The five-county region of Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, and Steuben Counties relies on an estimated $601 million in agricultural product sales to fuel the local economy. Eighty percent of those dollars come from the dairy, livestock and field crop sectors.
Connecting farmers in those commodities and those counties to cutting-edge resources from New York’s Land Grant Institution, Cornell Cooperative Extension’s new Southwest New York Dairy, Livestock and Field Crops (SWNYDLFC) Program. The program’s four specialists help farmers start or optimize their businesses, innovate their dairy or livestock operations, improve soil, and deal with invasive threats to their field crops, through both group educational programs and one-on-one on-site visits.
“We form a direct line between Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the commercial agriculture producers in the region,” says Business Management Specialist and Team Leader Katelyn Walley-Stoll ’14. “And because we each have our specialty areas, we each get to focus on the needs that are important to each individual farm.”
Adds Walley-Stoll: “Say a farmer is looking at changing how they manage their crop land to increase efficiency. Members of our team will go to the farm to learn what they’re doing and explore ways we can help them improve – from the production side and from the business side.”
The business side of farming is Walley-Stoll’s area of expertise. She consults and trains farmers on financial stability, “Whether that’s how we’re going to get through tomorrow or how we’re going to get through the next three generations of farmers in that family,” she says.
