The East Hampton Town Board will hold a public hearing next Thursday on proposed legislation that would require the planting of a cover crop on agricultural fields.
The move follows repeated instances in January in which dust blowing off a dry field north of Main Street in Amagansett created thick clouds of swirling particulate over the hamlet. The dust blanketed the commercial core and made its way indoors, sickening employees of Main Street businesses, temporarily closing one of them, and keeping schoolchildren indoors during recess.
The absence of a cover crop was blamed for the silty top layer of the soil’s windblown movement into the commercial core. That absence, in turn, was blamed on climate change: the heavier rainfall in the Northeast left wet soil conditions, hindered last fall’s harvest, and threw off farmers’ schedules, disrupting the establishment of cover crops. Conditions similar to those in Amagansett also existed in Southampton and on the North Fork last winter.
The board scheduled next week’s hearing on June 6. The code amendment would be to the town’s zoning code. The town’s agricultural advisory committee was supportive of the measure, Councilman Jeff Bragman said last month. “If we want to have a living landscape,” he said, “we need to protect the soils.”
To combat the dust bowl conditions last winter, the town board, after consulting with Alex Balsam of Balsam Farms, chairman of the agricultural advisory committee; Barry Bistrian, whose family owns the field north of the municipal parking lot in Amagansett; Peter Dankowski, the farmer who leases the land, and Corey Humphrey, district manager of the Suffolk County Soil and Water Conservation District, enacted a mitigation plan that included placement of straw atop the barren fields and installation of snow fencing to help keep it in place. The action largely eliminated the swirling particulates that many Amagansett residents said constituted a health emergency.
A concurrent analysis of the soil revealed no pesticides, according to the environmental remediation services provider contracted by the town.