'Follow the Sun' Takes on a New Meaning in North Fork Agro-Business

With winter finally getting serious, it is tempting to join the snowbirds winging it south for the season. "Follow the sun" also could be the rallying cry for some area  companies that have shown a lot of foresight and have installed solar or wind power generating systems.

Just how ahead of the curve are they? On one of our recent trips through Europe, the VAST MAJORITY of farmsteads and agricultural operations were taking full advantage of these technologies. For all the clamoring about how ugly windmills are in this country, I for one not only sensed a gracefulness about them dotting the landscape, but an admiration for the very choice and resolve to find a way to stop using so much fossil fuel in how we live and work. True, some states like Minnesota have run with the notion of vast wind power fields successfully. As we chugged west in the camper early last summer, the highways were thickly populated with trucks hauling the oversized blades and shafts. But so many other states where wind and sun are plentiful cave in to the NIMBY mentality that is so crippling and destructive long-term.

Receptivity to change — in the garden and out of it — is not a luxury. It is a necessity. There is a time and season for everything. Hats off to those among us who are not letting opposition and insularity get in the way of common sense. If we become a Third World nation, it is in part because we are so rigid in our thinking that we cannot bring ourselves as a culture and society to find ways to adapt to the very technological our scientists and inventors are creating — even as the rest of the world enthusiastically embraces them. How sad.