THE PARTIAL OBSERVER

Farmland Protection
is Everyone’s Concern

New York is an agricultural powerhouse, you may be surprised to learn. The state ranks in the top 10 nationally in no fewer than 14 crop and value-added agricultural products: number one in yogurt, number two in apples and cabbage, top 10 in tomatoes and potatoes, to name a few. Forty-three percent of New York’s wine grapes go to California for their wine industry. This productivity is all the more amazing when one considers that the transition from dairy that is going on leaves much farmland, for the time being, unused, Our farmland has the potential to be even more productive—and many believe that it will soon need to.

Climate change is a threat to the food system that the U.S. population relies upon. California is drying up, even burning; Florida loses land to sea-level rise, encroaching salinity, and development, and Texas is facing problems that both of those states are experiencing. Add to this the fact that the system is so heavily reliant on fossil fuels—from the seedling to the grocery store—and the specter of unsustainability rears its ugly head. Draw a 300-mile radius around northern Otsego County, and you take in 25 percent of the population of both Canada and the U.S. New York waits in the wings as the potential breadbasket of the region.

Yet, what is happening to ag land in New York State? It’s under threat from development, and has been for decades. Shopping malls with their giant asphalt and concrete footprints have been eating up farmland for a half-century. Now the giant distribution centers gobble up arable land in many places upstate. But these phenomena could pale in comparison to the promised rollout of renewable energy projects, with hundreds of thousands of acres due to be covered with solar arrays, wind turbines and battery storage facilities. Basically, our foodshed could be traded for an electricity grid.

Finally, let’s not forget that most of us live here because of the natural beauty, clean air and water, biodiversity, and tranquility we experience daily. All these benefits can be directly traced to both our natural and working landscapes.

That translates into farms. Farmers and others who work the land, like loggers, steward our landscape and keep it, and us, healthy. New York’s soil is among the most valuable in North America; in addition to producing food, climatologists now recognize the ability of our lands, both in use and fallow, to act as carbon sinks. Unused farmland is not useless, as some might think. It’s sequestering carbon.

So let’s be aware of the treasure we possess, and be alert to opportunities to support its protection. We all have to eat.

Dan Sullivan