Fracking, Farming and Finger Lakes Wine

Peter Saltonstall and his wife, Tacie, own King Ferry Winery. The small farm winery, located on the east side of Cayuga Lake, recently received a gold medal for their semi-dry Riesling. For some reason, Finger Lakes wineries do well when it comes to winning awards. So well, that Governor Andrew Cuomo often mentions wineries when touting NY products and agricultural achievements. The governor also puts a lot of energy - publicity-wise - into touting NY state agriculture, and in particular, the growing organic sector. These are examples of economic growth for the state, he says.

So why, if he values the wineries, organic farms, Community Supported Agriculture projects, farmer's markets, dairies.... why does he still waver on fracking? Time and again researchers and farmers have demonstrated how destructive industrialized drilling can be on agricultural land. Industrialized gas drilling harms dairy farmers and ranchers, can affect crop yield, and raises food safety issues.

One of the biggest issues is land use; industrialized drilling in Pennsylvania is taking over the agricultural landscape. Last summer Peter took his camera on a plane trip along the Susquehanna River, shooting footage of farms, fields, forests, and gas pads, pipelines, and other infrastructure. With the help of Ithaca College Park Productions he created a travel-documentary that shows what drilling looks like in Pennsylvania's northern tier. He also raises concerns regarding the impacts of hydro-fracking on NY's farms and wineries.

Fracking the Farm Part 4: Perception and Food Safety

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Two years ago the Park Slope Food Co-op publicly stated that if hydro-fracking were allowed in New York, they would “research alternatives to New York State products.”  The 15,800-member retail food cooperative purchases more than $1.5 million in New York State fruits and vegetables and another $1 million in poultry, beef, lamb and pork. They also purchase NY-made yogurt, cheese, eggs, cider and milk and take their responsibility to “buy local” seriously.

Fracking – even if it weren’t on the producer’s farm – would be a deal-breaker. One that, says NOFA-member Ken Jaffe, would have a dramatic effect on his farm.

Jaffe raises grass fed beef on hilly pastures in the Western Catskills. Slope Farm is situated on 100 acres in Delaware County, located near the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and just outside the “no fracking” buffer zone protecting the NYC watershed. He leases another 300 acres of pastures and hayfields and contracts grazing with other farmers. Some of his beef ends up at the Park Slope Co-op and other NYC markets, so Jaffe takes extra care to ensure his cattle are raised well away from drilling areas. But what happens when drilling moves into an area?

That’s not a rhetorical question for Jaffe. Just a few months ago he began negotiating a two-year grazing contract with a Tioga County farmer. But at the end of September, Houston-based Carrizo Oil and Gas started drilling an exploratory Marcellus well in Owego, NY. Now Jaffe’s re-thinking that contract, especially since Governor Andrew Cuomo has already indicated that he’d allow horizontal hydro-fracking Tioga and four other Southern Tier counties.

The primary concern for Jaffe’s buyers is what’s in the meat. “No one at the regulatory level is investigating this,” he says, disbelief in his voice. He cites the Pennsylvania case where 28 cows were quarantined after exposure to drilling fluids. No one, to his knowledge, has looked for any chemical residues in those animals.

The proximity of gas drilling chemicals and waste fluids to food production raises questions about the safety of grain and vegetables as well as the meat, eggs and dairy products. Not only is there no federal funding for research on the impacts of chemical contamination on food, there are also no required tests for contaminants.

Testing won’t make much difference, though, if there’s a perception that food comes from a contaminated place, says Stefan Senders. Two years ago he started Wide Awake Bakery in upstate NY. Production is small – between 500 to 700 loaves a week – but the focus, Senders says, is to nurture a local economy. One neighbor grows the organic grains, another neighbor mills them, and Senders bakes them into wholesome loaves.

“The wheat, the flour, and the bread are wholesome,” says Senders. “They bring our communities together, give us work, nourish us, and make our bodies and our land healthier.” Fracking threatens that because bread needs water, Senders explains. His rye flour requires nearly equal proportions of water and flour, and the purity of that water is critical. “What happens if you put your second ingredient at risk?”

