Lazy Crazy Acres – Arkville, NY by Patty

Wednesday, September 5. If you’ve read any of my other reports from this tour, it’s probably clear that I get excited about the visits that combine unlikely topics – recycling and tomatoes, asparagus and jam, etc. Well once again, I got to explore two more of my favorite issues in the same stop – innovative manure management and ice cream. And the only place you could really delve into those two topics in the same day is at a dairy farm.

Lazy Crazy Acres is a 100-acre dairy farm in Arkville, New York run by Jake and Karen Fairbairn that uses rotational grazing to feed 40 cows. That means that the cows are rotated through different pastures so they can eat grass all day long. When you visit a farm whose slogan is “let them eat grass,” you expect to see some pretty happy cows. We had to hike up a hill to find them, but when we got to the cows they sure did look pretty happy. It didn’t hurt that the scenery is pretty spectacular too – the farm is in the middle of the Catskill Mountains.

Our afternoon at Lazy Crazy Acres included fabulous local food (including pumpkin hummus) from Slow Down Food Company, a restaurant in nearby Andes, NY that uses as much local food as possible. Jake and Karen showed us around their milking parlor, their pasture (and the cows), and their barn, which is getting a lot of visitors because of that innovative manure management thing I mentioned earlier.

Because their farm is on very steep hilly land, there is no good area for storing the manure that accumulates during the winter when the cows are in the barn instead of out on pasture. Managing manure to reduce the amount of runoff is key to protecting local water quality (a huge issue in the Catskills since the area serves as a source for New York City’s drinking water.) So at Lazy Crazy Acres, they are using something called a cover bedded pack, a system for storing the manure in place in the barn to minimize runoff. The technique involves covering the manure that accumulates with a thick layer of straw. So instead of moving the manure out of the barn to be exposed to rain and snow, it becomes the floor of the barn. They received a grant from USDA to build a special barn to accommodate a floor that gets higher as the manure/straw pack accumulates and that soaks up moisture to ensure there is no runoff. When spring rolls around and the cows move outside to the pasture, they clean out the barn and haul the manure to an unfrozen spot where they can compost it and spread it on their fields. It sounds fairly simple, and it is, but it is an important example of how small farms can make a real difference in figuring out to raise animals with less impact on the environment.

But it wasn’t all manure talk during our tour. Along the way we learned that the Catskill region was once the cauliflower capital of the world, a fact that will be celebrated at the upcoming Margaretville Cauliflower Festival. And they gave us ice cream. Really, really good ice cream from one of their first test runs as they get ready to market their own line of ice cream. Just like fruit and vegetable producers who can turn their products into “value added” products like jam, these dairy farmers are getting in on the act processing their milk themselves so they can keep a little bit more of the consumers’ food dollar.

Finally, I have to mention the folks at the Watershed Agricultural Council and Farm Catskills who set up our afternoon visit to Lazy Crazy Acres. We got to hang out with them on our ride to the farm and visit with them throughout the day. They are doing great work for folks all over New York – both in the Catskills because they work with farmers to preserve farm land and increase farms’ economic viability and in New York City because their efforts are protecting the city’s drinking water at its source (and saving the city millions of dollars in water treatment costs.) We had a great conversation with them about the issues facing agriculture in this region, ranging from the universal problems of marketing and price to some specific trends (like the combination of vacation home development and land acquisition to protect New York City’s drinking water source) that drive land prices out of reach for farmers. The distinction between a working landscape that includes farming and preserved “open space” is an important one that gets overlooked in a lot of conversations about development and I was glad to have the opportunity for them to explain it to me.

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