Editorial

Letter from Larksong     

?We’re at that time of year when all the creatures on the farm are drawing toward the shelter of the barns—the heifers were brought in (I’m writing this on the last day of November) to the heifer and dry cow barn and the fall calves to the warmth and beds of straw of the old bank barn.
The grazing season has ended because of all the rain and now wind and cold and sleet. A time of the year we sort of hope to block out has arrived. On the positive side, the rough-legged hawk that calls our farm home for the cold months is back from the Arctic. Today I saw the dark morph bird perched on an electric fence and it looked as black as a vulture. Only when it flies does a bit of white show on its underwings.
Because of the year’s adverse weather, hay and grain prices are high, which negatively affects livestock producers. Reports are that dairy quality hay in eastern Pennsylvania is selling for $500 per ton. Here, organic hay and corn will be in short supply and pricey. I guess I’m still a farmer of the old school where matching the animals to one’s acres often works out well. I understand this isn’t possible in some cases, but where it can fit in, ten acres of corn producing 200 bushels an acre is a nice Christmas bonus.
Ernest Martin writes about genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in this issue, as did Sara Leonard in the Fall issue. I think we need to be mindful that there is a wave of consumer awareness concerning GMOs. Recent surveys have shown that 93 percent of consumers would like to have food labeled whether it contains genetically engineered (GE) ingredients. Then 53 percent said they would not buy products with GMOs. Europeans already have the choice because their food is labeled. In the United States the agricultural giants have resisted labeling with million-dollar campaigns.
A ground-up movement is extremely difficult to resist, as we all witnessed this past spring and summer in North Africa. Once food is labeled and consumers have a choice, GMO’s days are numbered. The educated consumer will have the last word and we need to produce what they want to buy.
While in a negative field right now, a few words of caution concerning the shale gas/oil hysteria that is consuming a lot of local energy. A recent article from the New York Times was passed to me. (The Times has been running a superb series of investigative articles on the natural gas industry and has come under severe attack orchestrated by top-shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake, aligned with the industry’s worst bottom feeders.)
Here are a few points of the lengthy article. First, even though the Times has been accused of lying by the gas industry’s slick PR firms, the Times has not printed a single factual correction. This is certainly an admirable reporting record for a series that has been running in the paper for nearly a year. This is because, despite massive efforts by the industry to find errors, no critic has been able to identify a single fact that the Times actually got wrong.
Many industry experts have reservations over whether the wells produce as much gas as industry is claiming and whether companies may be misleading investors, landowners, and the public about the true costs of shale gas.
Shale gas wells often dry up faster than companies expect—sometimes several decades faster than predicted.
Rather than coming clean, the companies downplay how much it costs to keep these wells flowing and overstate how much profit companies can make by these wells.
Furthermore, only a small percentage of the land in each shale gas field turns out to be highly productive, even at the start. Nevertheless, companies routinely pretend that all of their acreage will be equally promising.
The U.S. Geological Survey just slashed its estimate on the amount of gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80%, raising doubts about all the industry’s positive economic projections about jobs, royalties, and revenues. Industry based those projections on resource estimates that the federal government has now jettisoned.
In a devastating admission, the industry now acknowledges that it absolutely cannot afford to pay localities the costs of roads damaged from the thousands of truck trips per wellhead, leaving those ruinous costs to local taxpayers, many of whom will see no benefits from the shale boom, but only declines in their quality of life.

This agricultural community lost two friends recently, Frank Ehrman and Rob Schlabach. Frank told me the first time we met that his farm is “12 ounces” west of Medina, Ohio. He was a retired farmer and a tremendous supporter of local and good farming. He was 77. Rob, 66, was an innovator and leader in our local grazing and organic dairy movement. He was also one of the first to successfully grow organic greenhouse tomatoes.
May your Christmas be filled with love and family and the New Year with blessings.

DK