Lancaster Farming contributor Troy Bishopp, "The Grass Whisperer," was out and about on a recent wintry morn in New York, took this photo and sent it in to grace the front page of our North edition.

     The Hendricks family could buy flowers from anywhere in the world, but they prefer to pick them in their own backyard. Their backyard is a 26-acre tract of land surrounded by the town of Lititz, Pa. Their fourth-generation retail florist business thrives with attention to detail, creative arrangements, science (Sue Ellen, one of the Hendricks family owners, has a masters degree in soil chemistry), and an excellent reputation for quality and service.  Lancaster Farming reporter Lou Ann Good toured the business, talked to the people who make it work and wrote a story for our current edition.     


     EPA inspections of farms in Lancaster County, the Delmarva Peninsula and the Shenandoah Valley began last week to determine if those farms have drawn up conservation and manure management plans. The inspections are part of a push by the Obama administration aimed at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Lancaster Farming reporter Chris Torres looked into the issue and found out that the EPA was sticking to its guns with respect to a December 31, 2010, deadline for farms to have conservation and manure managment plans in place. His story is in our current edition, which you can see at lancasterfarming.com.


     In another TMDL story, Torres reports on a recent teleconference by ag industry groups who want the EPA to delay their TMDL requirements. In part, it's because the two lead agencies in the watershed cleanup effort - the USDA and EPA - use significantly different numbers in their calculations of just how much sediment and nutrients are carried into the Chesapeake from farmland.

What the real Farmville looks like.

     Will the real Farmville please stand out? The Facebook version was created in 2007 and has a gazillion visitors/players every day. A real live Farmville has existed in Prince Edward County, Va., since 1798. It has actual people, streets, businesses and buildings, and if you want a cup of coffee and a piece of pie you pay with actual money. Denise Watson Batts and Jim Hall, reporters for The Virginian-Pilot, recently visited the physical Farmville and noted their impressions of the differences between the real and the virtual town. The AP picked up their story and it is reprinted in our current southern edition. One gets the idea that the Hall and Batts team preferred the real to the imaginary.  A hearty second to that notion.

  

An example of Suzanne Wainwright-Evans' sweet handiwork.

     It's very clear that Suzanne Wainright-Evans is serious about her candy-making hobby. Clear toy candy was a Christmas treat for Colonial-era yougsters, and Wainright-Evans is a stickler for historical accuracy when it comes to making her modern-day versions. She eschews refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup, for example, in favor of organic sugar which she grinds by hand with a mortar and pestle. An entomologist by trade, she makes clear toy as a Christmas fund-raiser for the Upper Lehigh Historical Society in Schnecksville, Pa. Lancaster Farming reporter Lou Ann Good called on the bug lady/candy maker and wrote of her visit in our current edition, which you can see online at Lancaster Farming.com. For more information on Wainright-Evans, check out her website at BugladyConsulting.com.

Attendees at a Lancaster conference
 on manure digesters.

     Manure digesters are a hot topic these days, and are considered part of the answer to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. And while large-scale on-farm and regional digesters costing many thousands of dollars are a focal point, small-scale digesters have been in use around the world for a hundred years or more. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres attended an anaerobic digester conference recently in Lancaster and discovered that Chinese farmers alone have 37 million small-scale digesters. They don't work as well as the scientifically designed and professionaly installed digesters on 500-cow U.S. dairy farms, but they provide biogas for heating and cooking. The story starts on page one of our current edition.


     Who gets the margin? If a consumer pays $3.20 for a gallon of milk, and the dairy farmer who produced it gets $1.20, what happens to the $2 that the farmer doesn't get? The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice have held joint meetings meetings in Alabama, Colorado, Wisconsion, Iowa and D.C. to help farmers - and not just dairymen - answer that question about milk and other food commodities. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres attended the Washington meeting and wrote about it in our current edition.


     Curious what we learned from the 2010 corn crop? Greg Roth, a Penn State agronomy professor active with the Pennsylvania Corn Growers Association, shares his thoughts about the subject in Corn Talk and Foraging Around, a special section in this week's Lancaster Farming.

A quarter-mile of cow munchies, captured by staff photographer
Stan Hall lining a farm lane near Ephrata, Pa.

 

     "Stay the course" was the message Pennsylvania farm organizations and dairy coops gave to the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board last week in Harrisburg. The groups were unanimous in their request to have the PMMB maintain an over-order premium of $2.15 per hundredweight on the milk produced by dairymen, as well as a fuel adjuster to run into the first half of 2011. Lancaster Farming special sections editor Charlene M. Shupp Espenshade covered the meeting and reported on it on page one of our current edition.

Visitors size up the displays at this
year's Cherry Valley Farm Toy Show.

     Farm toys are for kids, right? Well, some kids. But if you visited this year's Farm Toy Show put on by the Cherry Valley, N.Y., Fire Dept., you'd have seen a lot of big kids, more than a few of them with a streak or two of gray in their hair. Actually, the Cherry Valley show history began with a high school fundraiser in 1995. It was run by students until 2008, when no one wanted to get things organized. That's when Dave Cornelia stepped in. Cornelia's kids had been instrumental in many of the annual events, and he and they wanted to see the show continue. This year's show attracted 11 vendors, saw 74 table-top displays and drew more than 200 paying visitors. Lancaster Farming correspondent Marjorie Struckle was one of those who visited. Her report appears in page B17 of our current edition.

