Message from the

Hello and happy spring, folks!

After an incredibly long winter, it’s so nice to have the sunshine and see people coming out and about. I want to take this month’s note to share some context within which we are operating. First, I will talk about how we’ve altered operations due to the ongoing pandemic, and then, describe a bit about how funding drives what programs we are offering. In March 2020, the Extension Education Center closed its doors to public walk-ins and in person group activities. We continue to provide assistance to the public by appointment, through web-based mediums, and in field visits. Per NYS guidelines, we will continue operating this way until further notice, including continuing to observe all standing safety protocols around masking, distancing, and sanitization. Indoor group activities are still prohibited, for all programs including 4-H. We’ve received lots of inquiries for group workshops, both in person and by Zoom. As we move towards warmer days we’re looking forward to offering some outdoor education and service opportunities, and rolling out more nutrition and food related content online. Keep your eyes peeled on our facebook and web events pages for listings! On a related note, we often receive inquiries from the community asking if we are offering a program in a particular interest area – let’s say, home composting or foraging, for example. While both these subjects fall within one of our five program areas, the current funding model does not support these activities. You see, at any given time, we are funded by 30-40 different local, state, and federal contracts. Each of these contracts have very specific activities and deliverables, and all of them are “reimbursable”. This means CCE Sullivan needs to expend money for staffing and program expenses, report our activities to the funder, then await reimbursement once the funder deems our activities and deliverables sufficient under the contract. For folks who have been involved with Extension for several decades, this is definitely different than it was, even just in the 1990s, when Extension’s primary funding sources were not restricted to specific activities, so long as the work fell within our mission. This left Extension staff with a lot of room to be flexible in planning and delivering programs. These days, the majority of our program budget is driven by time limited, competitive grants and contracts. The good news is that we use local data and input from our local municipalities, community partners, program participants, board, and committees to inform what we write into our competitive applications. This way, we’re still being responsive to community needs. The downside is that once awarded, our energies must be committed to those contracts, limiting our ability to be creative with our resources. Further, when the pandemic hit, we redirected any bit of unrestricted funds we had to ensuring our local residents had access to food. With no new funding thus far, we are committed to continuing this work. We have invested more than $350,000 in the past year alone to support the Catskills Food Hub in its transition from primarily wholesale sales to retail sales, the expansion of the Sullivan Fresh Market on the Move to six sites across the county, and the creation and sustainability of the Sullivan Fresh Community Cupboard, a mobile food pantry and soup kitchen that delivers more than 1600 meals four days a week, ensuring that our once invisible neighbors, most in need, don’t have to worry where their next meal comes from.

We use these community connections to provide our most vulnerable residents with information and resources on nutrition, food safety, storage and preparation, navigating community resources, and most importantly: human connection and hope. I share all this because I want you to know we receive your inquiries and ideas. We are listening. And while we may not be able to offer exactly what you’re looking for, we do take these ideas to reach out to other partners and community groups who might be able to help us make them a reality. One upside to the pandemic is that it has forced our entire Extension system, where bandwidth allows, to be more comfortable in the online space. To ensure the research backed group educational experiences you have come to trust from Extension, I wholeheartedly encourage you to visit our partner CCE’s websites to see what’s available online from their respective programs. The variety across counties is amazing! You can find direct links to their programs here: https://cals.cornell.edu/cornell-cooperative-extension/ local-offices. With your help, we will continue to seek diversified funding sources that allow us to meet community needs, and also build our capacity to be more nimble when there’s a particular area of interest. Thank you for your support and I look forward to continuing to work with you to bring any study, to any person, in Sullivan County.

My very best,

y y

Colleen Monaghan C ll h Executive Director, cm638@cornell.edu

Sullivancce.org/jobs cce.o

SULLIVAN COUNTY FOOD SAFETY OUTREACH PROGRAM

Written by Michelle Proscia, Agriculture Educator

Calling ALL fruit, vegetable, sprout or mushroom farms.

Cornell Cooperative Extension of Sullivan County applied and received a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute for Farming and Agriculture (NIFA) grant. We are working in partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Delaware County, to respond to the need for increased food safety outreach and education for both counties’ produce farms, to assist farms in compliance with the new law. The goal is to assist farms within

our region who not only are subject to follow the Produce Safety Rule as mandated through the FDA, but also to farms who may be exempt due to income threshold.

Farms who provide food into the food system should have the understanding of how to minimize contamination and food safety risks associated with their growing operation, whether large or small. Additionally, having a food safety plan and third party audits can increase market opportunities and customer confidence in your products The FSMA Produce Safety rule has already come into effect on January 27, 2020. All size farms who gross $25,000 annually or more in covered produce sales are required to become compliant with the law unless exempt.

