Breaking the barrier: Ideas for increasing participation in voluntary livestock stream exclusion Livestock exclusion from streams? Is it time for the big R—regulation? Livestock, especially cattle, are the number one polluter of streams in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. They destroy the aquatic ecosystem by dislodging soil, trampling the streambed,...
Walk Along Middle River in Swoope—June 4, 10 ’till noon Come walk along the Middle River with Virginia Senator Emmett Hanger and ninth-generation farmer Jeanne Trimble Hoffman on her farm in Swoope, Virginia. Middle River is a tributary of the South Fork of the Shenandoah River—headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay....
This is the place . . . Swoope. I wrote a book about it . . . Swoope Almanac, Stories of love, land, and water in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
Note: This post transformed into an op-ed piece that the Washington Post published in the Sunday print edition on April 14, 2019, and the online edition on April 12. WOTUS stands for Waters of the United States. When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it gave the Environmental...
Shen Valley Magazine is hot off the press and can be found in many outlets throughout the readership area. It is a quarterly, lifestyle publication about the culture and community of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Jessie Knadler, editor of Shen Valley magazine asked me to write an article for...
The riparian buffers on our farm on Middle River are now fifteen years old. Fifteen years ago, the “River Farm” was basically a cool-season grass pasture with a few scattered mature trees along the banks of the river. Now, in addition to excellent forage for cattle, there are hundreds of...
The emerald ash borer, Agrilus planipennis, is a destructive, non-native insect that kills all species of ash trees. First discovered in Michigan in 2002 it has spread to thirty-three states and is confirmed in all six of the Chesapeake Bay watershed states. They have arrived in Augusta County, Virginia in...
I watched it devour a whole nest of tent caterpillars. Yellow-billed Cuckoos, we need a lot more of them – they prefer to eat hairy caterpillars like the eastern tent caterpillar that defoliate trees. The Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, sometimes called the rain crow, nests and forages in the riparian...
This is a sifting of writings and ruminations for the year 2017:
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