A Creek Runs Through It...

Drop for drop, the White Clay Creek in Pennsylvania's Chester County may be the most intensively studied,  wadable, body of water in the world. The Stroud Water Research Center is perched on the White Clay's banks, and ever since 1966, part of the streams flow has gone through one of the center's labs. Fish and insects and everything else that swims, crawls, clings, eats and breathes in the outdoor White Clay acts the same way inside. Last Friday, I tagged along with a group of Lancaster County government and ag leaders as they visited the Stroud. Their mission for the day, fully accomplished, was to learn some of the things the tiny White Clay has taught science about the workings of our water-covered planet. Some of those lessons were learned in micro-environments contained in the world's largest collection of specially fitted Coleman coolers. Bernard Sweeney, the center's president, figured if they were going to buy 600 Coleman coolers at one shot, Walmart should give them a discount. "But we buy 600,000 Coleman coolers a year," the folks at Walmart told him. So the order for Stroud, as befits a water research center, perhaps, was just a drop in the bucket for Walmart.

Down with fences for deer control. Stroud Center researchers study everything about their White Clay watershed, and that includes methods to keep deer from eating tree seedlings planted on stream banks. A 10-foot-high chain link fence will keep deer out of any patch of ground, but at a prohibitive cost. The Stroud scientists think they can keep deer away with a much lower, double fence.  A four-foot-high outside fence separated by two feet from a similar inside fence creates a space that seems to make deer uncomfortable. Maybe because they're claustrophic. Which could be why you never see deer riding in elevators.

Slashing dollars from ag budgets could affect a state's economy for many miles and in many directions from the end of the lane.  Lancaster Farming's Charlene Shupp Esbenshade covered budget hearings in Harrisburg, Pa., last week and reports on what she learned in the current issue.