How Americans can profit from the great outdoors is a question given new importance in the ongoing economic doldrums, especially in the Hudson Valley where a world-class landscape provides a storied economic engine.
Passivity in the form of long, lazy days in the shade appears not to be an option.
Marist College on Aug. 6 hosted  a standing-room-only crowd who greeted high-level federal officials visiting the area as part of President Obama”™s initiative America”™s Great Outdoors, a half-day forum  bringing forward an array of agricultural and land-use authorities and ordinary folk to contribute their ideas to reconnecting Americans to the land. This was the 17th forum of 25 to be held nationally.
Thomas Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Judith Enck, Region 2 director of the EPA; and David Hayes, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, attended the session where a pair of local congressmen offered insight.
Vilsac called farmers “the first stewards of land and water” and cited “extraordinary economic opportunity in the great outdoors.” But he noted that while inner cities are typically pictured as breeding grounds for poverty, the truth is the vast majority of “persistent poverty” plagues rural America.
Hayes said when the initiative was announced in April, U.S. Reps. John Hall D-Dover Plains, and Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley, wrote a letter saying, “If you’re going to do to America’s Great Outdoors, you need to come to the Hudson Valley.”
“It’s not a coincidence we’re here,” Hayes said, adding he would “challenge (Interior Secretary) Ken Salazar to give me a Western vista to best this. He can”™t do it.”
Enck, the regional EPA chief, also celebrated the area, asking for a show of hands from the packed auditorium from those who had trod the Walkway Over the Hudson. Nearly every hand rose. “There”™s nothing else like it,” Enck said.
But she also raised issues, including the need to continue removing PCBs from the Hudson River, in hopes of someday reopening a once bountiful commercial fishery. And she warned that carbon emissions leading to climate change will have “immense” effects on agriculture.
Effective programming, public private partnerships and the need for funding were key phrases heard when local officials and the public had their say. “If you”™re looking ideas of what is working, you”™ve come to the right place,” said Fred Rich, chairman of Scenic Hudson. He noted that tens of thousands of acres of farm land is being developed annually in the region, and said federal funding could help pay for programs to keep the land in agricultural production.
Judith LaBelle, president of the Glynwood Center, noted that about 1,000 square miles in the region was farmland, and said that the Hudson Valley farms are atypical in that they are only on average 143 acres. She said the region demonstrates that small- to medium-sized farms “can produce world- class food from a world-class landscape.”
The situation could be improved through, for example, reinvigorating the Hunt”™s Point Green Market in the Bronx, which could serve as a focal point connecting farmers in the region with a huge potential customer base in New York City and throughout the Northeast.
Better farm-to-market infrastructure “is a critical issue,” said LaBelle. She noted a recent success, with help of the Department of Agriculture a mobile slaughterhouse was approved to ease a dire shortage of facilities to take grass-fed beef to increasingly appreciative markets.
