Beaver in the Hudson River RALPH STONE / COURTESY OF WEST SIDE RAG
Twelve years ago, when a beaver was discovered in the Bronx River, it was a big deal because it was the first one spotted in NYC in 200 years. Now, beavers are apparently moving further downtown—because one has been discovered swimming in the Hudson River near the Upper West Side on Monday morning.
West Side Rag reported that a man walking his dog in Riverside Park noticed the beaver in the river around 71st Street, just north of Pier I. They wrote, “Ralph Stone took the photos… just after 10 a.m. as he walked his dog. He said he’s never seen beavers before in the area.”
New York City was essentially built on the back of the beaver, as beavers were plentiful in colonial New York and the fur trade fueled the city’s growth (the beaver is on the New York City’s seal). From the city’s wildlife site:
Overtrapping, deforestation, and habitat loss caused by New York’s rapid growth led to a sharp decline in their local populations over the decades. Just two centuries after European settlers first arrived, the number of beavers in New York State fell from an estimated 60 million to almost none at all. However, efforts in the early 1900s to reintroduce beavers by releasing them in the Adirondacks have been largely successful. By 1924, upstate beaver populations were thriving again. And in 2007 a beaver was spotted in the Bronx River, marking the first beaver sighting in New York City in over 200 years. Beavers are now present on Staten Island as well, and have been spotted in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The beaver is also the official New York State animal, “To provide beaver pelts to European markets in the early 1600s, fur traders settled near the present capital, Albany, to trade with Indians.”
Beaver in the Hudson River (Ralph Stone / Courtesy of West Side Rag)
While many consider beavers pests, because they love to chomp on trees, they have also been called an “essential ecosystem engineer,” because they can, according to a 2008 study, “create ponds and stimulate growth of diverse streamside vegetation critical for birds, including many migratory songbirds in decline.” In Washington State, a project relocated “problem beavers” to new areas to help restore the upper Yakima River Basin.
Anyway, yet another reason to rejoice in the revival of wildlife in the Hudson!
Update: The beaver was spotted in the Hudson by 59th Street just before 2 p.m.
Fran Summerlin checks the hemp crop with her two dogs. A five-acre hemp field grows at the base of Chandler Mountain. This is the first year farmers can legally grow hemp in Alabama. (Joe Songer | jsonger@al.com).
One of the first industrial hemp fields planted in Alabama in mid-May, just below Chandler Mountain in St. Clair County, has an herbal scent, almost like a hint of basil.
Its neat rows of mostly thriving plants range from two feet to four feet tall. They appear almost jolly.
“It looks like a field of 3-foot-tall Christmas trees,” said Ed Glaze, who oversaw the planting of the crop. “They look very cute.”
Fran Summerlin, owns the former horse farm that now has a five-acre hemp field, walks through the rows with her dogs, Zella and Zeke. Deer prints are evident in the dirt between the plants, but there’s no evidence that they’ve eaten any of the leaves.
“Deer don’t like hemp,” Glaze said. “We can’t see where they have eaten anything.”
Nor have bugs noticeably bothered the plants. No pesticides are allowed on the hemp.
“We’ve had no issues with pests,” Summerlin said.
The hemp farmers are more than halfway through the growing season for the first legal crop of industrial hemp, which looks like marijuana but is a species of cannabis that lacks anything but the tiniest trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive ingredient that gets people high.
They are farming hemp for CBD oil, or cannabidiol, which is purported to have a variety of positive health effects and is now widely legal.
Glaze and Summerlin are learning to grow their first crop. Many of the farmers across the state who have been licensed to grow hemp are experienced at growing cotton, soybean and other crops.
“We’ve got some really good farmers in the program that we know can grow anything,” said Alabama Department of Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate.
“I think people seem pretty pleased,” Pate said. “Most of them think they’ll have a crop. There are smart people hoping they can make a little money. With CBD oil taking off, there are plenty of people wanting to buy it.”
Joint Senate and Assembly environmental committees’ summer hearing in 2018.
By Frank Brill, EnviroPolitics Editor
A trivia question for you fellow-followers of environmental issues in the New Jersey Legislature: How many years have the Senate and Assembly environmental committees been holding their joint summer hearing at the Jersey Shore?
