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Gone to the mules
In our summer issue we reviewed a documentary, The Farmer and the Horse, about a movement amongst small, mostly young farmers to use beasts of burden instead of tractors. All the rain has turned their ideological stance into a practical one. Upstate New York farmer Dennis Kelly told the Glens Falls Post-Star that he had to begin his harvest a week early at his farm near Queensbury, for fear Irene’s rains would bring fungus, and he had to rent
mules because the ground was too wet for tractors.
All drama is local
Unspool the yarn of the property that was the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility and you’ll get a pretty good approximation of the history of our country. You’ll find Indians, farmers, rampant alcoholism, Prohibition, a reform school, a prison, and now…
That’s the $64,000 question. After the men’s prison closed this summer, the Warwick Town Board rezoned the site off Kings Highway to office/ industrial. Town Supervisor Michael Sweeton wants to see the 772 acres become an agricultural park, not a dense residential development.
“The future of this huge site will fundamentally shape the direction of our community for decades to come,” said Warwick Historian Dr. Richard Hull. So will it be farmland or condos? As ever, the property is a microcosm playing out our national drama.
Come Together
“Farmers are tough,” said Vinny D’Attolico of D’Attolico Farm in Pine Island, post Irene. “We take beatings and we don’t ask for help, because if there’s a good year, we’re not standing on the corner passing it out, either. This time we’re asking for help. September and October, that’s when we start to break even and make money on a good year. That money pays for the seed order for next year. I know of a bunch of farmers who are done. That’s it. Finished.”
So far they’ve seen less than their fair share of the help they asked for from the government. Most farmers spit at the idea of the low-interest loans on offer. When, pray tell, would that loan be repaid?
But help did come, in one unexpected way after another. When Jeff and Adina Bialas, of J&A Farm in Goshen, had little to give to their CSA members, their neighbors at the Corn Shak pitched in six ears of corn per CSA member, and some extra for Adina to make corn bread.
All hands came on deck to make T-shirts, book performances, solicit auction items, and set up for the Warwick Valley Farm Aid fundraiser. The goal was to raise $25,000, to be split equally amongst Town of Warwick farmers
who applied. The whole town turned out that Saturday, raising $60,000. And a sign in a local deli read: “Flood damage? No house? No job? No food? Come on in and have an egg on a roll.”
Decorating a live tree is the greenest way to go. But if that route’s not for you, should you cut one down or get an artificial tree?
Real tree
Many don’t realize real Christmas trees are grown on farms just like other crops and are a renewable resource. For every tree harvested, a new one is planted. Christmas trees are grown all over the U.S. and Canada, so there’s always a local source. Tree farms provide habitat for a wide variety of birds and animals. Trees help filter the air, prevent soil erosion and provide oxygen. And the Christmas tree industry, with an estimated 21,000 growers nationwide, employs almost 100,000 full- and part-time domestic workers.
Post holiday season, a real tree can be recycled into bird feeders, mulch or fuel chips for biomass furnaces.
Some argue that real trees are sprayed with chemicals, and it takes a lot of trucks and fuel to move those trees around.The fact is that real trees are not produced for sale on a grocer’s shelf, so they don`t need to look perfect. Valued for their natural appearance, they are often grown with fewer chemicals than most of your store-bought produce.
Speaking of chemicals, most artificial trees are made from PVC, a potential source of lead. Ever notice the warning label on the box to wash you hands after handling your plastic tree? The manufacture of PVC creates dioxins, the most toxic of chemicals. There are relatively few artificial trees manufactured in the USA; the majority are imported from China, which is notorious for weak enforcement of environmental regulations.
There are statistics that state artificial trees could be greener if kept for eight years. In today’s throwaway society, many people don`t keep cars – or even houses – that long. When they do throw away their old artificial tree it will sit in some landfill for centuries.
If you ask me, the only thing green about an artificial tree is the money big companies make selling them.
