Stormy and Deetzie

Do me next! 

Freshly swept and resting comfortably 

Brooming the Cows

We are chopping ice off the water tanks every day. Some days it is four inches thick or more. The ground is frozen solid; it is near zero most mornings and the wind has a savage bite to it. However, no matter what the weatherman or the calendar says, spring is coming. House finches and chickadees are singing their mating songs, cardinals are calling cheerily from down below the drive and the first blackbirds are showing up at the feeder. The cows are shedding like crazy too, with clouds of hair flying all over the barn.

This leads to an interesting phenomena. The cows go nuts when they see a broom, or at least they do on my side of the barn. See I have been spending quite a lot of time sweeping floors and cleaning windowsills in honor of the fact that, since we are shopping for a new milk market, we are meeting a lot of new milk inspectors.
A bit of sweeping and polishing helps give a good first impression when they walk into the barn to talk turkey.

Anyhow, as I walk down the aisles brandishing my tired, old, barn broom, I also sweep off the loose hair on the backs, rumps and tails of any cows that are lying down. This is something I do every spring. The cows love it. Within a couple of days of my starting, they begin to beg, cow style, to be next for grooming. They stare at me intently and swing their heads up and down, clanging their stanchions. Some will even moo at me and groan eagerly when they see the broom coming.

While the stiff bristles are scrubbing off their excess hair, they put their heads right down to the floor and chew frantically, in a reflexive action like a dog moving its leg when you scratch its ear. Cows that are normally about as friendly as crocodiles lean toward me and jostle their neighbors to keep themselves closer to the wonderful tool. Some of them insist on standing up, which makes it much harder to broom them, as I am not terribly tall. The smart ones stay down though, so I can get at every itchy inch.

It makes the job fun to have them enjoy it so much and they really look amazingly better when I am done. Clean cows are another important issue for milk inspectors, so I get a business benefit along with the satisfaction of making the cows more comfy.
Cows
Farming
Signs of spring

Sunset/moonrise 

Great Game

Hat tip to A Coyote at the Dog Show for this really entertaining game. Just put aside your politics for a few minutes and have fun. Good hunting!

Good Post

Sarpy Sam has a good post today, on just how necessary National Animal ID is, or should I say, how unnecessary. Worth a read.

Apples to Apples or Calculating the Price of Milk

I spent a long time pushing the old pencil today, trying to compare the various milk pricing deals we have been offered. (It was plumb painful; mathematical calculations are so not my thing.)
You would think it would be simple though, wouldn't you? Say, so many dollars for so many hundredweight of milk, so much to haul it to the plant and so much for dues and services. Instead they make it darned near impossible to compare. One place charges forty-five cents a hundredweight and the other eighty cents for hauling. Obvious decision right? Nope, the one with the lower hauling has a higher stop charge. (If you are not a dairy farmer, you probably don't know that not only do you pay to ship your product to the plant, but you also pay for the truck to stop at your place-fifteen times a month.) One has a better base premium and the other higher dues. One charges a nickel to participate in the CWT program, the other includes it in the service fee. And on and on until my head is spinning trying to compare. There is no apples to apples and oranges to oranges about it. More like apples to arachnids and oranges to orangutans.

However, both the boss and I, independently, came to the same conclusion, so I think we know where our milk will be going. It is just a matter of talking to the new inspector now and seeing if we share the same, or at least almost the same, philosophy on just how clean the milkhouse has to be and other milk inspector-type issues. No matter what we do we will be paid less than we have been being paid. The demise of Allied Federated Cooperatives is going to be very rough on a lot of farmers in the Northeast. I am wondering if I should sell all my Allied hats, coffee mugs, carpenter's pencils and all the other things they have given us over the years on e-Bay. They are collector's items now.
Dairy Farming
Milk Pricing

"Canadian cold front moving in...." 

Shameless bunny photo of the day 

More shameless bunny photos on The View at Northview.

What I DON"T Believe

In response the comment on yesterday's post about how wonderful alternative farming is.

Don't get me started on the whole organic thing. I am no fan of chemicalling everything to death and using drugs to take the place of good husbandry. If you care about your cows and take good care of them, they will take care of you. My kids literally love their cattle. This whole place was in mourning for months when old LV Dixie died. She was one of the family after a lifetime in the show ring. In fact, our oldest is passing up a free ride to vet college in the Caribbean to come home and run this little dairy farm on a thin, fraying shoe string because she loves her cows. However, only in magazines is organic husbandry better for cows than using modern medicine when they are ill.

