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While one might not think of New York State as a farm state, the drive southwest from Albany past Oneonta, Binghamton, Ithaca, and Corning into the countryside of the Southern Tier, shouts ‘agriculture.’  Seemingly endless lush, flat fields, rolling fields and gentle hills yield green revenue from a wide variety of sources, livestock, dairy, vegetables, fruit, hay and more.  Its 6,500,000 farm acres and 30,500 farms across the state contribute roughly $6 billion annually, 60% from livestock and dairy, 40% from agricultural and wine products.

Agriculture has been a bedrock of Upstate’s existence long before there was an Upstate or a State of New York or even a United States.  Indigenous people grew corn, beans and squash (known as “The Three Sisters”) along with fruit such as apples and peaches.  Early Dutch settlers introduced cows and dairy practices to the Hudson River Valley in the 1600s, with animal husbandry subsequently moving up the river and along the Mohawk River and finally to Central New York and the Finger Lakes by the 1800s.  The Erie Canal introduced transportation to this agriculturally rich region, expanding the reach of commerce with Rochester transiently called the “Flour Capital of the World” in 1838.

While other industries grew and faded throughout the state, agriculture has continued to be a steady economic driver, playing a major role in the life of the region.

Underlying this successful story has been information and education, in the form of a land-grant university begun in 1865, when Ezra Cornell donated his farm in Ithaca to form the basis for an educational institution – for agriculture and more.  It was among the earliest land-grant institutions, known as such because they were funded by public land sales.  Under the Morrill Act (1862), the revenue from these Federal land sales in the West was distributed to the states specifically to fund higher education.  Cornell was only one of three land-grant universities that began with private gifts (along with MIT and Tuskegee).

Cornell evolved over the subsequent century and a half to serve as an agricultural and an intellectual resource, both regionally and globally.

Cornell created a University Farm near campus in 1874 and then in 1880 incorporated a New York State agricultural experiment station in Geneva, NY (now known as Cornell AgriTech) into what has grown to be the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), with campuses and research stations in many regions, reflecting the State’s diverse geographies and agricultural challenges.

The wine heritage of Upstate is long-standing, even if the original grapes contributing to that history were often better left forgotten or on the vine.  There were of course native grapes, undistinguished, for eating, all over the state.  When French Huguenot settlers tried in the mid-1660s to grow European varieties, they met with failure….and settled on the native types already there.  And the vines, the wine and the environment have all changed.  Markedly.  For the better.

Those early hybrids were clearly hardy enough to survive the abbreviated growing seasons and deep freezes during Upstate winters.  They were intended to be improvements over the labrusca grape, predominant originally in the region and more a juice-and-eating grape than a fine-wine grape.  But the hybrid grapes when processed into wine needed attention, doctoring, to make them interesting, render them palatable, perhaps trying vainly to win awards beyond the borders of the state.  Palates back then were less sophisticated; a bottle of wine was a bottle of wine.  And nature – the cold and the shorter growing season – ruled what could grow and be grown and survive.

Auspiciously, over the past 4 decades, temperatures in Upstate, measured by Growing Degree Days, have risen gradually but steadily by 12%, contributing to the growth, range and depth of wine-making in Upstate.  Many smaller vineyards were planted, many small winemaking operations started and experimentation-and-innovation flourished throughout the Finger Lakes and elsewhere within the state.

Its agricultural technology research arm, Cornell AgriTech, has been working to the specific benefit of Upstate farming.  Until the past decade, deep-freeze winter temperatures prevented the more desirable (and better-known) California grape varietals from surviving along the Finger Lakes.  Those hardier but somewhat less-desirable varieties had predominated, hobbling the development of a modern winemaking industry.  Global warming helped change that.  Minor modification of grapevine stock at Cornell a decade ago also helped.  The gleaming vineyards and the award-winning wines they produce attest to the dramatic changes.

Finger Lakes wineries were suddenly able to grow those better known (and better tasting) California and European varietals across hundreds of Upstate vineyards, nearly 450 at present.  While California still predominates as far-and-away the largest wine producer, New York has now moved up the production hierarchy to become the second largest state in the country, ahead of both Washington and Oregon.

At last, these wineries could achieve distinction and begin to gather awards, national and international.  And they could experiment in ways never before undertaken in chilly Upstate, including the adoption of organic and biodynamic winemaking techniques.  Some winemakers began to work with aging in other-than-steel-and-oak barrels – including ceramic amphoras – the oldest aging techniques, dating from the very earliest origins of winemaking.  Others began experiments in blending and aging to produce outstanding award-winning wines in French or German styles that acquitted themselves well against or even better than their inspirations, in California and Europe.