Dan Daly, nursery manager at Hudson Valley Nursery in New Hampton
Plastic tree
It might seem obvious that since plants consume carbon dioxide, a real Christmas tree would have a smaller carbon footprint than its manmade counterpart. In truth, although the average Christmas tree consumes about 9 kilograms of CO2 on the farm, as that once glorious symbol of Christmas lies rotting in the mulch pile in the spring, it releases about 5kg CO2. Another 7.5kg for transporting your tree, lashed to the roof of the family minivan, brings the grand total to an emission of 3.5kg CO2.
The numbers for an artificial tree initially look a lot worse. The combination of production in a far-off Chinese factory, transportation by truck, boat, and a car to reach your doorstep, and the eventual breakdown of all that PVC in the nearest landfill produces a whopping 30kg of CO2. But, unlike the cycle of the real Christmas tree, which is repeated every year, a well-treated artificial Christmas tree will last for many years.
In fact, after nine years, the carbon footprint of using your plastic tree will be smaller than nine years of real trees. And for every additional year you string lights around your artificial tree, your Christmas footprint will continue to diminish until it disappears into the snow.
So, yes, a decade of an artificial Christmas tree, with its cold steel trunk, wire branches, and plastic needles that smell more like a chemical plant than Christmas morning, has a smaller carbon footprint than ten years of fresh-cut trees, but are the two even comparable? A real Christmas tree provides experience. I look back fondly on years of picking out Christmas trees with my dad and sitting on the floor while my parents struggled with each massive evergreen, loudly “discussing” whose fault it was that the tree was not perfectly vertical. But, what are these experiences worth? How many kilograms of greenhouse gas? The answer to that question cannot be determined using a mathematical formula.
Alicia Marrie, chemical engineer, grew up in Warwick
“Oh look,” says a delighted Dani Baker. Dark is falling fast as Dani walks me to the campsite on her 100-acre farm where I’ll be pitching my tent. “It’s spinning! That’s the thing about windmills. When the sun goes down they keep making electricity.”
Cross Island Farms’ 10-kilowatt windmill went online a month ago, and Dani is still in the honeymoon phase with the svelte turbine. She just got her first electric bill since the installation. It had been cut by more than half from the year before.
Cross Island Farms sits on Lawrentian shale on Wellesley Island, in the St. Lawrence River, which separates New York from Ontario. Folks up here call this the North Country. The toll on the bridge that leads to the island is cash only; it isn’t wired for EZ-Pass. An extended outage here isn’t so hard to imagine.
That’s why the Bakers are determined not only to renewably generate enough electricity on-site to run their farm, they also want it to run if the grid goes down.
Tomorrow morning, they will unveil the other two legs of the stool that will make their organic farm energy independent: a 5.5-kilowatt solar array and a 17-kilowatt propane generator that could keep the farm going for 13 dark days.
The morning of the open house, it’s drizzling. Hot cups of coffee on the screen porch punctuate a flurry of outdoor work. David Baker takes a break from “mud mitigation” (laying down hay where the solar panels’ wiring was buried) to give me a sneak preview of what’s at the other end of all this wiring. Out past the tomato field, 24 sleek panels are mounted at a 45-degree angle on metal legs atop concrete pedestals.
There’s still caution tape in front of the solar array because the shipment of parts was delayed by Hurricane Irene. Solar installers from Alternative Energy Systems have been here, in raincoats, since first light.
David fishes out his iPhone. He looks through the screen and steps back, back, past the rough timber fencepost that marks the corner of the crop field, and snaps a picture. He uploads it to the farm’s Facebook page, which will send a tweet to 115 followers.
Direct marketing is practically as much work as farming, but Facebook, too, is an aspect of sustainability, David explains. The farm doesn’t yet support the farmers: David works as a computer programmer of industrial machines, and Dani, a retired New York State prison psychologist, receives a pension. Reaching the small slice of the population that’s willing to pay more for organic food is crucial to the farm’s survival.
There seems to be a more considerable slice of the North Country population interested in not paying for electricity. Despite the rain, 20 people, most of them homeowners, trickle in for the tour.
