Farms

"At this time, when our bees are dying off, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has done a very quiet but very dumb thing. They’ve stopped collecting critical scientific data on honeybees."

Whey Street Dairy received the 2019 State Agricultural Environmental Management Award.

Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a farmworkers’ rights bill into law Wednesday that will for the first time give the workers benefits other employees get, including time off and overtime pay.

Assemblyman Stephen Hawley, a Republican from Western New York, comes from a long line of farmers. He predicts the new requirements will be too onerous and that farms will close.

"If you look at the decline in milk consumption in our schools over the past nine years as a result of that misguided legislation, it actually tracks with the financial decline within the dairy industry."

Assemblyman Phil Palmesano is pushing back against a bill that would give farm workers the same rights as all workers in the state.

"If a beekeeper is able to take a honeybee swarm, they can care for them and manage them if they need it, instead of having these colonies kind of inhabit people's homes."

“We haven’t really prioritized them as the workforce and the backbone of the agricultural industry that they are."

Crispin Hernandez used to work on a North Country dairy farm. He and others workers tried to organize and were fired. Now he works for a workers' rights group.

Some food pantries are benefiting from home chicken keepers' desire to keep collecting the birds as pets, which results in more eggs than they can handle. But sometimes it can be hard to find takers.