You wouldn't deny your child an antibiotic if they were ill and I will be damned if I will do the same thing to my cows. Organic husbandry means that if your cow gets sick, you give it a few probiotics and hope the hell it gets over whatever ailed it. Even the best cared for cattle, under the most natural of circumstances get sick sometimes and they need help. I have watched acquaintances of ours go to organic dairying to make an extra buck and watched their cows DIE of curable diseases. I believe in grass feeding. I believe in not dumping twenty different hormones into an animal to make up for stuffing it in an overcrowded barn. However, do not bother to tell me to throw away the bottle of Excenell for a scouring calf or to NOT give Star, our eleven year old pet some penicillin when she suffers from a retained placenta. Good management prevents some of these things, but just as no matter how much we love our children we can't always keep them from getting sick, sometimes even well cared for cows NEED medicine. Ours are going to get it if I have any say in the matter.
organic

I thought I had heard everything

The New York Times is so afraid that we don’t know how to take care of ourselves and need a full time nanny, (preferably a New York City Liberal nanny of course) that it is advocating teaching eating as a classroom subject. The paper uses the usual flawed data, such as that children will die younger than their parents, and that we are all "addicted" to sugar and fat, to bash hamburger and chicken, and as an excuse to rejoice that whole milk has been banned in NYC schools. The writer wants lunch to constitute the "core of the curriculum". (For some it probably already does.)

The author suggested one thing that seemed logical to me, getting kids involved in actually growing some food. This makes sense, first of all because growing food is hard work. Get them up off their butts and out in a garden, put rakes and shovels and hoes in their hands and the so-called obesity epidemic might be a thing of the past. Growing food of their own might also put them just a tiny bit in touch with the people who normally grow it for them. Farmers and ranchers that is. Somehow, though, I think this would just turn out to be another attempt to accustom us to government baby sitting, as applied to our families.
Obesity
Farming

This guy was born at 4 AM today. Hard to believe little Ricky had such a behemoth all on her own 

Still another shameless bunny photo 

Mohawk 10C 

House Guns

Here is my house gun as per a post on Alphecca about which one you keep handy. This Mohawk 10C is my favorite because I can shoot it. I have had it since I was 21, which has been a fine long time. It was the first gun I ever owned except for "dummy training rifles" that my brothers and I played "Combat" with when we were kids.

I got really ticked at my son when he came back from hunting with it and said that he "dropped" it on the ice and slightly cracked the stock. I got even more ticked when he admitted that he and his dad had dropped a tree on it when getting firewood and that is how it really got the crack. My dream gun however, is a cannon to set at the top of the driveway. I also want a military tank to scare the bejesus out of all the jacklighters poaching our deer every fall.
house guns

The Farm Sign. It DOES have a flat tire. It does NOT say Argersinger Road. It sits on the cliff at the bottom of the driveway.

Argersinger Road

I trudged down the barn driveway today and took a few pictures so you can see how little it looks like a county road in New York State. There was just no way the guy on Sunday could have been mistaken about where he was.

Farming
Trespass

Argersinger Road???? 

Nope 

Still not 

Alert

I got my weekly update from Drovers Magazine today and two stories jumped right out. One is on the sale of banned beef products to Japan. Looks like the Japanese company actually deliberately ordered the illegal material, then cancelled the order. The USDA is still taking blame, but it looks to me to be shared.

The other is that Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced legislation that would put the burden of proof "in proving unfair actions away from the producers and onto the dealers, stockyards and packers. The legislation also would make several changes to the Agricultural Fair Practices Act, intending to prevent discrimination against producers belonging to an organization or cooperative. The American Meat Institute expressed opposition to “any expansion of existing authorities that would adversely inhibit producers’ and packers’ ".
Farming
Beef

Tired Iron

I put a couple of pictures of the tractors over on The View at Northview if you want to see them.

Farming
Farm tractors

Night Checks

So far I have been out of the loop on the night time calf checks. We only have two cows hanging fire right now, Ricky and Aretha. Ralph and Liz have been taking turns going out at night and I have been doing the early morning and daytime checks, but they are getting tired and I can feel my turn coming.

