“Agriculture is a huge driver of the upstate economy,” said James Pettis, nephew of Jennifer and Brian Thomas.

Pettis is one of 17 employees who work for the Thomases, but he had different plans until about 15 years ago.

When he was earning his agriculture degree at the State University of New York at Cobleskill in the early 1990s, he went home every week to work on his father’s dairy farm in Gansevoort, New York.

“I got to know the cows pretty well,” he said, adding that he had planned to help run the farm after graduation. But a tough economy at that time, rising property taxes, and escalating land values got to be too much, Pettis said.

In 1994, his father sold his cows.

“I didn’t come home that weekend,” he said. “So many farmers have just given up. It’s just too hard to make it work.”

Brian Ziehm of Tiashoke said his father also has experienced tough times over the years.

Pressure from commercial real estate developers forced his father to move the family farm from Albany County to Rensselaer County in 1968. The farm had been located on land now home to a mall.

“I’m not opposed to development,” Ziehm said. “It helps the economy. But it has made it harder for farmers to pass the business on to the next generation.”

There is no doubt farmers are feeling more pain in the current recession than they’ve felt in decades. Yet farmers and lenders remain optimistic that the sector will rebound once the economy recovers and prices increase.

Congress attempted to help revive the dairy sector this month by passing a bill with $290 million in payments for milk-income losses. Such efforts help, but farmers say the impact of many federal and state regulations on agriculture remains a concern. Farmers fear their industry could be crippled if lawmakers mandate overtime for farm workers or require poultry farmers to stop using cages.

“If legislators want to know what they can do to help farmers, they should think of us like a small business,” Ziehm said. “Help me get my property taxes in line so I can keep my employees.”

For the Thomases, the agriculture downturn has only magnified a perennial concern.

They grow 500 acres of corn each year and still have to buy up to 75 percent of the corn consumed by their chickens from other farmers. High taxes have made it hard enough to find land to grow more corn, Jennifer Thomas said. The recession is making it even tougher.

“That’s our biggest challenge,” she said. “Our advisers have told us there is not going to be enough corn around to supply our needs.”

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Robin K. Cooper writes for The Business Review (Albany).