Much of Cornell’s scientific agricultural research has been devoted to traditional plant and animal disciplines.  Yet they have deployed new approaches in molecular biology, genomics and computer technology to extend their work. To help vineyards, promote plant health and grape yield, they developed robots capable of sampling the health of crops (grapes and vines) and fields (soil health), moving semi-autonomously along row upon row of vineyards to guide viniculturists with real-time and hyperlocal information to improve yields and quality.  The vision-and-optics work just a bit farther west, from the Rochester area, contributes to these strange devices roaming the vineyard alleys.  When to pick, when and where to fertilize, what to fertilize, all combining to grow better grapes and make better wine, from the other-worldly robots gently traversing the vineyard rows, Cornell assisting as well in the analysis, with benefits to all: skoal!

An unlikely source for practical agricultural research has long been a grocery chain founded over a century ago in Upstate, Wegman’s.  Well-established as a national leader in food retailing for its marketing innovations and its commitment to food quality, the company has maintained an experimental organic farm since 2007 in Canandaigua.

Collaboration with Cornell AgriTech introduced new technologies to extend the growing season for varieties of plants, which they could trial and subsequently share results with their suppliers.  The overall intent has been to address growing consumer interest in organic products, foreseeing needs and requests, envisaging the food store of the future as the company expanded its distribution territory, in terms of products, health concerns and sustainability.

One of the largest vegetable greenhouse operations in the nation has planted itself just outside of Syracuse.  Originally a year-round greenhouse operation that began in northern Maine over 2 decades ago, Backyard Farms pioneered a novel hydroponic growing process.  It proved successful for year-round growing in challenging northern climates, with the ample ground water of northern Maine and inexpensive hydroelectric power imported from Quebec.  That is the origin story for Backyard Farms and highly successful.  It was acquired a decade back by Ontario-based Mastronardi Produce, dedicated to the same goal.

Mastronardi already had a nearly century-long heritage of traditional greenhouse operations in Canada’s colder, darker climate.  They leveraged that new technology in combination with Upstate’s inexpensive hydropower, this time from Ontario (Niagara Falls), ample ground water and clever water recycling to create the massive 60-acre Green Empire Farm complex in Oneida, NY.

Tomatoes grow year-round, picked fresh, delivered fresh, within a 24-hour drive of over 60% of the US population.

One of the oldest brewing companies in the country sits in an industrial area of Utica, near the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal.

Having acquired the old, established Utica brewery that Charles Bierbauer opened in 1853, Francis Xavier Matt, a German immigrant brewer, in 1882 renamed it the West End Brewing Company and set to work. While not the oldest brewery in the United States, though close, it remains one of only three family-owned breweries in the country.

Matt, renamed to honor its founder, has charted a remarkable course for survival and growth through a brewing landscape facing challenges from Prohibition and now through the current industry-wide declines in beer sales.  They survived Prohibition by making soft drinks and malt tonics, non-alcoholic of course, but bearing a suggestive label, as the brewery advised, “Caution: Do not ferment, do not add yeast, or you will create beer.”  God bless the temperance movement.

Currently, with markets changing, the company has strategically diversified its business model.  It offers contract brewing to well-recognized regional and national brands, following their specific formulas scrupulously.

Upstate is home to myriad streams and rivers, some stocked with fish by the state, many stocked by nature.  The notion that one might farm fish inland seems fanciful and yet that is precisely what is now happening in various locations around the state.  Regenerative aquaculture is producing steelhead trout in the Hudson River valley and rainbow trout in the Catskills.  Both species are native to Pacific Northwest streams but thrive in the carefully crafted inland environments of Upstate.

The Kamloops variety of rainbow trout ordinarily found in British Columbia’s mountain streams is instead growing on a Catskill farm, Skytop Springs.  A mountain-top spring is piped directly to a succession of tanks and ponds where the trout grow in a natural and protected environment.  The farm owns the mountain top and the spring, the water source is protected practically from heaven to the fish, the pipes feed directly to the pens (no risk of contamination from people or raccoons), the fish grow without anything but natural food, certainly no antibiotics….and just over a year later appear at farmers’ markets and restaurants barely an hour after harvest.

Rounding out the food production story and moving from the soil and the water to the air takes us to the bees.  The bees in Upstate are busy.  They contribute to pollination inside the massive greenhouses, resident colonies.  They also contribute to the education of budding chefs, at the Culinary Institute of America.

They feature as well in roadside stands (and at Wegman’s stores) alongside other local products such as maple syrup.

The fields and land that Wilson loved:

The most beautiful fall here I have ever seen.  We drive out into the country and take little walks along some uninhabited and unfrequented road.  Foliage so wonderful that at this time of life, having already done so much describing, I hardly tried to describe it: rose orange, blood orange, pale lemon or deeper copper.  One road ran uphill through a wood toward a tunnel completely yellow, a little falling stream below.  There has been almost no frost, and this produces different effects from the sudden blasting blazes of red.  Sometimes a gold-soaked mist.

Upstate / Wilson / p 332

continue to merit his accolades, continue to produce food for the region and continue to present its beauty to passersby.