Wyoming County

Wyoming County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York, located in the state’s western area. As of the 2010 census, the population was 42,155. The county seat is Warsaw. The name is from a modified Delaware Indian word meaning “broad bottom lands”. Wyoming County was formed from Genesee County in 1841.

Wyoming County is in the western part of New York State, east of Buffalo and slightly west of due south of Rochester. The county is in the Holland Purchase Region.

The county is largely rural, dotted with small towns. Even the county seat, Warsaw is quite small. The land surface is generally broken and hilly, and the soil fertile. Much of the area is wooded, used for timber. Some that are predominantly maple are tapped each spring for the production of maple syrup. Agriculture is mostly small family dairy farms, or hobby farms for people who work in Buffalo or Batavia. Apple orchards were once a major agricultural endeavor, but only a few are left. The area is well known for outdoor sports, being an excellent area for fishing, hunting, and snowmobiling.

An active geologic fault runs down the Dale valley through Linden, to the east of Batavia and out into Lake Ontario. Movement of the fault is an occasional source of minor earthquakes, which, at most, have toppled a couple chimneys. The Dale Valley has been developed as a source of salt by way of brine wells, for the chemical industry. A pipeline moves the brine to Niagara Falls.

Letchworth State Park, on the Genesee River forms part of the southeastern boundary of the county. A deep gorge with three major waterfalls characterize this scenic and historic area, created when the last Ice age glacier diverted the river and forced it to cut a new valley. It is the home area of Mary Jemison, the White Woman of the Genesee, who was captured as a young person by the Seneca tribe and became an important figure in negotiations between the tribe and the land companies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_County,_New_York

The Smells of the Geenese Valley

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A few weeks back I was in the Genesee Valley at Letchworth State Park, poking around some of the little farm towns. The Genesee Valley has long been the joke of little kids and remarked upon by the authors of books for the smells of the dairy business – the sweet smell of the chopped silage and freshly cut hay, the sour smell of spoiled silage and cow manure, being stored than returned to the fields to bring nutrients back to the land.

The Genesee Valley and even some of the uplands around it are some of the great agricultural regions of our state. Once the bread basket of the nation, wheat blight and the Great Plains replaced it as did the high cost of living, leading to specialization largely in the dairy industry. Cows have to be fed year round and dairies produce milk and year round by carefully planning calving so there are always calves and milk being produced. That means farm families get milk checks year round from their processors.

Apparently The Best Grass Is On The Trail

The valleys and areas with the best soils have the biggest and most modern farms, often with hundreds of not thousands of cows complete with modern free stall barns and slurry holding tanks that allow the farms to apply manure only when it’s most likely to be uptaken by crops and not washed away as pollution.

It’s easy to root for the small marginal dairy up in the hills with a hundred or so milking head. The truly small business with a tie stall barn that has old fashioned gutter tracks and hay storage up above. But the truth is that the large dairy, run by a family and their employees probably is a better stewart of the land with their scientifically driven CAFO plan – even if the kids yell our – what’s that smell.

I really didn’t spend all that much time in the Genesee Valley, heading back to Allegany County hills where most of the farms are small. Where the occasional smell of petroleum from the century old industry, still stripping a little high quality oil from the land remains, often situated on the same farms that produce the crops that feed the cows that produce the milk I like to drink.