CCE announces strategic plan

LEWIS | Agriculture Issue Leader for Cornell Cooperative Extension Essex County Carly Summers announced CCE's Essex County Farmland Protection and Food System Plan to the Essex County Board of Supervisors Aug. 8. This strategic plan has been in progress since 2019. The most recent one was written in 1997. CCE, in collaboration with Essex County Community Resources and Adirondack Land Trust, developed the plan by collecting data from many sources, including surveys and forums with the community. They compiled their research into maps, graphs, charts and text. The plan is divided into five sections. Section one contextualizes the power of food system planning. Section two reviews the findings of the 1997 plan. Section three analyzes common food system challenges. Section four identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Essex County's food system. Section five describes opportunities for strengthening Essex County's food system. The top three goals of the plan are to protect farmland, support climate resilient agriculture and build agrotourism efforts. One of the ways CCE hopes to protect farmland is through conservation easements. These are voluntary legal agreements held between landowners and a government agency or a land trust that permanently restrict the land from being used as anything other than farmland. In Essex County, they are mostly made with land trusts. Summers said many farmers in Essex County have easements, but not all. She said not only do they benefit the county from a conservation standpoint, but they can also benefit the county financially. The plan suggests several ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change to build resilient agriculture, like planting trees on idle or underutilized land, riparian buffers and rotational grazing. In order to build agrotourism, Summers said CCE hopes to intertwine agriculture with other aspects of tourism like recreation, hospitality and dining. Summers said in her presentation that tourists spend $495 million in Essex County each year. Summers said the plan is not static, it can evolve. The full plan is available at: http://essex.cce.cornell.edu/agriculture/essex-county-farmland-protection-and-food-system-plan-2022.

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CCE announces strategic plan

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