Night checks are a misery. Even with the best of flashlights, the lumpy frozen ground is hard to walk on. Since we have been having folks prowling around, (see below) I am nervous going to the barn in the dark. I often take Mike and Gael along, although if there is a calf they are a pain in the neck.
There also have been a lot of skunks around whenever it gets above freezing and I am not much more enamored of them than the human kind.

Alan and I were counting up yesterday and between now and the end of April we are expecting 14 of our 56 cows to calve. That adds up to a lot of nighttime hikes. One of these days I am going to get a remote camera and put an end to all this fun. Oh, well, if you can get past the bogeymen in the bushes, it is nice out at night, quiet and clear. Guess I will live.
Farming
Calves

Another picture by Alan, last night out in the woodstove. All that nice wood was a gift from friends who had county work done on them, trimming some dead trees. Thanks to them we are nice and warm. 

For Pete's sake, fill the feeder will ya? 

Corn Planter

If you guessed some kind of planter or seeder, you were correct. The boss's folks had several of these. Alan wants to see if he can plant some sweet corn with it next summer.

What is it? 

What is it?

The guys found this out in one of the buildings. I am sure many of the farmers who stop here will recognize it, but everyone is welcome to take a guess.

Leave an answer in the comments section if you would like.

Here it is

Several Northview readers have suggested that the next step after mandatory national animal identification will be the same for us human folks. Here is the New York Times, (who else) advocating just that and sugar coating it enough to give a whole herd of Holsteins a three day sugar high. It never ceases to amaze me how far the Times will go with its social agenda.
National ID

At College Today

One of Liz's friends found out that the reason her apartment mate had not been back to school in a while was that she had been arrested in NYC.....for allegedly murdering her last roommate. The person in question is out on bail and back in school, so the friend moved in with another mutual friend. Whew! Liz said that she felt like coming home and kissing her brother and sister, just for not putting her through stuff like that. There is something to be said for living at home.

A couple of other NYC kids sat in the lounge today complaining loudly about how terrible their recent visit to the cow barn had been. The cows stink and they are big and mean and ugly. And how can anybody stand to work around them...and on and on about how awful the ag portion of the school makes their lives.

After a few seconds they noticed the thickening silence around them. Then one very large, solid, good old boy informed them that he was a farm kid, quite liked cows and did they want to make something of it. The city kids quickly appealed to the rest of the folks in the lounge. After all there couldn't be more than one cow lover on campus could there? And cows really do stink don't they? However, they discovered that every single other person in the entire lounge was an aggie. They decided to leave while the going was good and the ag students had a good laugh. I wonder what part of ag and tech school they missed when they enrolled.




agriculture school

Mike looks like a serious boy, doesn't he? but there is a tennis ball just off camera between his front paws.  

The golden time just before dusk when every tree stands out in its own sharp shadow 

Another try

Okay, today I am going to write this in Word

and cut and paste. Thanks to all the kind folks who suggested that I try Firefox. I did use the earliest version for a while, but had trouble with sites that wouldn’t load. If this business with Netscape doesn’t improve, I will have to download the newer version, which is said to address that problem.

Anyhow, back to yesterday afternoon

. I was Sundaying it up in fine fashion and acting very un-farmerly. Feet up, handmade (by my wonderful mother, who never met a stranger) lap robe keeping off the chill, first book of the Outlander series in hand, I was enjoying a few comfortable chuckles and some genuine, pure-D relaxation.

Enter my son, in an incoherent panic

, "Mom, will you talk to the sheriff for me? They are over there at the barn yelling at dad."

Well, I got out of the chair

a lot quicker than I got in. Visions of my volatile husband in a one-man standoff against the local authorities leapt to mind. He was armed only with a skid steer and a bucket load of corn, but handicaps like that have never stopped him before. It is nothing for him to get in a screaming match with trespassers bearing shotguns when he is totally unarmed. So far he has come out ahead, but I worry.

When I finally got the kid calmed down

, I discovered that someone driving a Jimmy had come creeping up the barn drive and, when he saw the guys, took off in a swirl of gravel. He drove into our sand pile trying to get gone. He saw the boss coming down to confront him and screamed some words that will not be typed here and threatened to run over him. That is when the kid ran for the phone.