They want to know how much everything costs. The $74,000 wind turbine cost the Bakers just $8,000. The New York State Energy and Research Development Authority paid half, and chunks were covered by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a federal tax credit. A NYSERDA grant covered about a quarter of the $40,000 solar array, and Dani expects a federal tax credit. The generator cost $12,800, including the six-foot deep, six-foot wide, 18-foot long hole in which its propane tank is buried.
One of the open house attendees did not have to travel far. Katherine Gwaltney, 29, has been living and working at Cross Island Farms as a WOOFer, or a member of Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which links willing workers up with farms. She arrived here just in time for the wind turbine’s ribbon cutting. She’ll be moving on to another farm in Vermont tomorrow.
“It’s been interesting to be here while they’re doing it all,” she says, as the group meanders from the turbine to the solar array, where the caution tape has been removed. A worker is still busy tinkering with the control box. His legs, scurrying up and down a ladder, are visible from where the group stands in front of the array.
“It’s a whole other part of my education. It’s really grass roots that they’re taking it upon themselves to generate energy solutions on this farm without waiting to see what happens with big wind.”
Gary Oppenheimer stages a coup d’ waste
Where was the idea for AmpleHarvest.org born?
Right here in front of you. In this garden, 2007 was a very prolific year. It reached a point where my wife was saying, “No more of that in the house.” And I’ve always hated waste, whether it’s food or time or energy. So I contacted a battered women’s shelter right here in [West Milford] and said, “I’ve got this extra food, can you use it?” I showed up with about 40 pounds worth of produce — peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes. This lady answers the door and she’s very gracious, and as I was leaving, she says, “Thank you, we now have some fresh food.” That really struck me.
When did you realize this problem was endemic?
In 2008, I was asked to take over the community garden. A lot of food was left to rot. I said, “If we’re going to have an ample harvest, the least we can do is give it away to people.” Google said the nearest food pantry was in Morristown, 25 miles away. I knew that was wrong. If I, an old geek and very internet savvy, can’t find food pantries in my town, that same problem must apply to millions of other gardeners. I got up the next morning and looked to see if AmpleHarvest.org was available as a domain. It was and I grabbed it.
You have 4,439 pantries signed on across the country.
Has this taken over your life?
Oh yeah. The more I spoke to people, the more I realized that I had stumbled upon a hole in the dike, and I figured I could plug it. The hole in the dike was the problem in the American food bank network that can best be summed up, if you ever read Adam Smith, as excess supply not meeting demand. There is excess food locally grown and there’s a vast need for food, and the two aren’t getting together.
You spend hours a day on the site. Does it support you?
I’m digging into my savings, to be blunt. We’re out looking for funding to have a paid staff . This is a lovely idea, but it’s not going to survive as a volunteer eff ort.
Have you always been a computer geek?
My geekdom started in my junior year in college [University of Bridgeport]. The school had just installed a mini-computer. I was enthralled with programming. In 1975, I designed a prototype email program when I was working for a bank. That same year, I built a computer. I soldered a computer together. My mother said I liked machines more than people.
AmpleHarvest.org just won the 2011 Glynwood Wave of the Future Harvest Award. Did you have any inkling?
I knew about the nomination. What I didn’t know was coming was last week, when I got an email from Arianna Huffington. She said I was nominated as one of the Huffington Post Game Changers for 2011.
Do you find yourself wondering how this all happenned?
No. What surprises me is: How come nobody thought of this earlier?
– Photo and Interview by Barbara Gref
Photos and Story by Rusty Tagliareni
In 1835, 40 school children sat at double desks in this high-ceilinged one-room building, facing the blackboard. In one corner was a bookcase, in the other, a sewing machine. In the middle of the room, a coal stove gave off warmth.
The Free Union Schoolhouse in Warren County, NJ closed in 1945 and became a residence in the 1950s. Since then, it has known several owners, but it wasn’t until Lorna and Phil Wooldridge bought it that the building turned back into a school – a home school for their son Jack, and for students Lorna tutors – and into a prime example of efficiency and forward thinking.