My guess would have been seven. It turns out I wasn’t even close. The first joint hearing took place in August of 2008 in Toms River.
Our official source? Veteran Office of Legislative Services aide Carrie Anne Calvo-Hahn who just happens to have a file on her desk containing every single agenda for those get-togethers.
Carrie Anne also can tell you what the subject was for each. Among them were: Barnegat Bay protection, the state’s energy master plan, beach access, and plastic bag recycling.
This year’s focus will be the broader topic of recycling, as in what impact China’s import ban on U.S. recyclables has had on New Jersey county and municipal recycling programs, and how the state might help to stabilize the disruption and stimulate markets for recyclable materials and recycled products.
The hearing is scheduled to run from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 15, in the LMH Room, Toms River Municipal Complex, 33 Washington Street, Toms River, NJ.
| Lummi Nation spiritualist Richard Solomon offers a prayer for the southern-resident orcas on a private beach in the San Juan… (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)
ABOARD THE LENGESOT IN THE SALISH SEA — The tote was loaded and full of water, the cedar boughs cut and stacked on deck. But as Lummi tribal members headed out on their traditional waters to offer a ceremonial feeding of live chinook salmon to the endangered southern-resident killer whales, neither whale nor fish was anywhere to be found.
Tuesday marks a month since the southern residents were last seen in their usual home waters in and around the San Juan Islands. Usually, present nearly every day at this time of year, the orcas have shown up only a handful of times this year, and then, only for brief visits before quickly leaving again for waters of the outer coast.
In this historic summer of unthinkables, day after day is passing without the orcas and fish that normally enliven the waters of the inland Salish Sea.
Meanwhile, the chinook runs to the Fraser River the whales are usually hunting in their ancient foraging grounds have cratered. And on a recent weekday on the waters of northern Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, but for a cluster of oil tankers staging offshore from the refineries in and around Cherry Point, the waters were quiet and still.
“Do you have any fish?” Raynell Morris asked on her cellphone, calling one fisherman after another from the boat. Senior policy adviser in the Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office of the Lummi Indian Business Council, she and other Lummi tribal members normally would have loaded the tote with fish for the whales before heading out. But with no fish to be had at home, they decided to chance getting some from fishermen as they were out on the water.
As she dialed, Richard Solomon prepared. A spiritualist for the Lummi Nation, his prayers were to be offered along with the fish for J17, a matriarch of the southern residents not yet seen this spring or summer, and feared dead. And for K25, also missing. And for the extended family of the southern residents, or in the Lummi language, qwel lhol mech ten: the people who live under the sea.
After hours of searching for whales and fish, the Lummi decided to offer what they could.
Kurt Russo, a strategist with Lummi Nation Sovereignty and Treaty Protection, carries cedar boughs to be used in prayer as Lummi Natural Resource Enforcement Officer Aaron Hillaire ties up the boat. (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)
Aaron Hillaire, of the Lummi Nation, docked the tribal police boat used for the voyage at an ancient Lummi village site in the San Juans, dating back more than 4,000 years. Solomon had painted his face for spiritual protection. An ermine skin flashed white from his cedar hat. Morris, carrying the cedar boughs, followed him as he walked ashore.
Solomon stopped and rinsed his face with cool, clean water. On the way to the village site, he suddenly stopped again, and plucked ripe blackberries, fat and succulent. He held onto them though, without eating a one.
Then Morris and Solomon walked down the beach to the water’s edge, where with song and prayer, they offered the berries, floated on cedar boughs, to the whales.
Lummi spiritualist Richard Solomon wears weavings made by Lummi hereditary chief Bill James. (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)
Afterward, sitting amid driftwood logs on the beach, Solomon scooped up a heap of white shell fragments in his fisherman’s hands, still red from ceremonial paint. He held the shells, and their memories. They had calved off from an archaeological deposit called a shell midden: bits of shell and bone left in the ground from cooking. The midden was layered in white bands in the ground stacked head-high along the shore.
As he walked back to the boat, Solomon paused, looking out over the cove, and sang his grandmother’s song. She had grown up here. It felt so good to be back, he said, with the memories of this place. “This is when we get to time travel,” he said, still holding the shells, pouring them slowly, carefully, from one palm to the other. They made a soft rattling sound.
