Helping Preserve Bradford County’s Heritage:
Become a Member of the Farmland Preservation Board
By: Megan Rought, Farmland Preservation
ATTENTION ALL FARMERS!! I have a few questions for you. How important is being rural and having beautiful wide-open spaces around you?  How important is your farmland to you? How important is it that the next generation carries on your legacy and continues to farm the same piece of ground that you have farmed for the last however many years? Maybe it was even handed down through multiple generations to you, and you want to continue the tradition. How much do you despise to seeing the next piece of pristine farmland be turned into a parking lot, shopping center, or some other sort of development?  If you answered that you land is very important to you, that you hope one day someone will continue farming your land and that you hate when you see a prime piece of farmland developed, then I have a great opportunity for you!

By: Miranda Neville, Agricultural Resource Specialist
Looking at the farmers in my life, some were born in to a seventh generation legacy while others chose to be first generation farmers but they all have one specific thing in common. No matter how long they have been farming they will spend their lives building their operation to create a legacy all their own. If (emphasis on ‘IF’) the day comes that they decide to retire or step back from farming, they want to be sure whoever takes the reigns will love and appreciate it just as they do. Finding someone who will take pride in what they do and who shares a passion for agriculture and their land is a rarity. So how does someone who spent their life cultivating their hopes and dreams (not to mention their life savings) ensure their legacy will live on?

​By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader, Bradford County Conservation District
Farmers today face challenges.  Farmers of any day have.  So too will farmers of the future.  That is one reason a group like the Future Farmers of America (FFA) exists – to help get them ready.
Four Northeast Bradford High School students are now wearing blue and gold as they begin a series of leadership challenges that will shape them for life.  Joshua Keeney, Emma Neuber, Kale Winters, and Kaleb Keeney are obviously willing to grow as they don their first FFA jacket in January 2021.  Their jackets were awarded to them from the Pennsylvania FFA Alumni Association after each wrote an essay about what the FFA jacket means to them and about their plans in FFA and in agriculture.

By: Amy Kneller, Ag Resource Specialist
Are you interested in protecting farms, farmland, and a persons’ ability to farm?  Protecting agriculture doesn’t always require a conservation easement – it can mean simply securing the right of farmers to farm without dealing with overly burdensome regulations. That’s the role of an Agricultural Security Area (ASA), where agriculture is a primary activity in the municipality. Farmers work with municipalities to develop ASAs, which demonstrate that farming is a local priority and promote more permanent and viable farming operations.

By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader
Conditions get tough for managing livestock in the winter.  It can be stressful for animals, farmers, and our natural resources.  Let’s consider steps to dramatically decrease cold snap stress.
If a farmer can cut the wind and give his animals a solid place to land their feet, our winter temps will cause little stress.  If relatively dry with a barrier against bitter wind, our animals like 15 degrees F, better than 90 degrees.

​By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader
Local farmers are receiving a new wave of “house calls” from Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).  These calls create some anxiety, so let’s try to get some background on where they are coming from.

​By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader, Bradford County Conservation District
Life is drawn to water.  We all can relate to that.  Land bordering waterways and waterbodies is teaming with life.  Riparian is a term literally meaning “riverbank”, or land beside the water.  How we manage our riparian land has far reaching effects.  Therefore, the conservation district gives considerable attention to equipping landowners to manage them well. 
Current focus on the Chesapeake Bay watershed is opening many opportunities for landowners wishing to improve riparian areas, including grant funding, plant materials, and more.

​An Excerpt from Pennsylvania’s Nutrient Management Program
Nutrient management traditionally has been concerned with optimizing the economic returns from nutrients used to produce a crop. More recently, nutrient management also has begun to address ways to minimize the negative impact of nutrients on the environment.
Programs such as the Chesapeake Bay Program and the Nutrient Management Act in Pennsylvania have focused attention on improving nutrient management on Commonwealth farms.

By: Kevin Brown, Agricultural Resource Specialist, Bradford County Conservation District
If you have, or intend to, plant cover crops, please read this column.  We all hear the benefits touted about cover crops- less erosion, having a living plant in the ground at all times, alleviating compaction, retaining nutrients for the next crop, giving food and shelter to microbes in the soil, and so on.  It is a great list and will do some miraculous things to the soil.  Try it on a limited basis, if you haven’t already.  Then get a shovel out and really look at what happened.  There are some benefits that definitely go with cover crops.  However, there are some things you should know beforehand that really can affect how those cover crops grow.  We have two years under our belt now with our highboy planter.  It has been a couple really wet years, so they haven’t been the best, but we have learned some interesting things that I think need to be shared.  They are things that I have NOT heard in any other cover crop presentation.  It’s like, “plant them and life will be good”.  Well, not here.  We have really struggled to get some good crops growing, but with the lessons learned, I think that will change.

​By: Kevin Brown, Agricultural Resource Specialist, Bradford County Conservation District
There was a joke in school back in my day that went like, “Do you know how to keep a person in suspense?  I will tell you later”.  Well, I told you I would help you pay for some of these conservation practices, most notably fencing out streams, in the next column and yet I didn’t.  I was keeping you in suspense.  Miranda had such a good article that I just had to let her go first.
I would like to remind you that even though we here at the District may be doing it for other reasons (clean water, and who wants that?), the real reason to do any of this is for the animals themselves.  The happier they are, the faster they grow (for production), and the more they will love us back.