Adopt an Acre co-founder Sheila Miller
standing on the organization's first
farmland preservation success story.

     Farmland preservation efforts usually focus on working farms with 50 or more acres. Smaller landowners, like Dean and Brenda Tice, with 16.6 acres in Wernersville, Pa., can be overlooked. The Tice's wanted to put their farm into a preservation program, but the bank holding the mortgage on their property balked because they feared a drop in property value would put their interest at risk. Adopt an Acre, a new Berks County organization focusing on of 20 acres or less, helped the Tices get their preservation easement. It was the first Adopt an Acre success story. Lancaster Farming correspondent Sue Bowman reports on that success on page B6 of our current edition.

Peace Tree Farm employee Stephanie Barlow shows off a opiary poinsettia

    Peace Tree Farm is the largest certified organic transplant grower in the USA, and recently opened their greenhouse doors to people who may want to compete for their business.  Greenhouse owner Lloyd Traven, a self-styled "hippie garden geek," started a conventional greenhouse business in 1983. A decade ago, he watched a customer tear a basil leaf off a plant in his greenhouse - a leaf recently drenched in pesticide - and decided to go organic. It was a good move. His business is wholesale only to smaller retailers, and he's developed niche markets for heirloom varieties, topiary plants and a recently developed table-top tomato plant that bears fruit for the Christmas season. Lancaster Farming reporter Lou Ann Good visited Peace Tree Farm, wrote a story and took a few photos for our current edition.

Hundreds of buyers vied for thousands and thousands of trees.

     Oh, Christmas tree, Oh, Christmas...OH! What's billed as the nation's largest Christmas tree auction - 70,000 trees, thousands of wreaths, countless holiday decorations - took place this year as in years past at the Buffalo Valley Produce Auction in Mifflinburg, Pa. Some 300 to 400 buyers from all over the East descended on Miflinburg and drove home with truckloads of trees. Lancaster Farming correspondent Liza Z. Leighton was on hand to witness the action and prepared a report for our current print edition. You can also catch it online at lancasterfarming.com

1959 Case 800 diesel from State College, Pa.

     Do you like old tractors? On the fourth Saturday of every month, we feature reader-submitted photos of old iron. They come in all colors and sizes, and from all over our readership area. For the 20 stars of our November Classic Tractor Gallery, check out page A52 or our print edition, or catch it online in the e-edition.

Roger Hoy checks out tractors at the Nebraska Test Laboratory. 

     Speaking of tractors, here's the buzz on newer models. You're  going to pay more but you're going to get more, at least in the way of pollution control Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres called on Roger Hoy, director of the Nebraska Test Laboratory, while he was in Lititz, Pa., to talk to the annual Binkley and Hurst customer classic bash. New technology, according to Hoy, will mean that anyone driving a tractor through smoggy Los Angeles will find that his exhaust pipe is putting out air that's cleaner than the air going into the engine. Of course, if you see a guy driving a tractor on a Los Angeles freeway, you might wonder what he's mixing with the air that's going into his lungs.

One of 122 creches on display in New Haven, Conn.

     Creches in a dizzying array of styles from 22 different countries are on display in the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, Conn. The exhibit of 122 different creches was organized and curated by the museum director, Lawrence Sowinski. The nativity sets are made from a wide variety of materials - cinnamon paste, for example, from Singapore, rolled newspaper from the Philippines, a Madonna and child of gold from Thailand. Lancaster Farming correspondent Suzanne Stahl paid a call on Sowinski and wrote a story for the food and family section of our current edition.

     What do YOU think about carbon credit trading? If you're like most of the 90 people who responded to a Lancaster Farming on-line poll, you're not too optimistic. Just about 80 percent of the respondents said they don't think the concept is ever going to be profitable. Less than 15 percent think it will be and about 7 percent can't make up their minds. (These figures add up to more than 100 percent because I never was real good at math. English came hard, too.) You can keep tabs on our latest polls - and even participate if you're so inclined - by checking out our home page. You can see the carbon credit poll full graphic here: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/Polls/Results/Carbon-Credit-poll

Lancaster Farming's Melissa Mazzocca
interviews Ken Diller  for Ag Vids.

     Also new on the website this week is the first in a series of Ag Vids, brief videos featuring the businesses and the support staff behind that guy or gal who drives down your lane every so often to check on how you're doing and to find out if you're in the market for seed, parts or a new combine. The first Ag Vid focuses on the well-known Hoober Inc. enterprise. You can check it out here: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/video/agvids/agvid-hoober

     Jaindl Farms is to turkeys as the Susquehanna is to your average trout stream. Jaindl is big, marketing some 750,000 turkeys a year in the Northeast, including one special bird headed for the White House kitchen every Thanksgiving. The 12,000-acre Jaindal operation is by far the largest ag enterprise in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres visited owner David Jaindl - a third-generation turkey man - to talk about the operation. One of the things he learned is that the whole enterprise started when Jaindl's grandfather bought five poults - for a buck apiece - from a neighbor in 1935. Check out the story in our current print addition or online at LancasterFarming.com.

