Dairy farmers from Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania participated in a social media âtake overâ hosted by American Dairy Association North East and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay.
During a live, one-hour conversation, the farmers discussed their environmental practices to protect local water quality and to protect their downstream neighbors.
Participating farmers included Katie Dotterer-Pyle of Cow Comfort Inn Dairy in Union Bridge, Maryland; Mike McMahon of E-Z Acres Farm in Homer, New York; and Chris and Laura Landis of Worth the Wait Farms in Stevens, Pennsylvania.
âWe have a responsibility, when you farm in an environmentally sensitive area, to protect it, and our first concern is the neighborhood around us,â McMahon said. âAnd even though weâre 250 miles away from the bay, preservation starts here.â
SW Photo/iStock/Getty Images Plus
MEASURING SUSTAINABILITY: Land O Lakes is launching a four-year effort with its 1,600 dairy farmer owners to capture information about sustainability practices. The effort will also aims to help farmers identify opportunities to fine-tune practices. The aim is for its 1,600 dairy farms to complete on-farm assessments of current practices and identify areas of improvement by 2025.
Mar 11, 2021
The word sustainability is being bandied about by a wider range of groups and individuals these days, but what can that mean for the dairy farm? Looks like farmers that sell to Land O lakes or Bel Brands are going to find out. The member-owned cooperative announced today, March 11, new on-farm sustainability commitments to be adopted by its more than 1,600 member-dairy farms by 2025.
Land O Lakes announces sustainability commitments farmprogress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from farmprogress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This past week, I learned a lot about trees from Dr. Geoffrey “Jess” Parker, who has served as the forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater since 1987. Jess wanted to show me around the Corcoran Environmental Study Area or “Corcoran Woods,” a 215-acre tract of forest adjacent to Sandy Point State Park.
A million-dollar grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation will pay the total costs of riparian buffers and other conservation practices on farms in three contiguous watersheds in Pennsylvaniaâs Lancaster, Lebanon and Dauphin counties.
âWhen you say total cost, is there anything the farmer has to pay out of pocket?â we asked Lauren Shaffer.
âNope,â she said. âThereâs even a bonus.â
A cover crop of winter rye was no-till planted between corn stubble from a prior year s crop to ensure live roots are in the soil year round. Penn State Ag and Environment C
Shaffer is an outreach specialist with the Penn State Agriculture and Environment Center in Lancaster. The grant covers 220 square miles of heavily farmed land in watersheds drained by the Chiques, Conoy and Conewago creeks.