Should drilling contaminate local wells, Senders could truck in water. But no farmer can afford to truck in irrigation water, he says. And without local grain, what’s a miller to grind? The illusion, says Senders is that you only need to fix one thing – maybe bring in water. “But when you frack, eventually everything fractures.”

Fracking the Farm Part 3: Impacts on Crops

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Bradford County, PA

Healthy soil is vital for organic farming, but drilling and related activities can compromise soil health. Four years ago a nursery owner in Texas lost 500 oak seedlings when a pipeline used to transfer brine to an underground injection well leaked. Brine is the salty well waste fluid that flows out of shale after drilling. But there’s more than salt in brine; there’s also benzene, heavy metals and radioactive compounds. XTO Energy, the company responsible for the leak, ended up trucking more than 3,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil to a regulated landfill.

The shale oil rush in North Dakota has brought soil trouble to farmers, too. Like Marcellus, the Bakken shale must be fracked to release the hydrocarbons. Like shale gas wells, fracked oil shale wells produce briney waste fluids that must be hauled to underground injection wells. But recent data shows that a lot of that waste never makes it to regulated disposal sites – it is spilled or dumped along the way. Last year there were 1,000 “accidental releases” of waste fluids and additional unreported releases along the roads. These spills have sterilized acres of farmland. One spill alone covered 24 acres with 2 million gallons of brine. A year after remediation efforts, nothing grows on that land. Not even weeds.

Dimock, PA, famous for water contamination is now facing soil contamination. According to the July 7 Pennsylvania Bulletin, Cabot Oil and Gas will begin remediation efforts at one of their well sites. A study found the soil to be “impacted by VOCs (volatile organic chemicals), SVOCs (semi-volatile organic chemicals), metals, and ethylene glycol due to a release from the reserve pit and a release from the mud shelf.”

Leaking pipelines can impact crops, too. Methane and other hydrocarbons leaking into soil displace air, thus depleting the oxygen. That in turn can change soil pH, and influence the microbial habitat. The result is severe retardation of crop growth, and sometimes early senescence or death.

Air quality is becoming an issue in the gas fields. Rural areas of Wyoming and Utah have measured ozone levels as high as 125 to 140 parts per billion (ppb) – much higher than EPA’s standard of 75 ppb and exceeding the smog levels in Los Angeles. Down in the Texas Barnett shale ozone levels reach 135 ppb, and in Fort Worth gas drilling produces as much ground-level ozone as all the cars and trucks in the city.

Though we don’t have shale gas drilling, NY is not immune. Chautauqua County, home to about 6,000 gas wells, boasts the second highest ozone level in the state. Where is all this ozone coming from? Emissions from drilling pads, truck traffic servicing those pads, and the compressors and other equipment related to drilling. The Clean Air Act regulates ozone, but the oil and gas industry enjoys exemption from those regulations.

Up in the atmosphere ozone is beneficial, protecting the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays. But at ground level it’s a major pollutant, causing more damage to crops than all other air pollutants combined. Each year it’s responsible for an estimated $500 million reduction in crop yields – and that’s just in the United States.

Ozone is created by chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the presence of sunlight. It enters leaves through stomata during normal gas exchange, like oxygen, but is more reactive. It can cause spotting and bleaching of leaves, affecting plant growth, flowering, fruiting and yield. Ozone damage can make some crops unmarketable, as in the case of spotting on spinach leaves.

Grapes are particularly sensitive to ozone, says Art Hunt, owner of Hunt Country Vineyards on the north western shore of Keuka Lake. Before the Clean Air Act went into effect, air pollution caused spots on his leaves. That, in turn, affected vine growth, fruit ripening and yield. Large scale industrialized drilling, he says, could roll back the gains made from clean air regulations.