On under an acre, the Wooldridges grow vegetables, herbs and a pollinator garden full of goldenrod, Joe-Pye weed and Sundrops. It’s all fertilized from their compost piles, which include manure from local farms and 200 pounds of bat guano that Phil harvested from the rafters of the old church across the road and lugged home in chicken feed bags. They raise chickens and honeybees, which reminded me of their presence by bouncing off my head. They tag monarch butterflies, so others along the migratory path will know where they’ve been.
The flooring is local hardwood, laid by Phil. Clothing is hand-washed and air dried, and in the cooler months the woodburning stove doubles as a dryer. A rooftop solar panel provides hot water, and a pickup sits in the driveway. What’s forward thinking about a pickup, you ask? The thing runs off used cooking oil collected from a local restaurant.
The Wooldridges plan to do away with the plastic siding, a remnant from a previous owner, so that their home more closely resembles the old schoolhouse. They are weighing the costs – financial and environmental – of such a project.
Warwick's Black Rock Shelter has endured fire, ice, wind and rain.
Some thin places are fragile. I was planning on writing about the all-season delight of the mile-long walk on the Appalachian Trail Boardwalk off Glenwood Road in Vernon, across a flood plain and the suspension bridge over the Pochuck River. For years I have been walking that crooked path low through wetlands, over a river and back onto land.
That was before Hurricane Irene returned the flood plain into a form of the pre-historic lake it used to be. The boardwalk was made by volunteers over a seven-year period after 17 years of planning and acquiring the land. It was designed, smartly, to float up a bit during high water, but the waters of Irene were way too much and actually displaced the whole boardwalk. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference is gathering people to help fix this and many of the natural trails in the region. You can help (nynjtc.org).
And some thin places endure. I’ve been visiting area rock shelters, natural caves where there is evidence of human use for thousands of years. Yes, I want to sit where they sat! “They” are bands of Delaware or Lenni-Lenape Indians… and who knows before that?
Just outside Florida, off Route 17A on Quarry Road at a “Protected Area” sign, the land rises to the famous Dutchess Quarry Caves, a huge cavern that has been dated back 12,000 years. Other shelters on the property were blown up years ago by the quarry owners. There are many smaller shelters around that have been dated to the Late Archaic period, about three to four thousand years ago.
One is in Warwick just off Brady Road and Magnolia Lane. Just before the first house on the right on Magnolia Lane, you can bushwhack up a small hill to “Mount Lookout,” the rocky outcroppings that form the shelter. Go find it and sit.
– Daniel Mack, Warwick
Share your thin places at dirt-mag.com.
Photo by Pamela Chergotis
By Pamela Chergotis
Tom and I sat atop a ridge along the Appalachian Trail to watch the storm come in. We knew the hills of Vernon were out there, but a thick gray mat hung overhead, concealing everything. The air pressed down on us. Something was coming.
We thought Irene would cause trouble at the shore. The usual images of boarded-up beach houses and storm-tossed marinas came to mind. But this hurricane proved to be a disaster of inland places. That thick gray mat held water, so much of it.
And when it fell, all at once, the quiet streams, the little trickles, swelled and raged, pushing boulders and trees before them.
Hiking since Irene just hasn’t been the same report. Sawhorses with “road closed” signs block the narrow mountain passes that lead to trailheads. Others you can get to only by picking your ankle-turning way through washouts, around blowdowns.
But one treasure has emerged unscathed from the wreckage. There’s really nothing more you can do to the Badlands, as the pitch pine barrens of the Shawangunk Ridge are called. Fire, ice, wind, rain have all had their way so completely, the rocks and plants left are perfectly suited to their time and place.
Geological time hasn’t yet finished with melting and tumbling the Catskills. But the Badlands have gotten past all of that messy living earth stuff and settled into a regal retirement.
