Mike Rutzke lives on Miller Rd in Danby on 102 acres. He is on the Danby Land Bank Steering Committtee and has helped move the Land Bank forward since it got started.
Mike has been using a pellet stove to heat his house for 4 years. He has found that burning corn and grass pellets are complimentary, increases the efficiency of both, and helps prevent clinkers. He is an enthusiastic innovator, works at Cornell as an analytical chemist, has completely renovated his old house, and would love to become a profitable part time farmer. On this last front he is moving ahead (or backwards?) with some goats. He and his wife, Corey, have two children. Corey is also involved with biofuels with the Sun Grant project at Cornell University.
This is what Mike says about joining the Danby Land Bank Cooperative:
I joined the Danby Land Bank Cooperative because farming is a life that is tough but well worth living. We need to reestablish more farming and even hobby farming in Danby. The Land Bank is important because we first need to reestablish an infrastructure that will make it easier for us to help of each other. By working collectively through a Land Bank it will give us the best chance to make farming profitable. Fortunately we have Jim Sczepanski, a farmer across the street, to help us. We purchase our corn and the grain to feed the animals from him. The more people that are involved the more we can pool our resources to make a profit. When you have animals it would be nice to be able to fill in for each other if we have to leave town.
Our farm is divided between 30 acres of tillable fields and about 70 acres of woods. I became interested in biofuels and the land bank for a couple of reasons. First it is important to me that we become good stewards of the land and second the cost to heat the house was draining our budget. So about 4 years ago we bought a Harman corn burning stove because Jim plants corn on some of our fields, which made it easy to buy some back. I found corn mixes well with grass pellets and burn both to heat the house. This saved us about $3,000.00 a year. It could not heat the entire house so last summer we installed an outdoor wood burning boiler because we had plenty of free wood. The system is plumed into our existing heating system. The system also supplies us with domestic hot water. I calculated that the 8 tons of corn and grass pellets we burn saved us about 6 tons of fuel oil. We found that mixing corn with grass pellets burned the best. The fuel we don’t need to use to heat our house can be reallocated for transportation.
I am currently involved in agricultural research at the USDA Lab, but I had never lived on a farm before our farm’s previous owner, Doris Coon, sold us the land and threw in the 200+ year old farm house in desperate need of renovation. The house was so unsecure the wildlife thought they had a right to live there. One day my wife asked our 2 year old son Mikey. Was that a cat that just ran through the living room? No, he replied, “a squirrel.”
My proudest achievement with the renovation is the cherry plank floor I installed in the dining room. It was a 6 month project I started by cutting down about 8 cherry trees out of the back woods. I did the installation and most of the millwork myself. It has been about 7 years of renovations and I am about two months away from finishing the house.
We try to live off the land as much as possible. For example we produce about 6 to 7 gallons of maple syrup a year. It can be bought at the Brooktondale Market. We also have a small very weedy garden and we just starter harvesting some raspberries. We planted about 300 plants over the last 2 years. We hope to start collecting some eggs from our 6 hens soon and start drinking some goat’s milk (after it is determined safe to drink) from the two goats who showed up in our backyard without notice. I hope someday it will be profitable, but it is a quality of life issue. I want my two children Mikey and Ella to be exposed to agriculture and the values it teaches them. The best lesson I ever learned in school was when in kindergarten I planted that sunflower seed in a Dixie cup and watched it grow. I learned that whatever you harvest in life first has to be planted well in advance.
What I like most about farming is when family and friends stop by and I have food to share that we produced off the land. It is nice to serve guests hot pancakes with real maple syrup you made your self
