Some NY farmers look longingly to fracking

ALBANY -- When Dan Fitzsimmons looks across the Susquehanna River and sees the flares of Pennsylvania gas wells, he thinks bitterly of the riches beneath his own land locked up by the heated debate that has kept hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, out of New York.

"I go over the border and see people planting orchards, buying tractors, putting money back in their land," said Fitzsimmons, a Binghamton landowner who heads the 70,000-member Joint Landowners Coalition of New York, a pro-fracking group. "We'd like to do that too, but instead we struggle to pay the taxes and to hang onto our farms."

While New York State has had a moratorium on shale gas development for four years, waiting for the Department of Environmental Conservation to complete an environmental impact review, thousands of wells have gone into production in Pennsylvania. Both states, along with Ohio and West Virginia, overlie the vast Marcellus Shale deposit, which has been made productive by the advent of horizontal drilling and fracking.

In the middle of the debate over whether the gas unlocked by fracking is worth the risks of drinking-water contamination and adverse health effects are the landowners who must decide whether to sell their mineral rights. Many are dairy farmers, and many are burdened with heavy debts.

While Fitzsimmons and others in his coalition look south and see the land of milk and honey, other farmers point to Pennsylvania as a case history for how the shale gas boom can be disastrous to agriculture.

Pennsylvania dairy farmers Carol French and Carolyn Knapp travel to other shale gas states giving talks against gas drilling. They tell of methane-contaminated wells; contractors destroying valuable timber for access roads; pipelines making cropland inaccessible; years of agricultural production lost and uncompensated, and road damage that isolates families for weeks.

"I never in my wildest dreams envisioned the industrialization that comes along with this process," Knapp said.

Siobhan Griffin, who raises grass-fed cows in upstate Westville and sells organic cheese, fears for her herd if drilling comes to neighboring leased land. She points to Pennsylvania, where 28 cows were quarantined from sale after they drank wastewater, and Louisiana, where 17 cows died after drinking contaminated water.

"I can't blame dairy farmers for signing," Griffin said, "because of the cheap food policy in this country. Farmers are stuck in the middle. They don't make enough margin to pay their bills."

The 30,000-member New York Farm Bureau supports natural gas development "as long as it can be done safely," said spokesman Jeff Williams. "We've been working with DEC to get them to craft the strongest regulations in the nation."

Fitzsimmons and other coalition members traveled to Albany recently to seek a halt to a growing movement of local drilling bans.