A leg up in the local organic market...

Traditional farm operations are scattered here, there and everywhere. Organic farms are clustered here, there and back to here, according to an article this week in the New York Times. A map accompanying the article showed the nation's 10,000 or so organic farms heavily clustered on the West Coast, the upper Midwest and the Northeast.

The map of the 2.2 million traditional U.S farms looks as though the mapmaker shook a pepper shaker over all the states from the Mississippi watershed east. A lot of the pepper hit Lancaster Farming's main readership area, of course. The map also shows that some of the tightest clusters of organic operations exist in a circle around our office here at 1 East Main Street in Ephrata.

It's an interesting time for all of agriculture. The majority of our readers will no doubt continue farming with traditional methods, although "traditional" is taking on new meanings. Today's best management practices reduce the need for purchased pesticides and fertilizers. Modern BMPs have also drastically reduced nutrient and sediment runoff from the levels of a decade ago. There may come a day, in fact, when there is very little to distinguish "traditional" from "organic."

Meanwhile, traditional farmers who want to make the leap - or is it a crawl - to totally organic methods can take comfort from the fact that they are in the heart of a ready market for their products. If you'd like to see the map in the Times, click here:  http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/05/03/business/03metrics.graf01.ready.html

Change the way milk is priced. That's the message from Roger Allbee, Vermont Secretary of Agriculture. And he thinks the time to do the job is now, with dairymen in a state of shock and milk prices under the cost of production. Allbee makes his case in an opinion piece in this week's Lancaster Farming.

Kidding around with a horse massage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wi_9n_BxDI