Farmers'
Research Circle
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Farmers' Research Circle
The Farmers’ Research Circle
is an informal group of organic and
conventional farmers from around the County. It meets occasionally,
mainly
during the winter months, to discuss topics of common interest and
share ideas.
It is also a forum that helps us understand how we can gear our own
research to
make it as useful as possible for local farmers.
During the winter of 2006/2007,
four main themes of research
were identified as being of interest: Local Food Systems, Economic
&
Ecological Sustainability, Land Tenure, and Inter-farmer Collaboration.
After
discussing these themes in more detail, we settled on two research
programs
which we have begun to develop.
First, we began exploring the
question of how does a farmer
evaluate the sustainability of their own grassland (i.e., pasture or
hayfield)
use? Severe over-grazing or mis-management can be obvious, but what
about the
gradual draining of nutrients? During the summer of 2007, we collected
three
pooled soil samples from a hayfield and from a pasture on each of seven
different farms. These samples were submitted to Cornell for Soil
Health
analysis, the results were returned by fall of 2007, and we had a
“field day”
in December of 2007 during which interested farmers joined with Bob
Schindelbeck of Cornell to discuss their results. We hope that this
project
will proceed through a combined approach involving collecting paired
soil
samples from field interiors and margins, using exclosures to measure
plant
growth, and modeling nutrient flows for each field. The central
question is the
following: What level of use is likely to be sustainable?
Second, we are chewing over a
combined modeling and field
mapping study to explore what an ‘agrarian’ Columbia County
might look like? How much of what sort of food could be produced where?
Who
would be involved in its production? What would the food marketing
system look
like? How self-sufficient, at least in terms of agricultural inputs,
could Columbia County
be? How close to food
self-sufficiency could we become? How food self-sufficient do we want
to
become? How can we insure that, in the global picture, our production
has the
fewest negative environmental impacts possible?
If you are a farmer who would
like to be involved, please
contact us.
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