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| Richard Giles and Holley White |
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Location: Hamden, Delaware County
Type
of Operation: Vegetables, Hay
Total Acreage: 43.4
Acres in Conservation Reserve: 1.8
Rotated
Cropland: 23
Permanent Hayland: 8
Other Land:
12.4
Best Management Practices: Tree planting, grass
filter strip area
CREP Practices: Tree planting, Grass
filter strip
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Have
the conservation practices changed your farm? For better? Otherwise?
It's definitely improved our situation. We had quite a lot of stream
activity with last winter's snowmelt, and the grass filter strip
installed last fall is protecting us from the river and protecting
our soil from erosion.
What
tree species did you choose for plantings?
We seeded the filter strip with timothy grass and perennial rye.
The trees we chose for the riparian area are red maple, sugar maple,
sycamore, black gums, redosier dogwood, larch, high bush cranberry
and blueberry.
Do you have any observations about
water quality in the stream?
By having the filter strip in place instead of corn or hay crops
right up to the river, we caught a lot of soil that might have been
lost.
Was there enough
financing to make up for the impact on available crop or pasture
land?
With our small acreage, the financial incentive didn't even cross
my mind. I look at this program not as an enticement, but as helping
me do what I would do anyway. In our case, by covering the cost
of the seeding and nursery stock, we were able to do this planting
sooner than we might have if we hadn't had the assistance. But we're
concentrating on what needs to be done, not what's in it for us.
Do you think this initiative
should become a permanent part of our farm policy?
I would be happy to jump on that bandwagon. Even though our contract
for these practices runs fifteen years, we intend to protect this
land forever. Small farms are less able to take advantage of grain
payments and other subsidies that assist large farms, but the small
farms might be more likely to take advantage of the conservation
initiatives and I think that's good.
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