Our Environment, Animal Tips & the Great Outdoors

Our old Dutchess farmers may feel proud of their farms,
Producing such fine crops, having beauty that chains,
The stranger that journeys far over the state
Declaring old Dutchess stands first on the slate.
Rhinebeck farmers, of good tillage, are not afraid,
When they gather their harvest, they find they’re well paid;
Their corn, rye, and oats, such a bountiful yield,
Crops bounteous, see growing, in every field.

– Excerpted from “Rhinebeck the Beautiful,” written by J. T. Hanunkk in 1889.

It cannot possibly come as a deep, dark secret that the Hudson Valley is steeped in farming history, ranging from the days of Native Americans on up to today. If your intention is to farm in a productive fashion, common sense would tell you that it is advantageous to find yourself some good soil in which to grow your product – if you’re standing in the Hudson Valley, you’ve come to the right place. 

What you will find over the next batch of words, believe me, is not some formal history of farming in the HV. As someone who has been surrounded by agriculture nearly my entire life, what I know about keeping a farm as a going concern you could put in a thimble, with room left over for a small cow, sad to say, although I have to think I’ve acquired some sense of it via osmosis. But that’s not terribly important. What you do have here is someone who carries around a full-blown addiction to poking through old newspapers, oftentimes the older the better, and what that has yielded in this particular case is an accumulation of farming issues, ideas, and prognostications that have popped up in these environs over time. Anddddd away we go.

Haying done right

In 1889, the harvesting of a hay crop earned a lengthy mention from one unidentified publication: “The tendency among the best farmers is towards an early harvesting of the hay crop. The old idea that grass when dried is too light and innutritious is disproven by the gains of milk in cows, and of beef in other cattle, when pastured upon it. The early cat hay does dry away in weight considerably but what weight remains is nutriment. In grass that has been left to ripen and dry up, the nutriment is too much like cord wood. What was nutrition has turned to fibre, and in the animal serves mainly the purpose that cordwood does in the stove, to maintain warmth.”

Listless fowl

Seemingly of concern in 1889 to one farmer, who opined in an unidentified publication that others were engorging their fowl: “While a great deal is said and written about over-crowding, little is heard of over-feeding. Yet it is a fact that fancy fowls are usually over-fed. There are two causes for this. One is that the average poultry fancier has other business to attend to during the day, so he gives his fowls all they will eat, and often more of a morning, and then gorges them again when he comes home in the evening. The result is droopy, listless stock that stand about in a stupid manner, with no activity or desire to scratch and forage for themselves. Especially is this true of the larger varieties, which are great hands to hang about the kitchen door anyway, unless they are colonized out.”

Packaging apples

The “Apple Packing Demonstration” train was coming to town in 1906. These days, I suppose this would have involved a QR code or seven and that would’ve been that, but no, 119 years ago the instructions would bring with them a three-car train “exhibition” and humans to explain it all. Indeed, coming soon was the apple-packing demonstration train, in conjunction with the State Department of Agriculture, courtesy of the New York Central Railroad.

Let off the hook the previous year, noted the Hudson Evening Register, the law and the train are “of special importance to apple growers in the Hudson Valley who ship apples in baskets and similar packages.” The demonstration train “consists of three vestibuled cars, one carrying exhibits, another for consultation and lantern slides and the third to furnish living accommodations for the attendants, who will be traveling with the exhibits continually for three weeks.”

Among the exhibits are different types of apple-grading machines and a set of colored models clearly illustrating the color requirements for different varieties within the various grades. Yet another set of illustrations will show the defects that are not permitted within the different grades.

Think

“Tillage is the basis of all success in agriculture,” stated Theodore S. Barnes in 1909, as quoted in The Rhinebeck Gazette. “By proper tillage the farms of Holland and Belgium are richer than they were a thousand years ago while our land has depreciated in value, owing to its failure to produce maximum crops. Let us then restore the fertility of our farms by putting more thought in our work not forgetting that work itself is a blessing, for it helps to develop the mind, makes a man strong, self-reliant and independent, gives dignity to life and cultivates within us a self-respect that must be wanting in the person who shirks honest labor.”

