By: Staff
12/03/2022 11:00 am
News from the Noteworthy
What grass is to dairy, water is to aquaculture. At Skytop Springs Fish Farm, on a sylvan hillside in Sidney Center, the Sellitti family works with nature’s offering—pristine water from multiple springs and wells. Twenty-five gallons a minute run through a series of artificial ponds, then huge tanks, and finally to holding ponds, where solids settle out and the water is returned to the land.
This is a zero waste farm. The inputs are fish eggs, water and fish feed. The outputs are compost, water, and fish—approximately 5,000 pounds of rainbow trout are sold annually as whole cleaned fish, filets, or smoked filets to restaurants, at farmers’ markets, or directly from the farm. The trout variety is Kamloops, hatched from certified disease-free eggs from a Pacific Northwest provider. They are hatched once a year—then staged through larger bodies of water as they grow. The eggs are sterile, posing no genetic threat to the local fish population should an egg or fish escape.
By: Staff
12/02/2022 4:00 pm
By Richard Sternberg, M.D.
As we continue into the third year of the COVID pandemic, increasing interest and concern is becoming evident by the set of symptoms called Long COVID. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition, on their website, says that Long COVID (also known by other names) is the experiencing of symptoms following infection with the virus that causes COVID, SARS-CoV-2. Their definition does not list a specific point in time of the symptoms but many people define the time frame as beyond four weeks following infection.
There are more than 200 symptoms associated with the diagnosis of Long COVID. Some of the most common are tiredness or fatigue that interferes with daily life, symptoms that get worse after physical or mental effort, fever, and brain fog (difficulty thinking or concentrating). If I wrote out the whole list, it would take up this entire page of the paper, but if you are interested go to the CDC and NIH websites.
By: Staff
12/02/2022 11:00 am
EDITORIAL
Until recently, the main streets of Otsego County’s towns, villages, and hamlets were densely populated with various commercial concerns that provided local residents with the majority of the goods and services they required to live full and productive lives. The money exchanged circulated within the communities, and local economies were vibrant and self-sustaining. Food was locally grown; that you could only get certain food at certain times of the year—like sweet corn—only made that food sweeter.
Today, those vital shops have largely disappeared, replaced in some towns by businesses catering to visitors, and in others by empty, decaying, and boarded-up storefronts. Where commerce still exists, mainly in outlying commercial strips, it is comprised largely of enterprises based in faraway places. While our shopping dollars do cover low-paying local jobs, most of it returns to the “head office” in God-knows-where.
By: Staff
12/02/2022 5:00 am
By CASSANDRA HARRINGTON
Many businesses and residents in both Otsego and Schoharie counties are unaware of the services provided by Destination Marketing Corporation, the nonprofit organization contracted by both county governments to promote tourism, using occupancy tax revenue generated the year prior. They’re responsible for stewarding the brands “This is Cooperstown” and “Visit Schoharie County.” Public awareness has been one of the organization’s largest barriers to success. It was growing increasingly evident that something had to be done to unite the community around these efforts.
The phrase “help us help you” was uttered all too often among team DMC. Staff dreamt of getting “everyone” in a room to not only introduce DMC, but to generate awareness among residents about the effects of the visitor economy. Early in 2022—with the help of my team of two and Board Member Marcy Birch of Barnyard Swing—the outline for November 17’s Visitor Economy Summit and Community Roundtable at The Otesaga Resort Hotel began to take shape.
By: Staff
12/01/2022 8:30 am
By SOPHIA HALL
COOPERTOWN – As this election cycle ends, it has become clearer that the fight for the right to vote did not end with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Claims of fraud, polling place closures and gerrymandering are rampant. Access to voting continues to depend on who we are, how we look and where we live. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v Holder that it was no longer necessary for states and local governments with a history of voter suppression to submit changes in their election laws for review; other outstanding Supreme Court cases threaten to erode voting rights even further. While New York itself has recently passed laws to protect the right to vote, de facto barriers, growing political animosity, and a feeling that one’s vote will not count continue to threaten voting in the state, clearly evidenced by the drop in voter turnout in this recent election cycle.
