Farm Party

Bree harvesting the berries 

Nona taking a short break 

Project name: Campus Community Farm Party

Hours: 2h 2:30-4:30

Event Organizer:  marni.swart@email.edcc.edu

This event was on the school campus community farm, I’m not sure who sponsored this but they did have members from the green team there so there may have been a partnership there. This events goals were for the students to learn about food issues, gardening skills, and sustainability along with several other issues. Our responsibilities were to help harvest the food, clean up areas full of weed, and add cardboard with woodchips on top to help avoid the weed from growing there again.  

This experience affected me in a very positive way, I learned a lot of new skills I previously had no knowledge of. This was a very important experience that everyone should take part of, its an amazing feeling to participate in the efforts of a community held farm. While farms can be kept by a single person they usually smaller and very time consuming, it can also be very isolating if its done alone. In this situation however, you are able to bonds with others, learn new skills, and contribute to a local farm. I grew up with an uncle who was very big on growing your own food, and maintaining a large variety of native plants. Spending time on the community farm really brought me back to the long lessons of life my uncle would give me as he’d teach me to plant a tree or cure infected roses. The larger the amount of impact on the environment you want to make the larger crowd you need to make it happen. With that said in efforts of improving certain situations, scientific studies are most likely made, which in the case of global warming have led to a single solution. This being a world wide human effort to reduce carbon emissions at all costs. In order for this to happen, there can be baby steps taken, one being participating in local community farms instead of buying food shipped in from hundreds of miles away.

Global warming is an increasingly important issue that must be addressed, it affects everyone and all types of different ecological regions. In the community farm we focused on re-using all of our waste, keeping non-biodegradable waste to a minimum, and efforts to eating locally in order to reduce co2 emissions. Our ocean is a direct victim of our pollution, a “symptom” currently seen in the ocean is a rise of acidity. A direct result of global warming, there are many affected by this because it targets all type of different species. Without a healthy ocean we cannot have a healthy human population, we as a species depend on the ocean for food, diversity in life, and most importantly oxygen. Phytoplankton, and many other sea plants are responsible for a large percentage of oxygen production. Biology is all around us, its formed our culture, the way we interact with others, and like a very large food web one system will always affect another.

Questions:

1. How long did the forming of the EDCC community farm take?

2. How many people a year participate in the farm every year?

3. Have the introduction of the bees since improved the farm life?
4. I saw several queen aunts when collecting the wood chips, are ants good contributors to farms or do they form a problem?