Ken Balcomb, of the Center for Whale Research, keeps the official count of southern residents, and usually announces the whales born and died since the previous July. But for scientists, too, it is a summer so far without precedent. Research scheduled for summer encounters with the whales has been impossible to conduct.
Balcomb said he would go out in search of the southern residents to take stock if they haven’t come home by mid-August, when Canadian scientists end their field season. Those researchers have recently been seeing the southern residents on the west side of Vancouver Island, he said. L pod was even seen off the coast of California, in Monterey Bay in April, searching for fish.
Morris said she was not yet ready to call the offering the Lummi made for J17 and K25 a memorial. But she knows their family is in trouble.
“We are here for them, and all the whale people,” Morris said. “Famine; there is no word in Lummi for what is happening.”
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2515 or lmapes@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @LyndaVMapes. Lynda specializes in coverage of the environment, natural history, and Native American tribes.
Larry Smart, a professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science, in a greenhouse examining industrial hemp.
By Justin Muir, Cornell University
Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University will house the nation’s only industrial hemp germplasm repository – a seed bank – co-located at Cornell AgriTech in Geneva, New York.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. who helped secure $500,000 in federal funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service (USDA-ARS) made the funding announcement on Friday.
“I fought tooth and nail to secure this federal funding,” said Schumer, the Senate minority leader, “while also working to strip back the burdensome federal restrictions that held our farmers and growers back from growing industrial hemp as an agriculture commodity, because I knew the potential this crop had to transform the upstate New York economy.”
At the new repository, the USDA-ARS will maintain the germplasm and collaborate with Cornell University scientists, where they already partner on research for grape, apple, cherry, tomato and Brassica crops.
Larry Smart, a professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Sciences, said the hemp repository is a desperately needed resource. The seed bank will enable researchers to identify pest-resistant and disease-resistant genes, giving them the tools to breed new varieties. Getting to the root of crop health, Smart said, is essential for providing better resources to New York hemp growers.
Beyond New York, the new seed bank will benefit hemp growers all across the nation. Christine Smart, professor in the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology section of SIPS, said these resources will let them breed hemp varieties that will grow well under different conditions.
She thinks cultivars developed at Cornell could be ready for growers within five years.
Understanding and cultivating these living, genetic resources provide the most promising ways to support growers. The market for hemp has already skyrocketed in the U.S.: According to Cannabis Financial Network, the hemp industry was projected to grow from $400 million in 2016 to $2.1 billion in 2020.
“The more germplasm that scientists have access to,” Smart said, “the better the chances are that we’re going to breed plants that are useful, whether it’s for managing pests or specific climates.”
“The hemp seed bank and the research potential it gives our Cornell and USDA-ARS scientists will be vital resources for New York state farmers,” said Kathryn J. Boor, the dean at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “We are grateful to Sen. Schumer for his hard work to secure this federal funding.”
Never mind “keeping ‘em down on the farm.” The youths in this story are showing a deep commitment to their region, coming home as skilled agriculturalists and entrepreneurs, and injecting a much-needed dynamism.
Hanna Esch stands among her cows in Unadilla, Nebraska.
Outside Unadilla, Nebraska, Hannah Esch walks into her cooler and pulls out packages of rib-eye, brisket, and hamburger. Over the past nine months her new company, Oak Barn Beef, sold out of meat four times and brought in $52,000 in sales. Over the next year, she expects to double those sales numbers.
That will be a milestone. It will also be when she finishes her last year of college.
Some 150 miles northwest, the Brugger twins, Matt and Joe, show off how they’re diversifying from traditional agriculture. They directly market the beef from the cows they raise and they grow hops for local microbreweries. But the most visible sign of their commitment to the rural Plains is the two-story farmhouse they’re renovating on the family homestead.
“We’ve just gotten to a point where we can live here,” says Matt, who moved in with his brother in May. It represents free housing, a key attraction for the budding entrepreneurs who have more ideas than dollars. But it’s more than that. It’s the place their great-grandfather bought when he moved here from Switzerland. It’s where their grandfather was born and where they played as children when the house was later rented by people who kept sheep.
“We always wanted to be back in rural economic development,” says Matt. But it wasn’t clear until college what that would mean, which was going back to the family farm. The twins graduated in May.