Nothing protects this most exposed of ridges from the full onslaught of the sky. Water has already washed away the soil and soft rock, leaving great blocks of very hard, and stunning, white quartzite. Out of the quartzite fissures grow a fairytale forest of pitch pine. Most of these gnarly trees are under six feet tall. Some grow so low in their mania to adapt, they creep along the ledges like groundcover.
You can’t take a bad picture in the Badlands: the 180-foot Verkeerderkill Falls (in winter, minerals streak the icefall with pastel pinks, blues and greens); the 360-view at High Point, overlooking the Catskills; the oceans of blueberry plants that turn scarlet every fall.
The trail follows the ledge that rims the central ravine. The blazes sometimes fool you into thinking they run right off the ledge. But they never do.
Sneak Peak
The hike: Loop at Sam’s Point formed by the Long Path (teal), high Point Trail (red), High Point Carriageway, and parts of the Loop Road.
Trailhead: Nature Center at Sam’s Point Preserve, Cragsmoor
Blazes: Long Path, teal; High Point Trail, red
Length: 10 miles round-trip
Why are people driving hours for their fix?
Glass mason jars clank as Mary Juliano heaves one cooler after another into her minivan. She picks up two envelopes labeled “eggs” and “milk,” peeks at the checks inside – $60 for 15 dozen eggs and $92.25 for 41 jars of milk – and backs out of the driveway.
For 10 Warwick families, Mary is the milkman this week. They can’t buy their milk at the grocery store, because the milk Mary is picking up is unpasteurized, and according to the FDA, dangerous.
Each state regulates raw milk as it sees fit, from banning it altogether in New Jersey to selling it retail in Pennsylvania. The most common arrangement is the one in New York, where you can only buy raw milk on the farm it came from.
Mary, mother of five, belongs to a CSA year-round and recently installed solar hot water panels. She likes raw milk because it’s “closest to the earth. I’m glad to be able to drink that and not feel like it’s been altered.” She has it with cereal, makes it into yogurt and butter, and blends it with fruit and agave syrup to make smoothies for her kids.
Her destination, 40 minutes northwest, is Freedom Hill Farm in Otisville, with a stop at Kirby Farm in Middletown for free-range eggs. Freedom Hill Farm doesn’t advertise, but since it started selling raw milk in 2007, word has spread like wildfire: “There’s this woman with this farm. You can eat off the floor. It’s raw milk. So-and-so says it’s the best milk you can drink.” Freedom Hill’s base of regular customers has grown to 700. Some make pilgrimages from as far as Manhattan.
Mary parks and shouts a greeting to farmer Julie Vreeland, who’s forking hay from the back of a golf cart into a calf’s pen. The small parking lot has two other cars in it, and more pull in as Mary unpacks 41 empties and loads full bottles into the coolers. Julie and Rick Vreeland had no intention of becoming the hub of a movement. Timing is everything.
♦
When Rick Vreeland says “the milk you buy at Shoprite is just white water,” well, for 26 years that was his milk. Half a life ago, Rick started one of the state’s biggest dairies, a 2,000 cow factory farm in Slate Hill.
The milk was homogenized to break up fat globules, pasteurized, and sold at grocery stores at the price the government set. The grain-eating cows and the humans were pushed to their production limit. Not your government man, Rick took a job with the county to make ends meet. After two and a half decades, this situation “got a little stressful.” The Vreelands sold out to Rick’s partner and bought the old farm from Rick’s dad.
This time around, the Vreelands settled on practices somewhere between today’s and those Rick’s great-grandfather (who died “right there,” said Rick, pointing to the barn floor) might have used. The Vreelands have 54 Jersey cows, grazed in the pasture, and milk 30 of them. The John Deere tractor out front was Rick’s grandmother’s. “I use it every day. I just love to hear it run.” Visitors can see the milk travel from vacuum cups attached to the cows’ teats through the circa-1960s milking system, headed for a tank in a sanitized room, to be hand-bottled.
Their vision was to start a visiting and teaching farm, while creating a business to be handed down to the next generation. They went with raw milk simply because it didn’t seem worth sending 186 gallons of milk a day to a processor.
