Fair-thee-well

Ametamorphosis is under way in Maryland agriculture. You could see it at The Great Frederick Fair in the City Streets, Country Roads building. There, a "national-award-winning display" unfolded that offered "'ag-citing' hands-on activities and workshops."

When a 147-year-old institution like The Great Frederick Fair clones its own adjectives, you might think something is afoot.

You'd be correct. Two often at-odds entities -- farmers and environmentalists -- are adapting a model that dates back to the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions: the cooperative endeavor. They are harnessing its power to save the planet and the American farmer. It's a relatively informal relationship, but CSCR exhibits laid the potential that it holds on the table.

In addition to the information, exhibits and demonstrations sponsored by agricultural entities ranging from the Frederick County Farm Bureau and Young Farmers to the Farm Bureau Dairy Bar and Pomona Grange, were handouts, sign-ups and displays from the green contingency.

Eco-representation included the Monocacy and Catoctin Watershed Alliance, Catoctin Forest Alliance, Potomac Conservancy, Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin and the Frederick County Agricultural Land Preservation Program. The Maryland Department of Agriculture, Department of Natural Resources, Rural Legacy Program and Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program also weighed in.

It is a Herculean task to convey the range of resources these agencies, organizations and alliances brought to the fair. Suffice it to say you could do things like buy ICPRB rain barrels and sign up for free "watershed-wise" gardening workshops; learn about MDA's "Greener Pastures, Cleaner Streams, Healthier Livestock" cost-sharing assistance to help farmers install stream protection practices; or sign up for DNR's "Smart Green and Growing Marylanders" initiative and "join your fellow Marylanders in planting 50,000 trees by 2010."

That's just a sampling. But it's enough to make our point. Things in the fields of agriculture are changing, and farmer-allies are emerging from what heretofore might have seemed unlikely sectors.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation signaled the trend about 10 years ago. In the wake of an intense struggle over regulations designed to curb farm runoff, the foundation declared the better idea was to help farmers "do the right thing" through government payments or other incentives, rather than exercising regulatory muscle.

More recently, the anti-sprawl environmental group 1000 Friends of Maryland, which once aggressively locked horns with farmers in attempts to keep farmland from spawning houses, changed course as well. Now the group's mantra is: "Doing more for farmers. Doing more for Maryland." It will lobby on behalf of farmers, trying to "help ease the economic pressures that drive them from their farms and farming."

A representative of 1000 Friends said, "We're not going to get at climate-change issues, transportation issues, healthy food issues unless we have a really strong agriculture system nearby." As this year's Great Frederick Fair amply and aptly demonstrated, the potential for that is right down the road.