Ozone can also make crops more susceptible to pathogens and pests and, in the case of clover and other crops, retard root growth.  For farmers, high ozone levels may mean lower nutritive value of their forage crops. It may alter how well herbicides work, promote the growth of perennial weeds and create opportunities for invasive species to move in.

Crops sensitive to ozone:

beans (string and snap),

beets

carrots

corn,

grapes (wine and juice)

peas

pinto beans

melons (cantaloupes and musk melons)

peaches

potatoes

squash

strawberries

 tomatoes

turnips

watermelon

Ozone also affects grains, including wheat and rice, as well as tobacco, soybeans, alfalfa, sorghum and cotton.

Fracking the Farm Part 2: Losing Dairy to Drilling

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

When Carol French signed a gas lease she never dreamed that half a dozen years later she’d be warning other farmers to think twice. French, a dairy farmer in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, lives in the midst of the drill zone. The last time she counted, there were nine active wells located within a mile of her farm.

photo by Frank Finan

Carolyn Knapp, an organic dairy farmer, lives just a couple miles away. Six years ago she was concerned that signing a lease might affect her organic status. It didn’t. Now, with a handful of wells drilled nearby, she worries about other ways that gas drilling and exploration could impact her operation.

The problem: gas leases do not protect farmland. Once those leases are signed, say Knapp and French, farmers lose control over their land. Gas companies decide where to place access roads, well pads, pipelines and compressors – and that can interrupt normal farming activities.

One of French’s neighbors ended up with a well pad sited behind his barn, effectively cutting off easy access to the fields and pasture. The farmer is earning royalties, French said – about $400/month. But he sold his cows because the drilling operations made it too hard to keep on farming. Knapp, who integrates intensive grazing into her dairy operation, said drillers planned to dig a 20-acre water impoundment right in the middle of her rotational grazing system.

Agricultural land is hit particularly hard; research shows that in the Marcellus, farmland makes up about 62 percent of the acreage affected by drilling. And when Penn State professor Tim Kelsey surveyed Bradford and Tioga counties in PA, his data showed that the number of wells in an area has an impact on farming. Areas with 150 or more gas wells lost 19 percent of their dairy herd; areas with no wells experienced only a 1 percent loss.

He doesn’t have an exact number, but Kelsey says there is no doubt that dairy farmers are quitting because of drilling. Even if their own farms are not impacted, farmers face other challenges. Landowners who used to lease fields to farmers are now renting their land for drilling-related uses such as equipment storage and water withdrawal sites. Large impoundments take land out of production, and crop yields are down in reclaimed pipeline right-of-ways. Add to that the scarcity of sawdust for bedding (it’s mixed with drill cuttings before they’re trucked to landfills) and the recent addition of an 8-cent-per- hundredweight surcharge for hauling milk (gas companies pay higher wages for those with CDL licenses) and it’s clear that the Marcellus boom is a bust for some farmers.

Reuse Fracking Wastewater to Irrigate Crops?

This past Thursday, Commissioner Vik Rao - a member of North Carolina's Mining and Energy Commission, proposed that fracking wastewater could be used to irrigate crops. Of course, he is the former chief tech officer of Halliburton, and he did mention something about sending the fracking waste through a treatment plant it could be useable. Barring irrigation, he posited that, perhaps, the saline fluid could be used to water sheep.

Using fields where we grow food as toxic - or "just" industrial - waste dumps just doesn't seem like a good idea. And it hasn't worked out in other places where waste has been land-farmed due to lack of regulatory oversight and the temptation to just dump stuff without ensuring that it has been cleaned up to proper levels. 

Fracking the Farm Part 1: Shale Gas Drilling Divides PA Organic Community

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

In June 2012, the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) asked the governor and legislature of the Commonwealth to place a moratorium on unconventional gas extraction. Like NOFA-NY, they asked that hydrofracking be halted until studies could determine that the industrialized drilling practice will not harm farms, the food they produce and the people who eat that food.

