Through this Saturday, August 18, the Delaware County Fair in Walton is going strong with rides, horse and livestock shows, bull riding, country music, and demolition derby.

Reader Ann Roberti visited the fair earlier in the week, and sent us some photos. Above, a team of draft horses in harness struts its stuff; below, fairgoers look on as a demolition derby event gets underway. For more photos from this year's fair, see our Flickr gallery.

Got photos from the Delaware County Fair? Send them to us at [email protected], or share them with the Watershed Post's Flickr group pool, and we'll add them to the gallery.

Above: Photo of emerald ash borer taken at the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station Laboratory, East Lansing, Michigan. Source: insectimages.org.

The march of the invasive emerald ash borer across the Catskills continues. Today, the state Department of Environmental Conservation announced that the green beetles, which infest and kill ash trees, have been found in the Kenneth L. Wilson Campground in Woodstock.

From a DEC press release (linked above):

The Daily Star reports that on Sunday night, fire tore through a barn on a dairy farm in Franklin, killing over 20 milk cows and calves and putting an end to a century of dairy farming by the Boning family.

Some of the cows were able to be rescued from the barn, the Daily Star reports, but the fire was burning so fiercely that firefighters had to abandon the rescue effort. Some of the rescued cows suffered from smoke inhalation and will be sold at auction for beef.

"You could hear the cows bellowing inside," [Franklin fire chief Thomas] Worden said. "It was so hot and so fast, we couldn't do a lot. We had to abandon the effort."

Farmer Renea Halstead Boning told the reporter that the fire means the end of her family's dairy business:

The Boning farm has about 15 dry cows and heifers that were in a field across the street, family members said, but the dairy operation won't be rebuilt.

"Life goes on," Halstead Boning said. 'We'll pick up, and we'll go on."