Jul 02, 2024 —
On one side of a highway near Heuvelton, Scottish Highland cows graze and chickens roam. On the other side, there’s plants, vegetables, more cows and lots of pigs.
“This is Amelia and Onion. They’re making babies — not actively. But that’s the goal,” Kia-Beth Bennett said while leaning over a wooden fence to scratch the pigs’ backs. Bennett runs the Bittersweet-Milkweed Collaborative Farm near De Peyster.
Bennett tracks much of the farm’s happenings inside of a beat-up calendar. The pages are dirt-smeared and crinkle from moisture. It lists things like the date when Bluebelle’s piglets were born and when the asparagus crop pops up.
“This is our biodynamic calendar that we use to mark when we’re going to plant various plants, when we’re going to have the animals breed,” Bennett said. “But we also use this as our phenology tracker.”
Phenology is the study of timing and cyclical patterns in nature.
Bennett is keeping tabs on unassuming details and seasonal changes, like when the sky shakes off the wintery gray and transforms into a summery blue.
“We’re tracking when the snakes first start coming out, which was the first of May this year. [That] was the first snake I saw. And we’re tracking when the soil is warm enough to plant corn, which was a lot later this season for us. We’re tracking when the first fireflies come out,” they said. “There are certain things that I’ve memorized at this point, like the Red-winged Blackbirds always come back around May 18, except that’s changing.”
Bennett keeps a book like this every year, gathering data on how climate change is playing out on this farm. What Bennett is finding reflects what climate change scientists are documenting.
As the growing season lengthens, the timing of when birds migrate, plants bloom and leaves fall gets off its natural cycle. According to New York’s climate assessment, that might have long-term impacts on how healthy ecosystems are.
So when those fireflies showed up a week or so earlier than they have in the past, it showed how this little corner of the environment is shifting, Bennett said.
Bennett has been a student of ecology and the farm for a long time, and climate change is making the love for both even more important.
“When you care about someone, then if something is going wrong, you’re going to have a greater connection to them. You’re going to be doing more to take care of them. And for me, that looks like learning,” they said.
So Bennett is taking action where they can. And they say that helps with climate nihilism, or the idea that we can’t do anything to stop climate change.
“We dug a pond last year to help with some of the flooding but also because I had promised the frogs that, given all the horrible things happening in the world, I would build them a pond. I could do that,” Bennett said. “I am not going to wind up stopping the doomsday glacier from melting, but I can build a pond for the frogs and I can plant native species around. And, God, the frogs and toads are just responding so well.”
Bennett says it’s exciting to learn through all of these challenges, but it’s not stopping any time soon.
“There’s a part of me that is enjoying understanding all of this. There’s also a huge part of me that is grieving all of this because I know it’s only going to get harder,” they said.
That’s why the farm is leaning on climate mitigation strategies and building and preparing for the long term, Bennett said, so it can grow food and be a place of refuge as the climate changes.
NCPR’s climate change series is made possible through the generous support of Margot and John Ernst.