While the cows are being milked, Rick, Julie, and three teenage girls who want to be vets brush the cows, moisturize a dry udder, salve a bruise. When a cow lies down on the barn’s memory-foam floor (perhaps the most modern of the farm’s equipment), the girls pile on top of the cow, which seems not to mind in the slightest. Time your visit right, and you might walk out with milk that was in the cow when you arrived.
“This is the way farming should still be,” said Rick. “Small, you can raise a family, get intimate with the animals.” Selling raw milk at $4.50 a gallon straight to the customer – plus, recently, pasteurized kefir and yogurt – the Vreelands now have a viable business. “I have better cash flow here than I did with 2,000 cows,” Rick said. “With the respect that when I get bills, I can pay ‘em.”
Raw milk drinkers say it eases maladies from asthma to eczema to cancer. At five percent fat, it’s creamier than whole milk but doesn’t make you fat. One of the Vreelands’ customers is on a raw milk diet, consuming nothing else for three months. That it can be drunk by the glassful by people who are normally lactose intolerant, this writer can attest. But of all its benefits, not the least is its potential, in an age of behemoth farms, to resuscitate the family dairy.
♦
James Kleister, 25, jogs outside in his socks when I arrive, thinking I’ve come to buy milk. A few years ago he caught wind of what was happening 25 miles to his west at Freedom Hill Farm. “When I saw the farm in Otisville, I saw yeah, it can be done.” He followed suit.
The fate of the 200-year-old family dairy in Washingtonville, or the 50 acres left of it, lies entirely on his shoulders. Until recently, things didn’t look good. “It costs $1.50 to produce a gallon and you’re getting $1 per gallon,” he said. “It doesn’t cut it.”
Aimee Polman, 23, lives a mile down the road from Kleister’s farm. She learned about raw milk when she researched it for a communications class at Orange County Community College. But Freedom Hill, then the closest source, was too far. Raw milk remained a hypothetical until she saw Kleister’s sign.
Now she buys a $5 gallon a week for herself and her mom (that’s $4 more than Kleister was getting per gallon three years ago). Four aunts, and a couple family friends have started getting it, too. Polman likes the milk’s fresher taste. She’s into the idea that it hasn’t been processed. Best of all, she hasn’t gotten a cold, sore throat, or sinus infection since she started drinking the stuff.
Kleister’s Udderly Fresh Farms has 100 customers like Polman, but persuading the mainstream is not proving easy. With the privilege to sell unpasteurized milk straight to the public come regulations exponentially more strict than those at a conventional dairy. Still, “a lot of people stop by, they want to buy milk. They hear it’s not pasteurized and they won’t try it, won’t even look at it.”
Not until he builds his base to 300 customers will Kleister feel confident that his dairy and its herd of 35 cows will continue into a fifth generation.
♦
Before she started milking them, Lisa Ross kept goats as pets. She’d dress them up in pink sweaters and university hoodies. She raised one that had been abandoned by its mother in her house, until it started humping everything and eating pictures off the wall. “I don’t have kids,” she said, “so I think I have a lot of animals to substitute.”
When she and her husband John, who run a dog boarding business from their Goshen property, needed an agricultural exemption to lower their taxes, they tried boarding horses. That didn’t work out. Lisa started breeding and milking her goats. Unsure whether she had enough milk to go into the bulk tank for pasteurization, she got her raw milk certification and started selling her milk for $25 a gallon.
And the people started coming. Like the Saudi royal staying at the Ritz-Carlton in New York last winter whose six henchmen would pull up to Ross Farms weekly in a black S.U.V., paying in hundreds.
The Ross goats moonlight as b-list celebs. Ginger was on the Letterman Show, dressed up like a peacock spoofing the bird’s escape from the Bronx Zoo. The rats backstage at Letterman’s studio are so big you could milk ‘em, laughed Lisa. A $750 check from the Dr. Oz show is displayed in on the milk room fridge, along with a permit to bring the goats to the city.
