New York, particularly upstate, needs jobs. Everyone knows it. Yet despite the talk, too often nothing happens.
That's changed in recent years, however, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has focused on making smart changes to help New York companies grow. Many industries that have benefited are agricultural or food industries.
A few months ago, Cuomo sat with the dairy and yogurt industries and asked how to help them grow — and immediately implemented smart changes. On Wednesday, he will sit down with the wine and beer industries.
The beer and wine industries together employ more than 10,000 people in New York. Brewery Ommegang — where I work — has been growing, like many small breweries around the state. We're now at 100 employees, up from 46 just four years ago.
But it doesn't just take people to brew beer or make wine. We need the right ingredients. Grains, hops and yeast are key. But they are not the biggest need.
For beer, the biggest ingredient is water. When you drink an 8 percent alcohol beer, 92 percent of what you drink is water. For Ommegang, that means water from the ground beneath our brewery in Cooperstown.
As a company that's dependent on water, we're very cautious about our water. We pump 1 million gallons a year from three wells on our property; it's pure when it comes up and we take care to ensure it stays that way.
We filter for any sediment and tweak the pH to levels required for our brewing. We protect our wells from contamination, while our lab oversees ongoing, intensive analysis of water quality.
Unfortunately, hydrofracking could make that care pointless.
To get natural gas out of the shale we live above, the oil and gas industry will pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water and chemicals into the ground to break apart the rock. That toxic mix doesn't just disappear.
Normal treatment facilities can't clean that water. So the industry generally takes wastewater by truck to underground injection wells, where it is stored.
But trucks crash, spilling wastewater. And producing gas wells along with underground injection wells leak, putting our water at risk.
If fracking comes to New York, our brewery won't put our customers at risk.
We see three options:
Option 1: Truck in water from a safe watershed. But that would be expensive — and if fracking comes to New York, it's not clear where the safe watershed would be.
Option 2: Relocate. We love upstate New York; it's our home. But making good beer requires clean water, and we owe it to our customers to ensure that the beer they drink is safe.
Option 3: Close down.
None of those options are good for New York.
Cuomo has the chance to protect the beer and wine industries by banning fracking. Rather than bring in an industry that will destroy our water and ship its profits back to Texas, he should continue on the course he has set and support local industries — like ours and the other 128 breweries in New York.
Larry Bennett is operator of Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown.