Final Exams in the Field, Fortunate Rains

This past week was jam-packed with activity. Monday morning we took the final exam for the Vegetable Crops course. In the afternoon we joined Bill Minter again to finish a lab experience that had been rained out the previous week (we couldn’t complain too much—we desperately needed that 0.64” of rain, and we continue to need rain). Bill took us to a Merry Lea field that is being restored to prairie so we could practice using clinometers to find slope, as well as try out several methods to mark out contour lines.

Tuesday morning found us all traipsing through poison ivy and tall grass to look at holes in the ground. This intriguing activity was our Soils class lab practical. We had each selected an area of Merry Lea with a unique soil type, dug out a soil core, and then were expected to interpret it for our classmates as well as our professors Dale Hess and Larry Yoder. We each described aspects of our respective soils, such as what the drainage classification might mean for cropping, why there may be a depleted A-horizon, what mottling in the subsoil indicates, and how the parent material affected the soil we were seeing. I think we all surprised ourselves at how much we had learned about soil in such a short time. In the afternoon we took our soils written exam, during which we began to wonder if perhaps we hadn’t learned quite as much as we thought we had about soils. The conclusion of the day on Tuesday marked the conclusion of the first half of the course. Thanks to the variety of activities we stay busy with, the time has really flown. It’s hard to believe we only have a month left!

After a day off on Wednesday, we jumped right back into things on Thursday by joining some other Merry Lea students, staff, and volunteers for bird banding at 6:00 a.m. We helped set up the mist nets and then walked out to check them every 30 minutes. We were pleased to catch a variety of bird species and have the opportunity to help with the identification, banding, and measurements of the birds. In the minutes between the net checks, we learned more about the nesting habits of certain birds, invented games to play with clothespins, talked about the history of bird banding at Merry Lea, and counted how many ticks Josh had discovered on himself since the previous net check.

That afternoon we traveled to Marcellus, Michigan to visit Bair Lane Farm, operated by Randy and Roxie Ewert. We received a tour of the farm and were very impressed by the innovative solutions the Ewerts had created to simplify a variety of farming tasks. We helped to dig and clean some garlic, and concluded the day with a jump in the river.

On Friday we headed off to Clay Bottom Farm near Goshen. The owners, Rachel Hershberger and Ben Hartman, gave us a tour and graciously answered all of our questions about soil fertility, tillage implements, greenhouse construction, and marketing models. We continued our discussion about the history of the farm, the merits of recordkeeping, and the process of selling produce to restaurants as we helped to clean a mountain of garlic. We returned to Merry Lea to conclude the week by reporting on the agroecology-related books each of us had chosen to read during the past few weeks. Our brief presentations sparked lots of discussion, and Caleb’s presentation was so interesting there was even a disagreement among three others as to who got to read his book next.

– Posted by Katie Jantzen, 2012 agroecology student