No Farms, No Food

Taking Stock After the Devastation

by Peter Barrett and photographs by Roy Gumpel, September 28, 2011

The meteorological one-two punch of Hurricanes Irene and Lee did massive amounts of damage to hundreds of farms in New York; over 200,000 acres of food and feed crops were flooded. The agricultural losses were worst of all in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys, with severe erosion, flooding, and the destruction of many structures and livestock; one farm lost its entire herd of cattle. But the Hudson Valley got hammered hard as well, and our farmers are reeling in the aftermath. They need help.

The rich, fertile bottomlands in our region are prone to flooding, and that’s part of what makes the soil so good. But the floods normally happen in late winter and spring, before any seeds are in the ground. Standing next to a hand-painted sign reading “High Water Mark Irene” that’s more than twice his height, Chris Kelder of Kelder’s farm in Accord explains why the timing of this disaster could not have been worse for farmers: “We’ve spent all our money, and the crop was ready to harvest, but now it’s gone. Since 1955 [flooding has] never happened during the growing season.” The end of the summer is the point at which all of the money farmers have put into their fields begins to come back out. It’s exactly like Black Friday in the retail world.

The Force of Water
In the Hudson Valley, the Walkill River was one of the most destructive to farmland. While the raging Esopus tore roads, bridges, and houses apart all along the Route 28 corridor, making for dramatic stories and footage, the slower-moving Walkill just rose and rose and rose, submerging scores of farms from southern Orange County all the way up to where it joins the Rondout in Rifton. The force of the water in these and other streams shifted rocks and gravel, blew out retaining walls, and scoured away riverbanks and countless tons of topsoil. Fine silt has clogged the remaining soil, blocking the capillary action that pulls water down below the surface. The still-high water level means that any more rain has nowhere to drain to, so in some areas the flooding from Lee was worse than Irene. There are millions of tons of logjams, boulders, and debris that need clearing and dredging so that the next storm doesn’t drive the rivers right back into these same fields.

Farms that were bright green and full of food are now drab, soggy expanses of brown. Driving around the area, one sees the tree lines at the edges of many of the flooded fields highlighted in orange; pumpkins that once filled the fields now lie broken and rotting where the trees caught them. Dave Davenport, owner of Davenport Farms in Stone Ridge and president of the Rondout Valley Growers Association (RVGA), explains what happened to all the rest: “Thousands of pumpkins floated downstream into the Hudson. A lot of people saw them coming down the creek, getting caught in a net over the dam in High Falls.” Someone who fished one out of the water there e-mailed the RVGA asking whom she could pay for it, and that led to a fundraising idea. Because there will now be a shortage of pumpkins this fall, the RVGA will also be selling paper pumpkins, marked with the donation amount, that customers can buy, decorate, and hang on their front doors to show their support. Davenport is currently talking with Whole Foods about selling the paper pumpkins at Whole Foods stores throughout the metropolitan area.