The Girls at the Corner

They like to play hide-and-seek. Well, the truth is they are not really playing anything. Just going about their business. I am the one who looks eagerly for them each time I pass by, wherever they have wandered. Between the months of May and October, whether it be rainy or sunny, hot or chilly, the girls can usually be found congregating somewhere in the fields that straddle a hill in the northeast corner of the Town of Union, NY.

The cows belong to one of the few working farms left in my hometown. The survival of any farms in this part of upstate New York surprises me, as development has steadily crept up the hillsides of my valley over the years. As a child, I remember there being more of them. Although my family was firmly tethered to the Village of Endicott by work and relations, the countryside was always special to us; we explored it extensively in our Sunday afternoon excursions.

Case Road, looking toward Robinson Hill, Town of Union, NY

These recent bovine friendships flowered when my mother moved to a new senior care facility on the hills outside Endicott. This shift in my center of gravity required me to forge new routes from the highway to my mother's complex. Rather than follow my usual route along Main Street, I now exit Route 17 at the Oakdale Mall, the regional shopping center in Johnson City just east of Endicott. Five minutes from the highway and only a mile above the mall, I am on Robinson Hill, in the lush and fragrant uplands of the Susquehanna Valley. Wildflowers grow by the side of the road. Red-winged blackbirds soar overhead, their calls reminding me of picnics by the streams of my youth. There are trees and meadows, hills and dales, brooks and ponds. 

Farm at Robinson Hill and Case Roads, Town of Union, NY

At the corner of Case and Robinson Hill Roads where I make the turn toward the senior housing complex, there is a working farm complete with picture-perfect black and white cows. Not being an expert, I hear that these are Holsteins, the archetypical dairy cow of New York State. They would often hang out in the field nearest the corner where I turned up the hill. I could easily see their soft nuzzling noses scruffling among the hillocks. Some would look up at my car, bored, chewing. Then they would slowly resume their foraging. Occasionally, they would have arranged themselves in a circle to gossip in the shade of a stand of trees. Other times, they had meandered along a woodland cowpath to the other side of the hill, where I would find them grazing in the north pasture.

Seeing these cows always fills me with a sense of constancy. Beyond the ever-changing storefronts of downtown; beyond the industries that had built the town, and then abandoned it; beyond the big-box retail that now populates the valley ... this farm, these fields, these cows, have survived.

Farm in the Town of Union, Broome County, NY

Late last fall, after the cows had retired to the barn for the winter, the farmer removed the fencing at the corner where I turn off. I worried that perhaps this signaled the disappearance of yet another dairy farm. Was the field soon to be lost to a housing development (something more typical of my current home state of New Jersey)? Or was this evidence of some farm management strategy (something about which I am totally uninformed)?

Farming is not an idyllic profession. It's a hard life. Many farmers give up, looking for an easier way to earn living wage that doesn't depend on the vagaries of nature. 

According to the Town of Union Unified Comprehensive Plan for 2007:

There are only a handful of working farms remaining in the Town of Union. The decline of agricultural practices has been the result of many factors. In a survey of 448 owners of idle agricultural land in New York, forty-one percent said that they wanted to sell their land because they couldn't afford the taxes. Thirty-one percent wanted to sell because they needed the money. In most cases it has just become more profitable to sell the land to developers than to try to make a living selling agricultural goods. Twelve percent said that farming was impractical (Kay, D. and Bills, N., 2007). Whatever the reason, agriculture in New York and the Town has seen a steady decline in recent years.

At last count, the Town of Union has fourteen individual tax parcels that are locally designated as Agricultural Districts, accounting for approximately three percent of the land (2007 Town of Union Unified Comprehensive Plan). Among them is the farm I always pass on Case Road. There are several more farms along that road, although I found only one that seemed to still be a working farm. 

The decline of farming in this area is not new. As early as 1909, Ralph S. Tarr, Professor of Physical Geography at Cornell University, selected Broome County as one of seven Southern Tier counties for his article, “The Decline of Farming in South-Central New York State.” His opening paragraph offers up the stunning news that, while previous studies expressed concern about the decline of farming in New England, in New York State there were some 20,000 farms for sale at the time of writing.