There’s a new generation of rural entrepreneur returning to the Great Plains. Unlike those who take over a conventional farm and help make it bigger and more efficient, these enterprising young people are starting small and unconventional operations. And unlike previous generations, they aren’t going off to big cities to acquire skills and then returning after a decade or two. Instead, these young people who straddle the end of the millennial generation and the beginning of Generation Z are often coming home right away.
It’s not clear how big the movement is and whether it can reverse the population decline that’s gone on for a century in the rural Plains. But if energy combined with business and social media savvy can overcome demographic decline, then perhaps these youthful entrepreneurs – the first generation born after the farm crisis of the 1980s – have an opportunity to do it.
“There is a spirit in these young people that is different than anything I’ve ever experienced,” says Tom Field, director of the eight-year-old Engler Agribusiness Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Of the 120 or more of its alumni, “90% of them say their goal is to return – or they choose to live in – a small or rural community. These are students who have had international experiences, had internships on both coasts, but they choose to live and work and play in places where they have a deep affinity with the culture, the people, and the landscape.”
Twins Joe (left) and Matt Brugger stand in front of their home in Albion, Nebraska. Melanie Stetson photo Freeman/Staff
It’s not just would-be farmers who are returning. Taylor Walker was a year or so away from getting his teaching degree at Mid-Plains Community College in North Platte, Nebraska, when his father called wondering if he wanted to start a restaurant back home.
That would be Gothenburg, Nebraska, a city of 3,448 with no stoplights and a big grain elevator just before the railroad tracks. His father, who had run a succession of restaurants in town, had retired and sold his steakhouse in 2016. “Gothenburg got in a panic when it was gone,” says Mr. Walker. “[My father] thought it might be a good idea” to start a new one.
So Mr. Walker skipped the degree and last September opened T. Walker’s on Main Street. It’s much smaller than his dad’s steakhouse but more centrally located, just between Yancy Insurance Agency and Ribbons & Roses, a floral shop. Employees of the two banks across the street come over to enjoy a menu that runs from sirloin steak to grilled trout. “They’ve got the best hot beef sandwich,” says resident Verlin Janssen.
Why move back to a rural community, anyway? “I’m not a real fan of the big cities,” says Mr. Walker. And “I had seen how the community of Gothenburg treated my dad with his businesses. If they continue that for me, then I owe it to them to be here.”
When the Brugger twins first started thinking about a return to the rural Plains, their initial idea was to do something in business development. Then they met with Dr. Field of the Engler program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He urged them to be role models, instead.
“He was the first one to say, … ‘The best thing you can do for your community is to find what you love to do. Start a business around it and hire people to come back … and show other young people that you can do what you love in a rural community,’” Matt recalls. “We completely changed our perspective.”
Now, the recent college graduates run their own company, Upstream Farms. They have 50 cows. They market the beef directly, mostly to the training table program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which serves high-quality foods to student athletes. They raise hops for nearby craft breweries, and because the university takes only the best cuts of beef, the twins sell the rest of their meat as hamburger to the boutique beer firms.
“You grow up and you get to college and it’s all about the industrialization side of [agriculture],” says Matt. “We like to tip our hat to the way that things used to be: this way of life where you had hogs, cows, sheep, chickens. You grew four or five different kinds of crops all on one piece of land. … We like to say that we’re twin brothers farming the Midwest, putting new ideas on old dirt and connecting our customers back to land.”
Those new ideas don’t always get the support of their father, Norman Brugger.
Matt and Joe Brugger buy cattle from their father, Norman Brugger, and use his land.
“Two years ago I said, ‘Dad, we need to grow more cover crops,’” Joe recalls. He explained the benefits of raising a crop over the winter to help build up a root system in the soil, which would allow them to use less fertilizer. “Cover crops are nothing new. … [Grandpa] understood it,” Joe adds. “It was Dad who was like, ‘What! We’re going to plant again after we harvest?’”
Norman agreed to experiment with 80 acres. But in the spring, when they went to kill the crop to get ready for planting corn and soybeans, weeds started sprouting in the field because the cover crop seed had been contaminated.
“It was one of those things where I thought I knew what I was talking about,” Joe says. “And it just fell on its face.” Cover crops have been abandoned for the moment.