Anyhow, the policeman

who answered my summons was a wonder. In this increasingly urban area you don't find too many people who understand just how much trouble prowlers can get into on private farm property. This officer was real understanding though and I sure appreciated that. By the time he arrived the guy in the Jimmy had stopped cussing and was claiming to be looking for Argersinger Road. (Yeah and there is a bridge downstate that I could sell you cheap too.) Argersinger Road is a nice, smooth, paved, public highway. Our barn driveway washed out in all the rain we have had, so it consists of a couple of nearly impassable ruts winding straight up the mountain. You can barely get a tractor up it. And at the bottom, there is a FARM SIGN for Pete's sake. It does not say Argersinger Road on it, I promise.

We will probably

never know whether he was looking to pick up a heifer calf, as some local youths recently got caught doing, or if he wanted to get into the abandoned farm house half way up the driveway. Had he not threatened to run over the boss and actually pulled his car right up to him, we would have just told him to light a shuck and let him go. The sad thing is that he had kids with him. Nice example to set for them.

At any rate

, he will be going to court next week, down in town, and even if he only gets a warning, hopefully he won' be back.

Trespassers and the browser from hell

I would tell you all about the trespassers at the barn today, who flat ruined my Sunday off, and darned near ran over my husband, oh, and the nice policeman who came and arrested them. And trying to find a phone number for the police, but discovering that 9-1-1 is all there is. And Alan's message when he came in the house in a panic and how I thought the police were trying to arrest his dad, and he was standing them off armed with with nothing but a skid steer with the bucket full of corn.

However, Netscape, the browser from HELL, has eaten, not one, but two, carefully constructed posts and I flat give up.

While you wait for details, I will write them an irate message and try to calm my heartbeat down after all the excitement. Talk about adrenaline overload!

More Ravens

I want to thank Karbon Kounty Moos for stopping by and telling me that ravens are a problem for calving cows out in the west. Here they are merely something unusual to see on a cold winter day, and from the sounds of things I hope they stay that way. Moos left a link about them that is worth visiting so I moved it up from the comments section to make sure that you didn't miss it.

Here in the Northeast, we have had little problem with predation by birds, although we have more than an adequate supply of extra-large coyotes and coyote-dog hybrids to keep us busy.
However, there is a large colony of turkey vultures that nest a few miles up the road at Little Nose Mountain. (It is on the left in the picture. Back when Magnum was alive I rode the trails pictured in the story at that site. It is an amazingly wild area for being only a few yards from a major highway.)

The turkey vultures followed the interstates north a couple of decades ago, feasting on road kill as they came. It is said that black vultures are following their path and that worries me. They are known for harassing livestock and doing serious damage.

However, last summer even the turkey vultures pinned a pair of newborn Holstein calves under a feeder wagon and were very hard to discourage. There is no doubt about identification either.

I hope this isn't the start of a trend. It is hard enough to discourage predators on the ground without having them dropping in from above as well.
vultures
ravens
livestock predation

An Unexpected Crop

Guess what the eighth most valuable crop in Washington State is. It ranks behind apples, which are number one, and ahead of sweet cherries, which it kicked out of their former ranking.

I will give you a clue. The agriculture department doesn't have anything to do with recording it, but law enforcement agencies do.

Shameful

TFSMagnum featured this story of appalling treatment of young women wishing to legally purchase firearms. Profiling of young men of Arab descent is not allowed at airports; they search small children and little old ladies as if they were known terrorists instead.
Just to be fair mind you.
Yet much worse treatment of young women, especially blacks, is being permitted if they are purchasing fire arms at a gun show. Some really ugly activities by the ATFB in these circumstances are described in this story. It is worth a read if you are interested in Second Amendment issues.
Heck, I am a woman and I have purchased guns. I'm glad they didn't follow me home.
Gun shows
Racial profiling

Ravens

We had ravens here today. The boss noticed a commotion going on over the top of heifer barn, when we were out in the milkhouse tearing down. (Otherwise I would not have seen them.) A bunch of crows was mobbing a pair of them, really tearing into them, and they were trying frantically to get away.

It was quite a sight to see, as the wind was really ripping and all the birds were having trouble aiming. The crows were surely winning though. They would swoop in from above, one after another, and pluck at the larger birds' backs, darned near landing on top of them. One raven perched on the heifer barn roof, where he sat like a weather vane until the crows found him. They pounded him so mercilessly that he actually flew in through the high window where we put hay in the mow and hid in there for a minute.

