The Farmers Market Federation of New York has compiled a sample menu that people can use as a guide to plan this year’s 4th of July Celebration!

Below is the sample menu followed by the recipe for Cornell’s Chicken Barbecue Sauce.
Have a safe and locally grown 4th of July!

Sample Menu
Barbecue Chicken – using locally grown, free-range chicken and Cornell’s Barbecue Sauce (recipe follows menu)
Barbecue Ribs – using locally pasture raised hogs with maple BBQ sauce
Grilled Lamb Sausage

Grilled fresh Zucchini and Yellow Squash
Grilled Squash Blossoms filled with Ricotta Cheese

Garden Salad with fresh locally grown Leaf Lettuce
Micro greens, early Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Radishes & Scallions

Deviled Eggs
NYS Cheese (more locally McCadam Cheese) & crackers

Dessert:
Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberry Rhubarb Pie
or Early Raspberry Cobbler

Drinks
NYS Reisling Wine
Saranac Beer
Strawberry Rhubarb Lemonade

Remember if you are drinking alcohol, please drink responsibly.  And do not drink and drive.

Enjoy the 4th!

Recipe for Cornell’s Chicken Barbecue Sauce

(enough for 10 halves)

Ingredients

1 cup cooking oil
1 pint cider vinegar
3 TBSP salt
1 TBSP poultry seasoning
1/2 tsp pepper
1 egg

Beat egg, add oil and beat again. Add other ingredients and stir until well combined.
You can vary recipe to suit taste and dietary requirements.

There are a number of great resources available but ATTRA (National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service) as published an excellent bulletin that explains food miles, their effect on producers and consumers as well as provides tips and resources for both to utilize. Visit: http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/PDF/foodmiles.pdf to read the complete document.

Some tools that are included in the above bulletin you might find useful are:

Life Cycles Food Calculator
The Life Cycles food calculator determines the distance and the amount of greenhouse gases saved if a certain food product is bought locally as opposed to imported.

Food Carbon Footprint Calculator
A tool for residents within the UK to calculate their food carbon footprint to better understand the extent to which food decisions impact global warming.

If you are curious about your carbon footprint there are calculators available that take into account all aspects of your life. But the UK calculator figures out your food based carbon footprint.

LCA Food Database
This is a tool for acquiring an aggregated description of emissions, waste, and the resource use from soil to kitchen per unit of different food items.

Click on Meat Yield Calculator to go to the University of Vermont Website to download the calculator.

The listservs we have available at this time include:
Outdoor Pig: This email listserv offers producers the chance to ask questions, share information, sell pigs, look for assistance or anything related to outdoor, natural, pastured and/or organic pig production.

Franklin AgNews: This email listserv offers you the opportunity to get the CCE Franklin newsletter (AgNews!) electronically.

North Country Small Farms: This email listserv grew out of a regional Building Your Small Farm Dream course that was held in the 6 NNY counties 2 years ago. This listserv allows the farmers who took part in this program to continue networking and connect with regional mentors.

NNY Farmers Partnership: This email listserv was established as part of a project in collaboration with Adirondack North Country Association (ANCA) that is funded through Heifer International. This listserv connects the participating farmers in this project.

If you would like to subscribe to any or all of the above listservs please select these in the form below.

We’d like to know how we are doing?
How are you using the Outdoor Pig Listserv? Click on the link below to answer our short survey.
Take the survey

There are a number of different websites where you can place your products for sale, advertise your farm or invite visitors to your farm without having to go through the process of building your own website right off the bat. These sites offer farmers, growers and crafters a great way to have a web presence and test out this market without going through the hassle and possibly the expense of creating and managing their own website. Furthermore, you will find out rather quickly whether this is some place you want to be.

In this article we are going to look at a few possibilities available on the web, each of these can be good options for farmers to consider if you are interesting in having a web presence but are not quite ready to build your own site.

One opportunity coming to farmers if from SUNY Morrisville, where they are currently working on a state project that is building an e-commerce storefront for Ag producers. This project involves the Morrisville State College’s Computing and Information Technologies Professor, Kim Mills, Agricultural Business Assistant Professor Sheila Marshman and 20 producers and processors to develop a model for farmer-to-customer selling via the Internet. This online farmer’s market has some very specific goals. These include increasing the profitability of each participating farm by at least 10% in the first year with a 4-year cumulative profit in excess of $4 million for the more than 500 participating farmers from across New York State. The online farmers market will act as a virtual warehouse and storefront for the farmers of New York. The database behind the website will keep track of sales, orders and inventory. Keeping the farmers informed of the sales of their products and tracking their inventory listed with the database is also a huge part of this project. “This project provides farmers with a low-cost, low-risk opportunity to see how their products might sell in an online market”, states Mills. This is a golden opportunity for those folks who are contemplating getting into the e-commerce arena but aren’t certain whether this is the place for them to be. The new website at www.newyorkfarmmarket.com is expected to go live by the end of the year. If you are interested in being part of this project or would like more information about the Online Farmers Market Project contact Professor Kim Mills at 315-684-6746.

