reduction of organic matter (OM) on U.S. cropland, arguably a greater issue than lost OM at any other farmed location on our planet. [Brazil may be a close second, as this equato...

The book Silent Spring, written by Rachel Carson, is credited with launching the environmental movement. Her book is the literary cornerstone of our planet’s ecological conscience. I became aware of Silent Spring, as it was about to be published in 1962. I didn’t actually read the whole book until a...

Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania’s most famous resident is a groundhog (or woodchuck) named Phil. This medium-sized rodent (beavers being much bigger rodents) allegedly predicts the weather annually on Groundhog Day (Feb. 2). If Phil sees his shadow, we Northeasterners are stuck with six more weeks of win...

Back in 2005… while I substitute-taught the ag program at the local vocational school… a student got a lesson in soil compaction. (I liked it when someone grew tomatoes, particularly when they ripened during the dead of winter.) One student was watering his little elevated garden plot, using a prett...

My Canadian friend, Ann Clark — retired agronomy professor from Ontario’s Guelph University — emailed me a link (www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/18508) with the headline “Glyphosate and dicamba herbicides increase antibiotic resistance in bacteria”. The article accompanying this link appeared on...

In early fall 2016, Sue and I were visiting my sister Ginny who lives in central Ohio — a region which is very much part of the nation’s grain belt. So we drove by huge fields of stover trash from both corn and soybeans that had been recently combined. These trashy fields would lay that way until sp...

A few years ago, a friend of mine who lives in a Mediterranean country was visiting upstate New York. As we rode around the countryside, he asked me why there was so much abandoned farmland. I told him small-dairy farmers once rented and worked those fields that we had just driven by (mostly three t...

Giving bees a break Just behind our house in Hartwick is a commons area of about eight acres. It’s privately owned, but Andy, the owner, lets people walk through this semi-wilderness parcel. This area has a small swamp and about four acres of orchard/meadow. The rest is pretty much goldenrod. Andy g...

Go back in history to the 1930s, where we can show that Delaware County produced more milk than any other county in the U.S. Fluid milk in cans was transported by trains to New York City. A large proportion of milk was made into butter right in Delaware County; much of the resulting skim milk was fe...

Two significant climate-related events are drawing a lot of my attention. The first one was an on-farm seminar which was written up in last week’s Country Folks. Elizabeth Tomlin wrote the article titled “Climate Smart Farming encouraged at twilight meeting”. The seminar was held last month at the M...

At the end of important football games the players on the winning team often take a bushel basket full of ice and an orange electrolyte-laden beverage and douse their coach’s head with it. This particular beverage is routinely consumed in large quantities by sweating athletes. Electrolyte packages a...