Photo of Andy Arthur

Andy Arthur

November is around the corner. 🍂 The colors are rapidly fading, the nights are growing long, the politicians are doing their thing, the tricker-treaters and manure spreaders their thing too. The woods soon will be full of the sounds of rifle fire, and the chill of winter and snow will be flying shortly.

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.

Replacing plastic for glass and metal is a bad idea

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There are some who want to replace single use plastics with single use aluminum or glass containers, noting the greater recycablity of both materials. But I think it’s a bad idea:

  • Glass and metal, once produced last forever in the environment.
  • A glass or metal object doesn’t just rot, it also doesn’t doesn’t burn. A discarded plastic bottle may be incinerated, burned in a burn barrel or campfire or be destroyed by a wildfire
  • Plastics, especially outside of a landfill have a much shorter life than metals or glass thanks to the combustible nature of hydrocarbons
  • Metals and glass discarded can lead to cuts in children and adults when they step on the glass, are working in the woods or swimming in the creek
  • Metals and glass discarded can puncture car tires both on and off the road
  • Metals and glass discarded can get into pasture and cause painful death from hardware disease in cows and other livestock
  • Traditional deposit for recycling programs do increase recycling rates but still don’t eliminate litter or even ensure most of the material is recycled
  • Recycling is great but even with glass and metal which is said to be 100% recyclable, material is lost when the metals and glass are melted down for reprocessing
  • Glass and metal makes a lot more sense with true rewash and reuse programs – like milk delivered by a milk man
  • Milk in glass is colder and purer
  • As would be other beverages such as soda or beer produced and distributed in reused growlers

Old Unopened Beer Car