LEROY – When it’s done, Nancy Adams will have 100,000 new "workers" on her farm northwest of LeRoy.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

LEROY – When it’s done, Nancy Adams will have 100,000 new "workers" on her farm northwest of LeRoy.

It will take years, even decades, before they can go to work reducing soil erosion, cleaning the air, fighting the greenhouse effect and helping keep the atmosphere in balance as well as providing lumber, food and countless products.

Sure, they will also provide shade and cool both man and beast beneath them, bring songbirds close, mark the changing of seasons and provide branches for kids to climb and canopies where treehouse can be built.

If anyone still believes trees are just ornaments dotting the landscape, they are wrong.

Trees live and breathe just like humans, They also work for everyone everywhere. Twenty-four/seven for all time.

In LeRoy Township, they will become a cash crop and usher in a new kind of agriculture

Adams is a farmer who is growing Mower County’s first agro-forest cash crop while at the same time planting trees that will help the environment heal and protect itself.

It will also make the weekend one to remember for a long time for LeRoy-Ostrander teenagers.

"It’s a way to celebrate Earth Day (April 22)," said Adams. "One of the most important things we can do to protect the environment is plant trees."

Adams’ ambitions to go into agri-forestry and grow a forest of over 100,000 trees were fueled by her work in Africa for the U.S. AID organization, where she participated in agriculture development projects.

"Trees affect everything. They affect the water table, provide shade and crops to sell, such as the hardwoods, like walnut," she said.

"Agro forestry is sustainable agriculture and working with the environment; not against it," she said. "I think that’s our future: growing crops on a sustainable basis."

Last Friday — Good Friday, it was, a group of LeRoy – Ostrander High School students helped Adams help the world.

LOHS members of Nick Archuleta’s History Club, plus members of the LOHS Cardinals’ girls varsity basketball program, as well as Bob Lewison, who helped, got down and dirty planting trees.

Adams sees trees, then forest

Adams has lived on the 120-acre farmstead in LeRoy Township for two years. Her voice was heard in the mid-1990s, when Mower County first embraced feedlot regulations.

Her thumb-print is figuratively on the recommendations of the county’s long-range planning committee on land use and the environment.

Now, she is putting her stamp on the environment. Color it green.

Working with the Mower County Soil and Water Conservation District and the Mower County Farm Service Agency, Adams is participating in the Conservation Reserve Program; 10.4 acres are being set-aside for native prairie grasses and plants.

The marriage of a forest of trees, including 26 acres of hardwoods to be grown to sell, and an 8-acre oak savanna with its native prairie grasses and flowers is another example how "bio-diversity" can work in agriculture, according to Adams.

On Friday, Adams and Archuleta supervised the students’ efforts to plant a windbreak of white ash, white pine, red Ossier dogwood and fast-growing hybrid poplars and to replant hazelnuts.

Many of the trees came from the Mower County SWCD, while other species came from private nurseries.

The LOHS students planted 4,100 trees Friday and earned money for two important extra-curricular pursuits.

Students learn, earn

According to Archuleta, Adams has agreed to make a contribution to the LOHS History Club and the newly-organized booster club to benefit girls basketball i return for the teenagers’ labors last Friday.

The LOHS History Club returned from their third annual trip to Washington, D.C. and other historic sites, such as the Gettysburg, Pa. battlefield.

The 23 sophomores and juniors made the trip at their own expense and from monies raised at various fund-raisers throughout the school year. No school district dollars were used.

The students walked in the footsteps of history and made quite an impression along the way. "Everywhere they went, they received compliments from people on their respect and behavior," Archuleta said. "They were a credit to the community, the school district and their families."

Last Friday, they ushered in a weekend of celebration from the secular world’s Earth Day to Christianity’s Easter resurrection reverie.

Everyone of them said they felt good about what they did on their holiday from school.

"It will be neat to come back in 10 years and see how the trees we planted have grown,’ said Andrea Winfield, a junior.

"It feels good to help the environment," said Kim Mills, a sophomore, whose family has also planted trees around their home.

Patrick Utz, a junior, said, "It gives you a good feeling. It makes you feel like you’re doing something to help the world."

Aubrey Jacobson, a junior said it made her feel good to "help Mother Nature" and Kaela Bucknell, another junior said helping plant trees was a "fair exchange" for the money the History Club and girls basketball team’s booster club would receive.

Colter Payne had the last words. "Five years from now, there will be more cover for wildlife. This is a change for the better."