I darned near froze out there watching them with no coat or gloves on, but I have never seen them here at the farm. We counted one on the Christmas Bird Count two years ago and I have seen them in the Adirondack Mountains, but never this far south. Oh, well, we knew it was cold, just not THAT cold.
Ravens
Crows

Cold twilight

The sun is setting north of the barn now 

I Hate the Wind

This morning it was calm and sunny. Skinny wisps of cloud slid across a tranquil blue sky. It was so warm we had all the barn doors open and the fans were running. However, we watched the forecast before we went to the barn and knew that the weather wasn’t going to be pretty. In fact I spent a good part of yesterday covering things up and weighting them down in preparation for all this. It was mostly a waste of time. Big wind doesn’t stop for anything; It goes through rather than around and takes whatever it wants with it.

At nine thirty when it hit, we were over at the cow barn. From the milkhouse door we could see the big old spruce in the house hard bending almost in half. I was real sorry that I forgot to move my car before we went to work. One of these days that big green beast is going to come down and I am not going to have wheels anymore.

Every thing that was not weighted down between the house and barn lifted on circling winds. The rabbit coop Alan is building blew over. The woodpile canvas sailed into the heifer yard. Slabs of tarpaper lifted off the old hen house and vanished. The sheep, who normally never come inside, crowded into the barn and cowered in the aisle behind the cows.

Later we found all the insulators and tools from yesterday’s fencing fun spread in a circular pattern all over the yard. They had been put neatly away in the corncrib, but the wind sucked them out. I will pick up that mess when it all stops, but I am not going out there now. It is just too ugly. Liz called from college and she is going to stay at school until it blows over, even though this is her "early" day. I am glad. That little truck is like a skateboard in the wind.
I wish it was over. The dogs are terrified because of the intermittent rolls of thunder. Elm trees that the guys have been afraid to fall, because they were so rotten and brittle, are lying in the mud in the lane. I can see the young stock looking out their door. They want to eat, but they don’t like the storm either.

I hate the wind.
farming
storm

One thing is for certain

One thing is absolutely, positively, for certain sure. If you have animals, you had better not be arrogant enough to think that you can ever make meaningful plans. Today I needed to get a lot of things done. A friend was stopping by to leave a border collie that I bred here for a couple of weeks while her family vacations. The milk tester is coming tonight. I needed to get some cleaning done, button things up outdoors ahead of the big wind we are expecting tonight and all that sort of stuff. I had a full day planned.

Then, I looked out the window and there was a big, fat, heifer, named Frieland Zebra Stampede, down by the fence around my front garden. She was NOT inside the heifer yard. The boss and I ran out and caught her and set to work rebuilding the electric fence.
It has been down for a while and we just didn't get around to it before, figuring that the page wire would do the job, but it was certainly time today. It was a lovely day to be working outside, the sun shining warm and mellow, the air sweet and summery. We actually had a very nice time working out there together and soon had the satisfaction of watching the stock rediscover what the fence was all about.

The boss headed out belatedly to get the cows fed their corn and I came inside to get at my work.

Perhaps five minutes later I heard the piercing whistle that means trouble on the cow front. Mary, a little Rex daughter, had just torn the whole darned fence back down. There was wire everywhere and insulators had flown half way across the driveway. It was not nearly as much fun to build it the second time, and it seemed to take forever. I didn't really get much else done today. However, I think the stock have figured out to leave the wire alone...or at least I hope so. Still, my work awaits.

In fact instead of doing this I should get out and water Rita, our visitor, before it gets too dark. She is Nick's sister, but is a pretty little long-haired girl, where he is a "bare skinned" dog.
farming
cows
building fence

This Doesn't Jibe

I got my online issue of Drover’s Alert today and was confused by what I read. One story announced,

"Farm income predicted to drop in 2006.The USDA estimates that farm income will
drop this year by $18 billion."

