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.