Both sides of the Mohawk Valley, for about ten miles north and south of the river have extensive dairy farming going on. Not large confined animal feeding operations, but instead relatively small dairies that overlook the river, and leave mostly a pastorial landscape of pastures and corn fields, sloped along the hills that overlook the river.

View Larger Map

There are certainly other farming locations in state, but there is something specifically quite pictorial of this area, all overlooking the river, with the relatively high hills that surround the Mohawk River. Few areas of state are as open, or is farming concentrated around a single valley. Most farming areas in state are single valleys — like the Black River Valley — and not hills surrounding a major river.

The Mohawk Valley Farm belt tends to petter out, as you climb out of the Mohawk Valley. Head to far north or south, and the farms are replaced with a lot of scrub land, where less productive farms, with poorer soils and shorter growing seasons have been abandoned. These lands nowadays are primarily owned by rural residents, and used mostly for hunting in the fall and the production of firewood. The worst parcels of all, as it comes to farming, are largely owned by the state, for timber and public recreation.

The belt is pretty clearly defined. Where farms begin and end in scrub land are as visible by the view of the window in your truck, as they are in view from the aerial photos looking down onto the earth. Farming, while an important part of the economy, really is limited to where can occur, and beyond that, most of the land is wasted.

Biomass companies, and alternative crops some day promise to recover this scrubland, that is all but abandoned for anything but deer hunting. It would be nice, but we will see the impacts to the environment once it happens. Scrublands, and recently abandoned, to the human mind look so disorderly, at least until they revert back to full forest.