Just the Stats?

Bone-dry stuff, statistics.
 
Ever since humans started making little wedge-shaped marks on soft clay tablets, people have been keeping records. During the early days of agriculture and animal husbandry, I like to think the scribe-in-charge heard, saw, smelled, and tasted the dust of the cattle as they passed by for accounting. He knew the marks he made were more than just numbers. They represented the physical presence of sheep, cattle or bushels of wheat, spelt, and emmer; all reassuring safeguards against a constant threat of famine.
 
Leap ahead several millennia to our current Information Age. Too often it seems the numbers are all. Type it in, it exists. But what are we missing?
 
For forecasting, planning, and other purposes, the modern day scribes at New England Agricultural Statistics do a great job of compiling records about our farm economy. Throughout the year they collect data from surveys and reports completed by the farmers themselves, agri-business consultants, and other in-the-field types.
 
What follows is a brief sampling of their 2005 report on New England Agriculture. As you read it, remember that each plant was started from seed, someone picked every apple from every fruiting tree, and every milk cow began as a newborn calf needing care.

Dry hay
Putting up baled hay is chancy work, given our ever-shifting weather patterns. That’s why concrete bunk silage and plastic-wrapped “baylage” has become so popular.
 
Even so, we harvested an amazing 609,000 acres of hay in our six-state New England region in 2005, on a ton-to-acre basis a little less than 2004, no doubt a reflection of the growing season. Total production tipped the scales at a bit over a million tons, which figures out to a lot of bales if you happened to be one of the folks loading them.

Apples
Orchardists had a difficult year. Limiting factors of record included “very cold May, light bloom, poor pollination, apple scab, two frosts in May, and an enormous amount of rain, making harvest difficult” (kind of makes you wonder how they do any harvesting at all). But, 2.8 million bushels still came in (figure 42 pounds to a bushel), 30 percent less than in 2004.

Wild blueberries
These are the sort-of-wild, low-bush types. Although we pick a fair amount of them in New Hampshire, only Maine keeps exacting records. Last year Maine recorded an increase of 27 percent over 2004, weighing in at 58+ million pounds. An early snow cover kept winter kill to a minimum, and better blossoming helped them out. Makes one wonder what we’ll see after this relatively open winter.

Potatoes
Maine also gets first prize for taters, with 57,000 acres planted in ‘05. I’m told Coös County was once known as “Little Aroostook County” because of its past potato production history. I’m therefore cautiously optimistic we’ll soon see a tremendous spike in these stats following last spring’s UNH Cooperative Extension classes on “Fresh-Market Potatoes.”

Tobacco
What, you didn’t know New England grows tobacco? Maybe this will win you a wager: Last year, Connecticut River Valley farms in Massachusetts and Connecticut produced four million pounds of broadleaf tobacco, mostly used as wrappers for cigars.

Turkeys
While on the T’s, let’s talk turkey. Turkeys are familiar backyard livestock on many small New Hampshire farms. We raise about 4,000 a year. New England farms collectively raised 120,000 turkeys in 2004, with Massachusetts and Vermont the top producers.

Grain (barley and oats)
Although we don’t usually consider New England a grain-growing region, until the Midwestern plains opened up, our farmers produced considerable quantities of wheat, barley, and oats. I have some letters from the early 1800s that mention grain shipments out of Portsmouth, probably destined for European markets.
 
Maine farmers sowed 55,000 acres of barley and oats for grain last year. These grasses work well in a rotation with potatoes to break the life-cycles of various potato diseases. The resulting grains feed dairy and beef animals; the straw’s a good mulch for strawberries.

Of course, many vegetable growers still plant grassy-grains—oats, rye, millet—to plow down as a green manure.

Sweet Corn
We think of corn as a veggie, but it’s a grass/grain too. I’m guessing ripening fields of sweet corn and pumpkins in early autumn are what most people picture when you say “a New England farm.” Despite a cold start and uncertain weather, we harvested 1.15 million cwts (hundred-weights) from 15,500 acres. A long fall and no major frosts until October helped get it in.

“Cow” Corn
The greatest portion of our corn land—186,000 acres— gets planted to varieties that will be chopped at a grainier stage of development than sweet corn. This chopped is stored as corn silage to feed dairy cattle in winter. The ancient Romans get the credit for inventing silage: a compressed, fermented, air-excluded fodder. Without the silage that fed the vast animal trains required by their advancing armies, Europe might never have been “Romanized.” Of course, what we call “corn,” is a New World crop unknown to the Romans. Their “corn” was actually barley and wheat.

Milk
Milk is certainly the region’s most economically important food crop. Profitable dairy farming keeps a lot of land open. Nationwide this industry has shifted far westwards. Considering inherent water resource limitations in the western dairy-producing regions, I have wondered about its long-term viability there.
 
We still produce an incredible volume of milk in New England, more than a billion pounds in the last quarter of 2005 alone. And it all came from roughly 227,000 head of milk cows. All the region’s milk doesn’t go to the fresh, bottled milk market, of course. A lot of it gets made into cheese, butter, yogurt, and ice cream.

Our region produced six and a half million pounds of mozzarella and other Italian-style cheeses in November, just in time for football’s bowl games. Got Cheese Pizza?

by Steve Turaj, Extension Educator, Agricultural Resources

3/02/06