Ross Farms is experiencing more demand than its herd of 50 – 15 of them milking – can supply. “I tell everybody to call. Please, please call,” said Lisa, as she cleans Moomoo’s teat with iodine, preparing to milk her. “They don’t like that, when they show up and there’s no milk. I usually don’t have enough milk for everyone who wants it. I have to save it for people who really need it, people who are sick or have babies.”
She stopped selling to the public this year from August to January, but she makes exceptions. Frank Golio, 33, of Monroe, gets this VIP treatment. A year and a half ago, he and his partner didn’t know what to do about their three-month-old son, who had developed colic on formula. A gay couple, they didn’t have access to breast milk. They went to their holistic pediatrician. The closest thing to breast milk? Raw goats’ milk.
Raised on the Ross goats’ milk, the 19-month old twins now have “insanely aggressive” immune systems. Golio has been using it sparingly in anticipation of the winter shortage that happened last year, even buying extra and freezing it.
But if he should run out while Lisa is resting her goats, the babies won’t have to be weaned cold turkey. “She may milk here and there,” said Golio. “Lisa’s really good to me.”
The pasteurization debate
The milk you buy at the grocery store has been heated to 161 degrees for 15 seconds; if it’s been ultra-pasteurized to extend shelf life then it’s been heated to 280 degrees. We’ve been pasteurizing milk since the Industrial Revolution to kill disease-causing bacteria like salmonella and e-coli.
FDA: Raw milk is dangerous. It can harbor dangerous microorganisms that cause diseases like listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and brucellosis. Don’t drink it, period. Pasteurization does not affect milk’s nutritional value or cause lactose intolerance.
Raw milk proponents: The high heat used in pasteurization is an equal opportunity killer that cooks out vitamins, fatty acids, antibodies and enzymes, including the lactaid that helps digest milk. The milk produced by healthy, pasture-grazed animals in a clean environment by conscientious farmers doesn’t harbor dangerous bacteria and doesn’t need to be pasteurized.
Photo by Robert Breese
If you see some one dressed up like an astronaut in his own back yard, he’s probably keeping honeybees for one or more of the following reasons. Honeybees (1) pollinate your garden (2) make honey and 3) have been decimated by colony collapse disorder for reasons no one knows.
But did you have any idea there were 419 other bee species native to New York? Me neither. I hazarded eight when Louise made me guess.
Entomology master’s student Louise Lynch, 27, curated a year-long bee exhibit at the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum in Cornwall to fill the gap in our collective knowledge.
There are pin specimens of leafcutter bees that make their nests from cut-up leaves or petals, and squash bees that have migrated north as more of us northerners have started planting members of the cucumber family.
The exhibit’s stars are the honeybees flying in and out of their glass-encased hive through a hole in the museum wall, collecting nectar and pollen to turn into honey and generally being endlessly fascinating.
At right, environmental educator Pam Golben discusses the exhibit with its target audience.
– Becca Tucker
I seek you
through poison ivy
on the shoulders of roads.
Reaching through brambles
my fingers stretch out
to capture you.
You have lain here
through sunshine
and rain,
in ditches, in thorns,
in water and crushed
by the mower.
Who was the last person
who held you?
Were you thrown to your repose
by a teen eating candy?
Or tossed from the cab of a truck
by a man after work?
They let you become litter,
flaunting some misguided
freedom
to toss things out of the car,
talking and laughing
and looking away.
All you I have gathered –
water bottles still full,
Styrofoam cups for coff ee and
cream,
bags for Doritos
and cans for soda and Bud –
I haul to my driveway.
Whoever threw you away on the
road
should know that I throw you
out, too,
as they could have done,
into the garbage, the recycle bin;
because I want order,
consideration
for mother earth and a view
that is pleasant in this little
village
where we all live.
– Anne Hanson, Florida
Photo by Heather Mormile
Readers: Feeling stirred? Post your poetry at dirt-mag.com or email editor.dirt@strausnews.com. We’ll publish our favorite poem in the magazine.
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