I didn’t have any trouble believing that. What with higher fuel prices, rising fertilizer costs, declining milk prices, declining government programs and the new milk tax, I am sure that the pundits are correct. Especially when you factor in imports, corruption in the Department of Agriculture, conglomerate farming and all the other hurdles facing the conventional farmer today.
But the very next headline read,

"Projections show growing demand for agricultural productsThe USDA’s long-term
baseline projections for agricultural commodities indicate that domestic and
international economic growth and gains in population will strengthen demand for
U.S. food and agricultural products over the next 10 years. "

There is something wrong with this picture. If demand is growing and is predicted to grow still more, shouldn’t the income of the folks producing the product grow too? They called that the law of supply and demand when I was in school. Today I guess it is more like the law of legislate, regulate and devalue the farm dollar by whatever means is necessary as long as the consumers find tasty stuff on their grocery shelves and don't have to go broke buying it.

farm
income

Crow time 

It is getting springish here 

The Vice President and the Patient's Right to Privacy

The boss pointed out an interesting discrepancy in press coverage of Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident. During the uproar over how information was served to them, they seem to have completely forgotten the patient’s right to privacy.

When I call the insurance company about something about our health coverage of either my husband or one of our two live-at-home, teenaged, but over eighteen year-old daughters, they will not talk to me. Same goes for the doctor. I have to call the person in question to the telephone, even though I am bookkeeper in chief, check writer in chief, and wife and mother too. I still must have a signed release on file to allow them to talk to me about my own family. This is private information, no matter what the ties between us are.

The same law applies to information about Mr. Whittington too. Do you suppose that every single reporter has a release from Mr. Whittington allowing him access to his health records? I am sure they don’t. Most of what they have demanded from the v ice President, White House staff and the hospital is privileged information.

And when all is said and done and the tumultuous uproar over this sad accident is finished, in what way could it possibly matter if the press was informed promptly or not? This is simply an accident, plain and simple, not a matter of national security. I wish they would find something else to whip themselves up over.

Vice President Cheney
hunting accident
privacy

Another shameless bunny photo 

Some of the reasons that we keep at this challenging job. 

The End

Today marked the end of an era. The small, but enduring, milk marketing cooperative to which we have belonged for quite a number of years voted to dissolve itself in order to join a bigger coop. We were told that we had no choice, that they would not allow our milk into their plants if we didn't do this deal. I have spent a lot of time on the phone since just before Christmas when I found out that this was being cooked up behind closed doors, from someone in another coop. However, the speakers for the new bunch are as persuasive as they are evasive and they convinced the members who bothered to show up (sixteen out of twenty-six) that there was no hope of survival without falling in with the big guys. It was interesting to see that, although the same fellows presented much the same program as I reported upon last week, they had taken out all the slides referring to their debt load. Ralph asked them some real tough questions on that topic at the other meeting. They did not answer them then and looks like they didn't want to hear them today either. It was pretty much all moot anyhow, as this was obviously all settled long before we even knew it was in the works.

We will probably not go along when the move is made. There are other markets out there, not great ones, but we can get a nice, new milk inspector and keep our old milk truck drivers if we change separately from Canajoharie Coop. It is gone now anyhow. Oddly enough, the Canjo coop is required to have an annual meeting even though it is in the process of dissolution. Therefore we will get our roast beef dinner with door prizes just as if nothing was happening. We are going despite our feelings. I can't wait to see who wins the quality awards. Since the boss and I took over the farm we have been in the top five every year, but I'll bet we will mysteriously fall from favor this year, despite somatic cell counts miles below the national average. Kicking in an unpopular direction does not pay.
Dairy
Farming
Milk

New Photoblog

I have started a new blog for the many photos we are taking with the new camera. You can find it in the sidebar blogroll or at The View at Northview.

This is what the Mill Point Bridge looked like in 1987 when flood waters from the Gilboa Dam took it and the Thruway Bridge out killing ten people. 

Gilboa Dam

So what happens if the dam breaks?

Here is a post from Upstream: a Mohawk Valley Perspective, that even people who don't live around here will probably find amazing. Can you imagine New York City maintaining a police force here in upstate NY, which makes arrests, performs raids without notifying local authorities and keeps watch over an antiquated dam that is threatening to flood half the region?
I was shocked and I thank Dan for the heads up. We are 174 miles from the city here and have more than enough layers of government of our own, thank you.
We sure don't need city cops telling us how to do business.
And as for taking care of the damn dam, had it been properly maintained in the first place, we wouldn't be discussing the concept of adding flood alarm sirens to our valley.

There have long been jokes about building a fence somewhere around Poughkeepsie and forming two separate states. I am all for it. Agriculture is New York's number one industry. We have nearly eight million acres of farm land. However, you would never know it from the way we are governed.
agriculture
Gilboa Dam