How We Can Help

CCE Sullivan can provide technical assistance and farm visits to assist farms with recordkeeping compliance, complete their farm food safety plan, participate in NYS Grown and Certified program, sell product through the Catskill Food Hub and find funding. We are also offering educational Produce Safety Alliance Grower Trainings- to become FSMA compliant on your farm, including a Farm Food Safety Plan Writing workshop on April 21st, and two Farm Worker Health and Hygiene trainings for yearly FSMA compliance held on April 5, and May 5.

If you are

interested in working with CCE Sullivan to gain compliance, obtain further certifications or reach additional wholesale markets available, we are here and trained to help you.

Please contact the CCE Sullivan office at 845-292-6180 and ask to speak with someone from the Ag Department. By email, please reach out to CCE Sullivan Agriculture Educator Michelle Proscia at mml249@cornell. edu.

PANDEMICS: HUMANS ARE THE CULPRITS

Submitted by Brenda Miller, Environment & Natural Resources Program Manager; Written by John Vidal

It’s easy to blame a bat, but experts concur that the loss of biodiversity, mainly because of humans, is directly connected to the spread of deadly diseases like COVID-19. The only way to prevent these new diseases is to preserve our ecosystems and biodiversity.

In 1997, I went to Borneo to investigate fires which had been raging uncontrolled for months across a vast area of pristine tropical forest. An intense El Niño event had triggered a deep drought, and a thick yellow haze had settled over much of Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond. The ecological and human damage was immense. Some of the most undisturbed, nature-rich forest on earth was burning. Thousands of species of plants, birds and rare animals like orangutans were at risk. The sunlight had dimmed, the temperature had dropped, trees were not flowering, crops barely grew, and millions of people were suffering severe respiratory diseases. Months after monsoon rains finally doused the fires, a mysterious, deadly disease broke out hundreds of miles away where tens of thousands of pigs were being farmed among commercial orchards. For no discernible reason, first the pigs, and then many humans, were struck down by seizures and headaches. To stop the new, highly infectious disease from spreading, nearly a million pigs had to be destroyed – but not before 105 people had died. It took six years for disease ecologists to link the destruction of the forest in Borneo with the disease in the Malaysian pig farms. What had happened was that certain species of fruit bats which usually foraged on flowering and fruiting trees deep in the Borneo forests, had been forced by the 1997 fires to seek new food sources. Some of these bats had been observed roosting in the trees and dropping pieces of half-eaten fruit into the pigpens below. Bats are well-known reservoirs of many viruses which they had passed to the pigs in the fruit and their urine. This virus, Nipah, is just one of many hundreds of animal-borne diseases, which have jumped from animals to humans in the past fifty years. “The more we destroy nature, the more likely we are to see fearsome diseases like COVID-19 emerging,” says Kate Jones, professor of ecology and biodiversity at University College London (UCL). The coincidence of the new diseases with the destruction of biodiversity is highly significant, according to her. They include some of the deadliest diseases ever encountered by humans – like HIV, Ebola; Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS); Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Some, like Ebola, have been linked to deforestation; others, like Lyme disease, occur where suburban areas sprawl into newly-cleared land. Many more are believed to have been caused by hunting, or are associated with wildlife markets and the intensive farming of animals. Jones argues that by driving roads into forests, fragmenting ecosystems, mining in remote areas, and encouraging global trade, we are not only destroying wildlife, but creating the perfect conditions for new diseases to emerge and turn on us. “Biodiversity loss is becoming a big driver in the emergence of some of these viruses. Large-scale deforestation, habitat degradation and fragmentation, agriculture intensification, our food system, trade in species and plants, anthropogenic climate change – all these are drivers of biodiversity loss and also drivers of new diseases. Two-thirds of emerging infections and diseases now come from wildlife,” she says. It might seem logical that the richer the biodiversity, the more pathogens and viruses will be circulating in animals, and are therefore more likely to jump to humans. However, many studies show that more species actually mean less disease – and that a rich biodiversity acts to protect species which evolve together. It is when a natural system is disturbed that viruses like coronavirus or Ebola are passed on. Environmental change can bite humans hard, says Felicia Keesing, a disease ecologist at Bard College. Keesing has studied twelve diseases, including West Nile fever and Lyme disease, in ecosystems around the world. In every study, she found that diseases became more prevalent as biodiversity was lost. By breaking down the natural barriers between species and destroying biodiversity we have opened the door, not just to COVID-19, but potentially to many more viruses and pathogens. “Preserving intact ecosystems and biodiversity will help us reduce the prevalence of some of these diseases. So the way we farm, the way we use the soils, the way we protect coastal ecosystems, and the way we treat our forests, will either wreck the future or help us live longer,” says Kate Jones.

Source: Vidal, John. “Pandemics: Humans are the Culprits. UNESCO Courier, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, May 26, 2020. https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/ media-coverage/pandemics-humans-are-culprits.