DRYDEN — It was either change to organic dairy farming or get out, said Troy Sherman of Sherman Farm, where Tuesday about 90 farmers heard about biological farming

Farmer Irene Hurst, who runs Signhurst Dairy in Locke with her son James Signor, said she's transitioning from conventional to organic dairy practices “now with the price of (non-organic) milk so low.”

ADVERTISEMENT

While in the past organic products often sold for less than conventional, it now makes financial sense to convert a farm to organic, according to the field day's speaker, Gary Zimmer, a farmer and author of “The Biological Farmer” who travels and lectures frequently.

“The conventional milk price is very low,” said another farmer, Brigett Ullrich, who attended the event with her husband, Dan Williams, and the two youngest of their three girls, who work on the farm and show organically raised cattle in 4-H.

“We've tossed the idea around for years,” Ullrich said.

They've used no chemicals on their soil in Truxton for 13 years, rarely resorted to antibiotics and used no growth hormone on their cows, Williams and Ullrich said. They started the formal transition to organic in February. The transition — supervised through the CROPP Cooperative, which markets Organic Valley products — includes a $2 per hundredweight incentive during the transitional year before the farmer can make the higher organic prices for milk, said the event's Cortland-based organizer Peter Miller, East Region Pool Coordinator of CROPP Cooperative/Organic Valley. He's so busy he has a list of about 300 leads of farmers interested in transitioning to organic.

Even in the transition, Williams can taste the difference.

“The milk tastes different; it tastes better,” he said.

They raise much of the food on the family's table, from their garden to chickens and pigs. “Once you get started, you realize the food you buy (in stores) is questionable,” said Williams, whose parents gave up farming in Ulster County in eastern New York in the late 1960s. When short on their own eggs, the family buys organic eggs, but even those are not as good as their own.

“My yolks are orange; their yolks are yellow,” Williams said, noting that for organic milk as well, “demand is unbelievable here in the Northeast. Stores run out of it.”

Zimmer said, “We're going to see more emphasis on local foods in local communities.”

He started his career teaching and researching bovine nutrition.

“I was trying to create a better feed for dairy cows,” said Zimmer, who owns Midwestern Bio-Ag, www.midwesternbioag.com.

Creating better animal feed resulted in healthier animals. He showed pictures of cows lounging in a field and said his “oldest cow is 17 years-old, and she's pregnant again.”

His biological approach calls for improving crops and soil. Zimmer lives in Wisconsin and tracks bio-agriculture practices on multiple farms throughout the country, mostly in the Midwest. He has also studied and lectured on farming in Australia, where he said fuel and other costs are higher, and challenges like less rainfall make farmers work smarter.

The field day included discussions of soil chemistry, whether to plow or not (Zimmer advocates against “abusing” soil, but says individual farms need creative approaches, and there's no one method), choices of “green manure” (crops grown, then tilled under to nourish the soil) and varieties of feed crops like the corn examined on the Sherman farm.

The switch to organic made all the difference for Sherman Farm.

“We would not be here if it wasn't for it,” said Sherman, who works the 1,400-acre hilly farm with his uncle Vaughn Sherman and Vaughn's son, Ryan Sherman. “We wouldn't go back to farming conventionally.”

Ernie Balch, 95, of Dryden, joined farmers of all ages, elders such as himself, teen girls and boys and at least one young Amish farmer to hike to the corn field where Zimmer and a group examined the crop and soil. He also walked to the pasture, where grazing and pasture practices were discussed. Balch grows “beets, carrots and posies.” Organic growing is nothing new to him. He said he started gardening organically in the 1940s.

lstout@ithacajournal.com

Originally published August 23, 2006

Post a Comment This article does not have any comments associated with it

Print this article     Email this to a friend     Subscribe Now