     Ed Hall heard cows mooing one evening while he was eating dinner with his family in their South Philly row home. It was 1968, he was in the eighth grade, and he was fascinated with animals. He lept from the table, caught the end of a TV news report about cows and heard the words "...a high school with cows." That scrap of information led him to Philadelphia's Saul High School, from which he graduated in 1973, then to Penn State for an ag degree, back to Saul as a teacher, and today as a sales rep for a meat company. Today, Hall and his wife, Patti, own a 13-acre mini-farm a few miles from Philadelphia, and they grow, among other things, turkeys. Every year, they invite 40-50 friends and family to their place to prep the turkeys for everybody's Thanksgiving tables, and to bake pies. Lancaster Farming food and family features editor Anne Harnish talked to the Halls about their turkey tradition and prepared a report for our current edition.

     Let's say you had an impulse to throw a pumpkin...oh, say, 500 feet down the line. You're not going to do that with your arm obviously, so you might want to confer with Dr. David Drummer and his physics students at Kutztown High School in Kutztown, Pa. The Doc and two of his students, senior Andrew Dietrich and junior Dustin Hoffman (No, not THAT Dustin Hoffman) built a trebuchet (TREB you shet) with the ability to hurl a pumpkin farther that you'd ever thought you'd want to see a pumpkin go. Their goal was to set a new world record at the annual Punkin Chunkin (PUNkin CHUNkin) contest in Bridgeville, Del. They didn't set a new world record, but their team, Stomach Virus, came in second with a toss of 653 feet, besting such teams as the fearsome Siege of Condor and the Wascaly Wabbits. There's a story about their efforts in the Kids Korner on page B10 or our November 13 edition. That's Dr. Drummer himself in the photo watching a test shot back in Kutztown.

Greengrow's co-manager Nina Berryman looks over
some of the CSA's late summer offerings

     Start with a two-acre patch of concrete, truck in some topsoil, and you've got a farm in downtown Philly. The patch of ground, site of a former steel mill, is home to a 400-member CSA (community supported agriculture) group called Greengrow. Lancaster Farming correspondent Kristen Devlin and reporter Michelle Kunjapu joined a recent tour of Greengrow and two other urban ag facilities in and around Philadelphia. They wrote about the experience for the Rural Ventures section in our current edition.

Jim Hershey addresses a no-till tour.

     No-till practices have taken root in Pennsylvania. Some 60 percent of the state's tillable acres are planted in no-till cover crops, reducing nutrient and sediment runoff and saving on fertilizer costs. But there's another reason for farmers to consider no-till practices, and that is the cash that might be generated with carbon credits. With cap-and-trade all but dead, there's still a chance that farmers could profit from the carbon captured in the soil with no-till, according to Jim Hershey, with the Pennsylvania No-till Alliance. Hershey hosted a field day on his Lancaster County farm recently to explain the benefits of the practice and the potential bonus from carbon credit training. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres was there and reported on the event in our November 13 edition.

     Take it for granted, a few western Pennsylvania farmers are investing for the future with grain-drying equipment that cuts fuel costs. Jesse Powell, a former steelworker, left his job in a mill to work fulltime at a 2,000-acre grain operation. With the help of USDA grants - obtained with the help of a professional grant writer - he installed his new equipment in time for this year's harvest. Lancaster Farming correspondent Carol Ann Gregg called on Powell and a few others in the area to find out more about their new equipment and the grants that funded the ventures. Her story is on page one of our current edition.

     Manure injection is another process that's getting a lot of attention from farmers who want to preserve the soil nutrients in the inevitable byproduct of livestock farming. With surface application, much of manure's fertilizer value is lost to the air. At his annual cover crop field day, Lancaster County farmer Steve Groff invited LehmanAgService owner Steve Lehman to demonstrate his huge six-injector rig to the dozens of curious who turned out for the day. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres was there, and wrote a couple of reports for our November 6 edition.

     "You gonna horn in on me?" "No, I'm gonna horn in on you!" The George family - Dolly, Lloyd and Jared - see a lot of this kind of action on their Catawissa, Pa., farm this time of year, which is breeding season for deer. For the past dozen years or so the Georges been operating a 160-acre red deer farm that today is home to more than 450 of this elk-like species. They are prized for their lean meat and impressive antlers. English royalty were so protective of their private stock that at one time a commoner faced a death penalty for killing a red deer. Lancaster Farming correspondent Sue Bowman paid a recent visit to the Georges' Rolling Hills Red Deer Farm and prepared a report for the food and family section of our current edition.

     Cutie-pie kitties on this old Lotto game could be worth $40 to $50 dollars at auction, according to a story by Lancaster Farming correspondent Linda Sarubin. The story in this week's edition - just after the Mailbox Markets section - delves into the history of board games, and how they became popular during the Great Depression, when people stayed home because they couldn't afford to go out. Hmmm...anybody for a game of Monopoly?