The seven counties Tarr considered were all located within the hilly plateau of Southern New York and all were well connected with other parts of the state by virtue of numerous railroad lines. In addition, the region had access to the Erie Canal through the two of the Finger Lakes and was served by three major rivers, the Susquehanna, the Chenango, and the Chemung. Normally these would be factors that facilitate marketing of farm products. Nonetheless, the farming population in Broome County continued to decline during the 19th Century - over 3% in the years between 1890 to 1900.

Due to the poor condition of the soil in the uplands of the plateau, dairying was often the principal farm industry. Dairy cows can graze on very poor lands like those found in Broome County. And even poor lands can produce the forage needed to get the herd through the long winters of upstate New York.

Dairying, an industry in which New York State lead the country in 1900, still remains a major component of New York State economy. After decades of decline, Broome County evidenced an 8% increase in the number of dairy cows between 1969 and 1987. By 2007, the value of sales from milk and other dairy products from cows in Broome County totaled almost $21 Million, outstripping its nearest competitor (cattle and calves) by more than six times. Not surprising, the top crop in Broome County is forage (land used for hay, silage, etc.) and corn used for silage (feed), where some 34,000 acres are under cultivation (USDA, 2007 Census of Agriculture). 

Fields along Case Road, Town of Union, NY

The economics of agriculture are too complex for me to digest for this study. It is obvious that many challenges remain for farming, including being able to eke out an adequate living from the land.

Recent years have offered hopeful signs for the long-term survival prospects of farms in the Southern Tier, if farms can adapt quickly enough. Technological advances have made smaller farms more productive; for dairying, this means more milk is now produced from fewer cows. There is ready access to a variety of modes of transportation to get goods to market. Consumers are increasingly interested in buying locally. There is reduced interest in red meat (much of which is produced by competitors in the West and Midwest), and greater interest in purchasing vegetables, grains, and fruits. New specialty markets for such things as organic farm products have opened up as consumers look to “eat healthy.” And more people regard fresh air and open space a basic element of one's quality of life. This all bodes well for the preservation of local farms.

As for my farm on Robinson Hill... well, the cows reappeared this spring, but the fence did not. I scanned the fields for the black and white dots, finally finding them grazing along the far tree line. The field on the corner where the cows used to greet me has been left fallow, at least for this season. I saw the farmer out there on his tractor on my last trip through - perhaps he's harvesting next winter's hay. It was a happy sight.

Resources:

Bills, Nelson, Krys Cail, and Monika Roth. Southern Tier Agriculture: A Regional Economic Resource and a Landscape In Transition. Powerpoint. (2005). URL: http://www.slideshare.net/KrysCail/southern-tier-agriculture-a-regional-resource-and-a-landscape-in-transition accessed June 30, 2011.

A History of American Agriculture - Farmers and the Land.” Growing a Nation: The History of American Agriculture. URL: http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm accessed June 25, 2011. Project funded by USDA CSREES cooperative agreement #2004-38840-01819 and developed cooperatively by: USDA, Utah State University Extension, and LetterPress Software, Inc.

Kay, D., and Bills, N. “What are the plans of owners of idle agricultural land in NYS?” Rural New York Minute. 2007. Cited in the 2007 Town of Union [NY] Comprehensive Plan.

Stanton, B. F. The Changing Landscape of New York State Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. Agricultural Economics Extension Bull. 92-5. Ithaca NY: Department of Agricultural Economics, New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, March 1992.

Tarr, Ralph S. (1864 – 1912), Prof. Phys. Geography at Cornell University. “The Decline of Farming in South-Central New York.” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 41, No. 5.American Geographical Society, 1909. Courtesy of Googlebooks. URL http://books.google.com/ accessed June 29, 2011.

Tomlin, Elizabeth. “Agriculture IS Economic Development – Central NY Ag Council 2011.”Country Folks, Eastern Ed. Palatine, NY: Lee Publications (April 25, 2011). URL: http://countryfolks.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=350E94585B37465F8B5F8BA068B734F5&nm=Features&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&AudID=90DC82AE125D4E708CD1E3ED9DA80CA2&tier=4&id=81A37F22667540CA9DFDF20302FDE074 accessed June 25, 2011.

Union [NY],Town of. “Goals and Objectives: Agriculture.” Chapter 17. Town of Union Unified Comprehensive Plan. URL: http://www.townofunion.com/

U.S. Department of Agriculture. “County Profile: Broome County, New York. 2007 Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Geographic Area Series. URL: http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/index.asp accessed June 25, 2011.