The Danby Land Bank Cooperative
We are a pilot project just starting this year (2009) as an experimental organization created to produce biofeedstock for biofuels entrepreneurs based locally in Danby, New York.
We are also interested in providing an alternative economic model to the main stream for-profit capitalism. We want to internalize what are commonly called the externalities of the community and the environment. If successful, we hope DLBC will serve as a model for other rural communities.
Why a Cooperative?
A Cooperative is user owned, user controlled, and user benefited.
We are interested in being a local business that feeds back into the community and the environment locally and globally. Our ties are to the land owners and the local government and other partner institutions within the community.
The Danby cooperative is waiting on a grant to allow us to be incorporated as a legal cooperative. We hope to work with Big Red Legal of Cornell University to facilitate this.
Why Alternative Energy - Biomass?
Alternative energy is a good place to find people interested in alternative economic models and burning biomass is an opportunity waiting to happen for our area. We think grass is an ideal crop for the Northeast. It grows well on slopes and marginal lands and does not require irrigation since there is sufficient rain. It keeps the biodiversity of old fields among wooded areas and hedgerows that would otherwise go to brush or be converted to sprawling extended rural suburbia. It requires late fall harvesting allowing native grass wildlife to mature.
Currently we are harvesting goldenrod and native grasses to see how how a low input scenario compares with a high input (cultivation, fertilizer, pesticide) scenario of warm weather grasses like switchgrass. We are learning as we go.
Why Danby
Danby happens to be where we live, but because it is hilly with sloping fields and poor soil, it also has agriculturally marginal land that can grow perennial grass but not compete with food production.
It also has:
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•rural land owners from suburban or urban areas who lack farming expertise but would like to include the agricultural experience as part of their life stye.
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•an increasing acreage that has been isolated from a decreasing number of farmers who, in the past, would have rented or cultivated it - land that has been either subdivided, left unused, or is beginning to revert to brush
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•A town planning board which wants to keep open space and farming in the community rather than let it be replaced with a patchwork of suburban sprawl
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•Fields mowed with hay that is sometimes medium to poor quality, not nutritious enough to feed animals