Another online direct marketing tool coming to New York state farmers is the MarketMaker™, which first developed by the University of Illinois Extension and faculty as a web-based network to connect farmers and processors with food retailers and consumers. Currently it is one of the most extensive collections of searchable food industry related data for the states of Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska. And it is coming to Kentucky and New York! MarketMaker™ was designed to “improve the access by Midwest farmers to regional markets via links with processors, retailers, consumers and food supply chain actors; all information can be mapped, located or queried by the user.” These sites are being built with land grant funds and will be open and accessible to all for no-fee. Each partner site will have its own unique site, but all sites will have a common database. New York States efforts will be housed and operated from the CCE-New York City office. New York will design and develop its own educational outreach and teach food entrepreneurs how to use the New York State site. Currently the NYS farmers markets, state and federally inspected plants, and farmer/producer database is being done. To see what has been done in Illinois visit: www.marketmaker.uiuc.edu/; Iowa http://ia.marketmaker.uiuc.edu; Nebraska http://ne.marketmaker.uiuc.edu. All farmers and businesses listed in the MarketMaker™ database will then be able to create, edit and update their own online profiles via secure password access. If you would like to be included in this contact John Ameroso, John Nettleson , or Dr. Khin Mar Cho.

Another way to get your products or your farm listed on the Internet is to become a member of a regional or state promotional initiative such as Adirondack Harvest, Fingerlakes Culinary Bounty or Pride of New York. These may or may not require an initial membership fee in order to join. Each of these examples has a related logo and web presence. For example by being part of the Adirondack Harvest Initiative your farm and what you have available and where people can get those products will be listed on their website. I would encourage farmers to look for the regional initiatives in their area that not only highlight their region but also are in line with the business and management philosophy of their farm operation. As well I would encourage folks to take part in the promotional and marketing initiatives available at the state level. Each of these programs has built credibility and logo recognition related to their initiatives. By being part of these ventures you are telling your customers that your farm business is in line with the sentiments of the larger program. Again these are low-cost, low-risk ways have a web presence and test that market without going through the expense of building your own website. However, generally these types of initiatives are ways to have information about your farm and your products on the Internet and are selling your product for you. This type of website is called a gateway website because they act as a gateway to information about your products and your farm business but are not a storefront to sell your product. A tip with these website is that having your information out there is great, but you need to remember to keep your information updated and current. If you add on more products or drop some products, change phone numbers or add on another way customers can connect with you then you need to ensure that your farm and product listings hosted on these various websites is relevant, current and updated. To visit the sites mentioned here go to: Adirondack Harvest (www.adirondackharvest.com); Fingerlakes Culinary Bounty (www.fingerlakesculinarybounty.org); Pride of New York (www.prideofny.com).

There are storefront websites available currently live and available for farmers to take part in. One is LocalHarvest which stated they are consumers’ connection to ‘real food, real farmers, real community”. In the “About Us” section it states that, “LocalHarvest maintains a definitive and reliable “living” public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets, and other local food sources. Our search engine helps people find products from family farms, local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their local area.” Their site features an online store, place to list your farm and post your farm story. This site is searchable by product, region, and type of farm or enterprise and also highlights the farmers markets across the country. This is a national site with a local focus. What is really great about this site is that new members are given homepage spot so regular visitors can easily see who has been added to the database. Creating a listing on LocalHarvest is free but you need to fit the criteria that are clearly laid out on the membership screen. This is again another great site for those who are considering getting into e-commerce but aren’t ready to build their own website just yet. To visit this website go to www.localharvest.org.

I have highlighted four options here, there are more options out there. These are four ways that you can begin your foray into the world of e-commerce, before putting out the money needed to create your own website. Each of these examples have advantages and disadvantages, determining which ones work best for you is just like assessing any other promotional and marketing angle you integrate into your marketing plan. Only YOU can determine what would work best for your business. Hopefully this article gave you a starting place to begin this process.

If you have questions about e-commerce, building your own website or the resources contained in this article do not hesitate to contact Bernadette at 518-483-7403 or email her at bel7@cornell.edu.

Marketing Activity

Scrap metal is worth money. Removing it will help make our environment cleaner and safer. The Farmland Protection Board of St Lawrence County has identified that a clean up would put money in your pocket as well as beautify the countryside, attract tourism and increase property values.

If you have scrap metal sitting around now would be a good time to consider a clean up. The price will depend on the region, How far does it need to travel to get to market?; form of the metal, Is it crushed?; purity, Is it sorted?; quantity, Does it fill a load?; and of course current market conditions.

Prices are quite high and I have listed the prices as seen on Monday, August 21, 2006.
These prices are what are being offered on the metal exchange at Globalscrap exchange. Prices change as they do on any exchange. http://www.globalscrap.com/MetalPrices/PrimaryMetals/tabid/150/default.aspx

Scrap Metal Table

If we convert these values on a ton basis the price for copper is at $6,770 per ton. Aluminum is at $2,248. Iron is at $212 per ton. You must recognize that these prices are what is being offered for specific forms and quantity as well as being pure. If we relate these prices to the value as delivered to a scrap dealer we could expect about half of these values The metals would however need to be sorted and pure.

Following are some scrap dealers that you can contact. This is by no means a full listing.
Massena Metals Inc. 315-769-3846 Massena
Waste Stream 315-265-3860 Potsdam
Vance Savage 315-389-4005 Brasher Falls, Winthrop
J&E Enterprises 315-465-3323 Pierrepont Manor
Gerdau Ameristeel Corp 613-933-1119 Cornwall
Kimco CDN Scrap 613-267-0912 Kingston

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to call us at 379-9192 extension 233.

Questions? Contact Bill VanLoo.

One of the ways is to provide a link to resources and expertise to help small farms do what they do best–to keep farming.

Here are some resources that will help you.

Cornell’s Small Farm Program

National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service

Some Certifying Programs

Certified Naturally Grown
Certified Humanely Raised and Handled
Certified Organic – National Listing