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Local Foods Weekend 2022!

Join us on September 9th, 10th, and 11th for Local Foods Weekend, with events hosted by over 30 different food producers and businesses throughout St. Lawrence County and its neighboring areas. You can attend one, a few, or try to make it to all of the different events. 

The Weekend’s events range from tours to tastings to kid-friendly activities, there’s something for everyone. Come out and participate in this exciting 3-day celebration of the products and the people that grow, raise, sell, or prepare food in and nearby St. Lawrence County.

 Our rural food system is powered by many hard working farm suppliers, growers, retail stores, cooperatives, and restaurants, along with local organizations and customers. Explore our foodshed and discover the diversity of products created in the North Country.

See the individual event listing on the Local Foods Weekend Blog Page HERE. Events can be viewed via the online map, which includes the ability to filter the  types of events and days of individual events. You can see photos and read the bios of all the businesses and farms participating or you can read the brochure of event listings for a complete list of options! 

This event is associated with the Extension exhibit In Season: Our Rural Food System in Photos on display at Traditional Arts of Upstate New York (TAUNY) in downtown Canton from May 14-October 29, 2022. Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County aims to foster a unique weekend experience with dozens of different activities that entice the community to dive into the rich local offerings.

Lauren grew up in neighboring Vermont exploring and loving the green mountains and vast landscapes. Her undergraduate degree made her appreciate the communities that surround local foods and a Master’s Certificate in Food Studies from the University of Southern Maine made her want to pursue a career in the food system. In 2021 and 2022, she was the Local Foods Marketing and Development Educator for Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County.

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How to spot, remove, and test ticks

As summer rolls through the North Country, people are spending more time outside in nature. We are not the only travelers in the outdoors, with tick season already in full swing. Ticks are parasitic arachnids that tend to hang around cool, shady areas, clinging to low shrubs, leaf litter, or grasses. They use these ground-level covers to latch onto prey easily as they brush by. Their diet consists of blood meals from their hosts, slowly consuming for three days to a week after burrowing their mouthparts through the skin. The most common varieties include the black-legged tick/deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the American dog tick/wood tick (Dermacentor variabilis), and the lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum).

The three most common tick species found in NY State: Deer tick, dog tick, and lonestar tick.
The three most common tick species found in NY State

Tick prevention: how to minimize interaction and maximize detection

Ticks are vectors of many pathogens, and are more likely to transmit them if feeding for more than 24-48 hours. With a dozen potentially transmitted diseases, they spread more types of pathogens to people from animals than any other creature. Many of these diseases are incredibly rare and all have under a 1% fatality rate if treated with modern antibiotics. The most common tick-related illness in the Northeast is Lyme disease, which is only present in black-legged ticks. The Thangamani Lab in Syracuse, NY reports that 38% of tested ticks submitted from St. Lawrence County carried at least one pathogen, with Lyme disease being the most common. The prevalence of Lyme disease has increased over the years due to booms in host deer populations, climate change shifting habitat zones, and human-related activities and development encroaching on natural areas. 

While ticks seem to prefer areas with long grasses or dense woods, up to 75% of tick bites occur in our own backyards and particularly affect those who spend time in gardens and yards. The unmaintained edge between woodland or brush and your lawn, called the ecotone, is actually one of the most common points of contact humans have with tick populations, while ornamental vegetation and lawns have the lowest number of ticks. If your home borders heavy vegetation, taking steps to prevent bites is particularly important. Read more How to spot, remove, and test ticks

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So You Have Keywords, Now What?

So You Have Keywords, Now What? 

Having identified what keywords are important to your business (first keyword blog post HERE), our next steps are to narrow down to the best keyword choices and then start incorporating them into your marketing. 

How many keywords can you optimize for on your website?

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts debate how many keywords you should use, but most agree to not use too many. For each page on your website, choose between 1-3 keywords you want to optimize for on that page, which is specific enough that you can pay attention to them but not too overwhelming of a task. 

For example, your farm might produce meat, but individual website pages might talk about butchering, pork products, beef products, etc. Think of picking keywords for these pages as a way to get people to just the right spot on your website (remember to pull out those tools we discussed in part 1). It will be the same for your social media posts. One post might talk about an easy pork breakfast recipe while another might talk about the two breeds of cattle raised and the differences between their beef. Those will have different keywords as well. So rather than aiming for a specific number of keywords, focus on how you are going to use them. Over time, they are going to show if they are working for your business or not.

Where to put your keywords

  • On your individual website pages. 

So let’s say that after some research, you see that homemade ice cream is most searched online but small-batch ice cream also seems popular. You have plenty of room on the actual web page to talk about your product but to emphasize the importance of certain words on a page you can:

  • Use the keywords a few times (aiming for 1-3 times)
  • Bold them or write them in a larger font on your webpage 
  • Link them to other pages

In this example, I have made the start of an ‘about’ page for my homemade ice cream shop. You’ll see how I’ve used formatting to emphasize the ‘homemade ice cream’ and ‘small batch’ and ‘order ice cream’ ideas for the search engines without driving the people reading the website crazy:

  • In the metadata (fancy for: page title, tags, and description) or your pages

Read more So You Have Keywords, Now What?