We are surveying in the blue region in the Capital District, a total of 11 counties including: Albany, Columbia, Fulton, Greene, Montgomery, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectaday, Schoharie, Warren, and Washington

Hello! I am Rosy, a soon to be senior and this is my first blog post about my summer internship with Cornell Cooperative Extension as their Ag and Natural Resources Intern. I have been hired to work on a project with the obective of identifying the impact and contribution of local agriculture production on the greater Capital District economy. The study will be conducted in 11 counties in the Capital District (see map above) and I will be driving all around the region surveying farmers with at least some of their products going locally. Since I live in Western Massachusetts in the Berkshires, it will be a lot of driving, but I just have to make sure to keep finding good new music to jam to!

The first week was a little overwhelming, but also very exciting. I got a general introduction to the project at the CCE office in Troy, and started organizing, emailing, and learning more the entire week. I got to meet Dr. Schmit who is in charge of the study, and Laura McDermott who is my main advisor who works for Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) mostly on the Capital District Vegetable and Small Fruit Program, and she is wonderful! It was a little hard to get through everything the first day because I was still getting over jet lag from coming back from studying abroad in New Zealand for the semester.

My main job this summer is to organize and do the surveying in all 11 counties. We have been working on creating a final draft of the survey, and just gathering lists of all the farmers in the district so that we can then create our population. We have already gotten a lot of feedback on the survey from farmers and extension agents from all around and its been quite a process figuring out how to get the results we need in the busiest time of year for farmers. I may need to do some bribery baking this summer!

The Hawthorne Valley Farm Store!

On Thursday I was able to head down to Columbia County and visited Hawthorne Valley Farm which does biodynamic farming and also outreach and educational programs! It was a gorgeous farm, and it has a wonderful farm store where I ate a delicious fresh lunch! That same day I also got to visit with people from the Farmscape Ecology Program which is an educational non-profit with a primary goal to stimulate, facilitate, and inform exploration of Columbia County. The entire first week it was awesome to meet so many people and hear about what they do and get feedback on our project as well. I think my favorite part of the project will be meeting farmers and getting to see so many different types of farms.