Perhaps that caution springs from Norman’s experience. He started farming in 1983, near the start of the worst farm crisis since the 1930s. At the time, farmers were going out of business because they had accumulated so much debt buying land at inflated prices during the booming 1970s. When interest rates skyrocketed and crop prices and land values plummeted during the 1980s, farm lenders could no longer justify the debt that farmers were carrying.
While others were selling out, Norman started buying land. It paid off in the long run but required him and his young family to live frugally while crop prices were depressed. A drought didn’t help. According to family lore, the twins’ older sister didn’t see rain until she was 3 years old.
So when the twins proposed building a distillery, their parents responded, “That’s really risky, guys,” Matt recalls. “They go, ‘You guys don’t know what it’s like to live in really, really hard times.’ And they’re right. We’re privileged not to have [known] that. And so we do take more risks. And I think that maybe someday … it’ll catch up with us.”
“But maybe not,” he adds.
Starting a business anywhere is risky, but in rural America it’s even harder. That’s partly because a declining population means a shrinking market of customers.
“You definitely have got to pay attention to what the town has to offer,” says Mr. Walker, the restaurateur who’s following in his father’s footsteps. “Gothenburg does a very good job. They brought in Frito-Lay [which buys corn from local farmers]. … The town has so many opportunities that it helps keep the people here.”
Two men chat in downtown Gothenburg, Nebraska, across the street from a steakhouse that Taylor Walker came back to his hometown to open.
Stability is fragile on the prairie. Despite the good times, Gothenburg has lost more than 3% of its population since 2010, which puts it back to where it was in 1980, before the farm crisis. In rural Nebraska, however, that counts as a roaring success.
Many schoolchildren learn about the Homestead Act, the 1862 law that opened up the Western frontier to settlers with the lure of 160 acres of free federal land. But few outside Nebraska know about the Kincaid Act of 1904, which did the same for the Sandhills and the rest of north-central and western Nebraska. Because the land was arid, the Kincaid Act gave each homesteader 640 acres, a square mile of land – four times what the Homestead Act had offered. The western half of the state’s population skyrocketed.
Already, in eastern Nebraska, however, there were troubling signs of decline. In 21 of the state’s 93 counties, the population had peaked by 1900. One of them, Otoe County, where Ms. Esch runs her cattle, had seen its population grow sixfold in the three decades from the outbreak of the Civil War to 1890, but then it went into a long, slow decline. It lost nearly half its residents through 1990 before rebounding a bit.
The rapid surge from the Kincaid Act also began to wane soon enough. By 1940, the population had peaked in more than two-thirds of Nebraska’s counties covered by the law, including Boone County where the Bruggers live. Using machinery that got ever bigger each decade, farmers consolidated their holdings, and towns started to disappear. When the twins’ great-grandfather moved here from Switzerland, he lived in Akron, a small community built in anticipation of a railroad that never came through. The country store, dance hall, and church are long gone. The twins’ address is now Albion even though the town center is 13 miles away.
The decline in population not only crimps the number of people rural businesses can sell their wares to, but also reduces their labor pool. After graduating from Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, Jameon Rush stayed on to do video production for a regional bank based there. During that stint, he started his own video-production company on the side and, when he realized it was viable, struck out on his own full time. What he didn’t count on was the lack of local specialized talent.
Cows graze in a prairie outside Obert, Nebraska, bordered by plowed fields. Many acres of grassland have been converted into cropland in the Midwest. Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“I was having difficulty finding the right people,” he says. Instead of finding a dependable No. 2 employee for his company, the position became a revolving door, he says. So this year he sold his company to a marketing agency, which was wanting to bring video production in-house. He now works for the firm and in June moved to Lincoln, the state capital, where the company is based.
His relocation to the big city is symbolic of a troubling trend for rural Nebraska. Between 2000 and 2010, the typical rural county in the state (one with no town of 2,500 or more) lost nearly half its population of 20- to 24-year-olds, according to the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. That is partially offset by a 16% net in-migration of 30- to 34-year-olds, presumably people who have worked elsewhere and are now wanting to return to the Great Plains.
But it’s not enough to reverse the overall trend of Nebraskans settling in urban and suburban areas. In 2010, the two counties containing Omaha and Lincoln as well as the county between them represented just over half of Nebraska’s entire population; by 2050, they’re projected to account for two-thirds. The state’s rural counties are expected to lose population over that time.
