In N.Y., farmers think about what might have been

When Kevin "Cub" Frisbie wants to see what shale can do for a place, all he has to do is get in his pickup and drive 15 miles south to Bradford County, Pa. There, the pavement on the road smooths out. There are new hotels and a new Dunkin' Donuts. In front of the family farms, Frisbie, a farmer himself, will notice the new silos and equipment. "All this, there's just nothing but commerce going on, commerce going on," he said. Crossing back into Tioga County, N.Y., Frisbie will pass the retired feed mill and the shuttered storefronts of Broad Street. He'll pass farms that he knows are right on the edge of survival, and he might pass the home of an old friend, a dairy farmer, who ignored a hernia for too long — and didn't have health insurance anyway — and died of surgery complications last year. "Fifteen years ago, these two counties were very similar," said Frisbie, a grain and crop farmer who's president of the Tioga County Farm Bureau.What changed, to him, is obvious: Pennsylvania allows fracking, and New York, under Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, banned it. "It's a desolate area, we could use some jobs, we could use some income. And he turned his back on us." The counties that border Tioga to the south, Bradford and Susquehanna, rank in the top three gas-producing counties in Pennsylvania. But gas is providing no shelter in New York's Southern Tier, where the dairy industry has been wrecked by a four-year price slump. Small farms are closing and liquidating by the dozen. Anti-suicide resources are being circulated. Some farmers in other parts of the state have taken their own lives.