Joanna Richards, NCPR

Smaller farms in upstate New York are being squeezed by the valuation mechanisms that peg taxation to land values.

One of those challenges is property taxes. Agriculture is a land-intensive industry, so rising property taxes can mean much higher costs for farmers. And taxes have been rising, thanks mostly to increases in the production value of farmland.

Behind John Peck, about 30 barn cats maneuver around – and sometimes under – 60 milk cows in his small barn. The Peck Homestead Farm, in the town of Champion in Jefferson County, has been run by the Peck family for about 200 years.

Wind farms are a touchy subject in the North Country. As the town of Cape Vincent wrestles with a potential project, in neighboring Lewis County another wind farm has been operating for seven years. 

The hallways at Lowville Academy and Central School during lunchtime sound like any other: kids letting loose, getting out some pent-up energy before heading back into classrooms for the afternoon.

A Tylerville dairy farm, in Jefferson County, is growing, in part thanks to help from National Grid. The company awarded the farm a grant of $50,000 to increase its access to electricity. 

Milk Street Dairy has grown quickly since it began in 2008, with a herd of 400 cows. Now up to about 1,000 animals, the farm's partners want to add 800 more by 2014.

About 200 community members turned up in a school auditorium in Watertown Thursday night in a showing of regional support for Fort Drum. The event was billed as a “listening session” for the Army, to inform a process of personnel cutbacks and reorganization currently affecting military installations around the country.  

The federal government's across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester are set to kick in Friday, barring an agreement between Congress and the president. That means a big impact for defense spending, including for Fort Drum, an important regional economic driver.  

A Pentagon spokesman put the financial hit at Fort Drum at $38 million. A portion of that will come out of civilian employee payrolls in the form of one-day-a-week furloughs through September, when the federal fiscal year ends.