Both NOFA-NY and PASA call for the federal government hold the oil and gas industry to the same environmental regulations as other industries – currently drillers are exempted from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act. Both organizations call for drillers to report publicly what chemicals they are using, and to be held accountable for negative impacts.

As far as certification goes, NOFA-NY allows organic farmers to lease their land for drilling – as long as they provide a “safe” buffering distance between drilling activity and their organic fields.  But how close is too close when it comes to growing food near a gas well?

For Adron, that distance ended up being a quarter of a mile. He and his wife leased land just south of Dimock, PA, where they grew organic vegetables for a CSA, farmers market and local restaurant. Just one month after they moved in, a well was drilled half a mile away. A year later another well was drilled, this one a quarter mile away and located uphill from the farm. The family experienced headaches, burning eyes, and hives. It often smelled like a mix of bleach and diesel, said Adron. But he hoped those problems would disappear once the drilling ended.

Then, in the summer of 2011 his well water changed color. The family used spring water to drink and cook, but they depended on the well for irrigation and washing the produce. “I never sold anything I didn’t eat myself,” he said. “But there’s an emotional weight of trying to grow pure food and fearing that it might be contaminated.” By the time their well cleared up, they had decided to leave PA.

 “We want to farm where we don’t have to wonder about the safety of our water,” Adron said.

Shale gas drilling is deeply dividing the farming community in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, and those divisions are showing up in the organic community as well. Pittsburgh-based journalist and filmmaker Kirsi Jansa has been documenting “Gas Rush Stories”, and her latest installment (below)  focuses on the uncertainties and risks facing Pennsylvania’s organic farming community.

Gas Rush Stories: Organic Farmers divided about Fracking

Drilling Won't Save the Family Farm

A couple years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Carol French, a dairy farmer in Bradford County, PA. She came to the town of Caroline, NY to share some of her experiences of living and farming in a drilling area. Since then I have heard her speak a couple more times. Since 2011 she’s seen health impacts to her cows and her family from water contaminated by nearby drilling activity. The photo is of rashes her cows have been suffering. That is only one of the health impacts she's seeing on her farm.

A couple days ago she posted a plea for New Yorkers. Here is a condensed version of her comments (full comments at Raging Chicken):

If I hear one more New York farmer or any Farmer tell me that they want Natural Gas drilling in their state or they signed a gas lease to “SAVE their FAMILY FARM” I will probably lose it!

Today I thought it’s going to be a good day. We didn’t lose power (from the big snowstorm). We made our way to the barn to only find that another cow aborts her calf. She was eight months into her pregnancy. Before I was done milking my cows, cow number three starts to abort her calf. She too is eight months into her pregnancy. In nine days we have had three cows lose their calves.

For people not familiar with farming I will explain the dilemma. A cow should be “dry” for two months before giving birth. A cow that aborts during this time of her pregnancy doesn’t “come into” her milk real well. This Farmer counts on the replacement calves to continue farming the same number of cows. I have heard from other farmers with “changed” water having similar problems. If this is true, the money from the lease, royalties, and signing other agreements will NOT offset the cost of:  1. Losing your health. 2. Losing your family business, 3. Losing the value of your property. With this stripped from you, what will you have?

A farmer claiming that this natural gas extraction is going to save the farm is sadly mistaken. Should that farmer count on this money and lose everything that I had mentioned … he definitely will lose his farm to the gas industry without a dime in his pocket!

Carol appreciates our concern – but what she really wants is us, her neighbors in NY, to stand up with her. She has written to her state agencies, DEP, state Dept. of Agriculture, and a host of other people, to no avail.

In the next few days the Governor of NY and state environmental regulators will likely determine whether and how to allow high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. This is the time, Carol says, for New Yorkers to stand up and speak.

Help Pennsylvania fight against Hydro- Fracturing and what it has done to its people living in Pennsylvania. Please remember, what my neighbor agrees to do on his property will affect me, just like what Pennsylvania will do in its state will affect New York, West Virginia, and Ohio. All of these states have become Pennsylvania’s drilling waste dumping grounds for the gas industry.