Too timid?

Thankfully for consumers, the quest for standardization with packing fruit didn’t conclude with apples. Zipping ahead to 1924, Mr. A. L. Shepherd, Farm Bureau manager, in bemoaning the state of agricultural affairs in general around the country and in The Red Hook Times, a section of The Rhinebeck Gazette, wrote, “Consumers are already sold on fine fruit of standard grade and pack. Consumers have learned from sad experience that eastern-grown fruit cannot be regularly obtained in the brands, grades and packs that were exhibited” at the recent Eastern Apple Exposition.

Things were made more egregious, opined Mr. Shepherd, as “the thought of Dutchess County agriculture, sound, prospering, enduring, is a happy one. The main conditions for success: strategic geographical position, proximity to well-nigh unlimited markets and ideal transportation facilities combine harmoniously to give assiduous farming an unopposed upper hand.” 

Further, “Local farmers half unwilling, half unable to cope with a new situation retard farming operations and add to the already idling acres of Dutchess County hundreds more. Anybody, possessing any amount of imagination, visualizing the ever-hungry, non-agricultural millions of New York almost rubbing elbows with this county, will never sympathize with an agriculture too timid to toil.” 

DDT?

“Apple crops in at least three major areas are threatened by the worst infestation of European Red Mite in the history of New York State fruit growing,” Cornell entomologist James E. Dew was quoted in 1946 by The Rhinebeck Gazette. “Apples in Western New York, the Hudson Valley, and in the Champlain Valley are showing the effects of the insect very generally. Some peach and prune orchards are also infested.”

“Control is fairly simple, according to Dewey, if the grower takes proper precautions. A gallon to a gallon-and-a-half of summer oil to 100 gallons of water should be applied in orchards that have not used DDT or water sulphur has not been used in the last four weeks. In orchards that have had DDT or water sulphur spray put on in the last two or three weeks, a pound and a quarter of DN-111 should be used per 100 pounds of water. A dust application of D-4 may also be used.”

For the record, DDT was, for all intents and purposes, outlawed as of January 1, 1973.

Changing times

By 1956, the nature of farming was changing, in terms of, for one, higher costs, observed The News-Republican: “The price-cost squeeze is forcing farmers to produce more efficiently, and to watch their costs more carefully to survive. No early change in this squeeze seems probable. The American ‘Family Farm’ is not disappearing, it is just getting larger, and every year farming is becoming more and more a commercial business, subject to the same rules governing other commercial enterprises. Increasing need for specialized equipment, and technical knowledge of production, make it increasingly difficult for one farmer to have all the equipment, knowledge and training needed to handle successfully as many different enterprises as his father may have had.”

Horses

As one might suspect, farming is not all about sowing and reaping and whatnot. Writing in Taconic Newspapers in 1989, Jennifer Ervin, the Cooperative Extension Agricultural Program Assistant specializing in horses, alerts us to some key facts and figures. She writes: “Contrary to popular belief, horses are not useless animals. Some horses actually generate income for their owners. The bottom line is horses still serve as beasts of burden for humans, as they have for over 500 years. We may not consume horse meat here in the U.S.; rather, we consume their energy in the form of riding and driving. Energy, like wool, is an animal by-product.”

“At least one person is employed for every eight horses,” she continues. “There are 189,999 horses in New York State. That adds up to 23,625 jobs. Indirectly, horses and horse farms keep many local businesses in operation, such as feed stores, tack shops, farriers, veterinarians and hay farmers. What kind of impact is this to our local economy? Thirty percent of New York’s horses are housed in the lower half of the Hudson Valley region. More than 2,000 people are employed in Dutchess County alone. Not only do horse farms maintain open spaces, but that land is kept productive.”  •