The end...or maybe just the beginning

Well the internship has been over for exactly two weeks now and I finally have time to sit down and reflect about what this summer has meant for me. I came into this internship expecting to do research almost everyday and be working at the dairy the rest of the time. What I got was completely different and so much better. What I got was an opportunity to learn about sustainable agriculture from a scientific, social, political, and local level. I received a scientific background in the form of lectures, and research that I was doing on reproductive efficiency. I learned about the social issues behind sustainable agriculture in our weekly student-led discussion and community days. And I learned how all of the other categories impact individual farmers through working at the small farm unit and interacting with the agricultural community of Goldsboro. But perhaps most importantly, I was continuously learning throughout the summer about all issues, scientific and social, as well as crucial life concepts from everyone I interacted with, especially the other interns. Being from completely different backgrounds with different educational paths, all of our conversations were intellectually stimulating and really made me think about how sustainable agricultural issues apply to me and my life, not just the rest of the world. I know this sounds like it should be reversed, but in all actuality I more often then not consider the impacts of sustainable versus conventional agriculture on a much larger and global scale, and because of this I neglect to think about the impact it has in my life as well as the changes I should make on a personal level. Sustainable agriculture is more than just making our food "organic" and "natural".

It's about scaling down.
It's about crop-animal rotational systems.
It's about increasing soil organic matter.
It's about integrated pest management.
It's about being concerned with the produce part of production.
It's about building communities.
It's about composting.
It's about pasture raising.
It's about health. Our health and the health of the world. We are so concerned with the idea that we only get one body so we should treat it the best, but what about our world? Aren't we only given one world?

This internship was a gathering of great minds and people that will make change happen in the world for agriculture. Let's get started!

PBR and barbeque pork at 3am

The last couple of days have been really hectic because we have been helping cook food for a 160 people that are coming down to the farm in Goldsboro as part of the RIC conference. The menu included potato salad, green beans, coleslaw, blueberry cobbler, blueberry and peach pie, real pulled barbeque pork, and bojangles sweet tea! Basically the best feast possible. My contribution to this conference was getting up at 2:30am on Saturday morning and helping Jackie and Remy getting the two entire hogs ready for the pig pickin' at lunchtime. The hogs were from the Cherry Farms and had been butchered up in Chatam county and brought back here so when we got them they were already cleaved in half and gutted. Remy and I helped put them in these cages that would make them easy to transport and deal with once on the grill. We loaded them up on the grill at about 3:30 and then had to wait for a couple of hours till we could flip them, so what did we do? Crack open some moderately cold bottles of PBR (yes they actually come in bottles, I was a bit surprised too) and sit on the coolers and chat it up. We had the most awesome conversation about Jackie's life in the airforce and how he has worked all over the country in factories and how he got into sustainable agriculture. I realized at that point that I don't really think he needed our help to cook the pigs, I think he needed our help to keep him company while he waited them to cook. Perfectly fine with me. Watching the sun rise above the high tunnels on the farm and knowing that no one else would be up for at least another 3 hours was pretty cool too. I'm going to try and make time to see more sunrises this upcoming semester because it's such a cool time of day. After the pigs were thoroughly roasted, we tore up the carcass a bit so that jackie could pour a special barbeque sauce over it and it would soak into the meat and give it that amazing taste. I think pulled pork is one of the only things keeping me form being a vegetarian. After the soaking of the pork I went back to catch a couple of mini siestas before going to the goat dairy to pick up some stuff. The lunch part started around noon and we were completely bombarded with high schoolers! It was cool to see everyone's enthusiasm and the event was made complete with a giant water fight that broke out. Sherlette also came to perform which was really cool and I had some pretty awesome conversations with some of the RIC conference people. After everyone left and we had finished cleaning up we all went back and showered (it was a million degrees so being outside for more than 30 seconds and you were completely soaked with sweat) and then chilled for the rest of the afternoon. We have so many leftovers.

Last library day

Not a whole lot has been going on this week because we are in the process of wrapping up our research and everyone has been fairly busy. This Thursday, however, I went to the library again and worked with the kids this time learning about nutrition. I've decided that my favorite camper there is a cute little boy named Matthew. He is always so engaged and happy to be there. We played several games dealing with nutrition including a variation on the ever so popular game of go fish, except it was called go shopping. This was our last week at the library which was a little sad because even though I've only been there three times, I feel like I've made an attachment to these really bright kids. They give me some hope for the next generation of farmers and gardeners.

Thursday night was our last traditional going out night when we were all together so we decided to try and go to Toreros. Unfortunately the dodgy Mexican bar was jammed packed and our usual table was full, so we decided to go to Murphy's. Totally different experience oh boy. The average age there was about 25 years older than Toreros and we were sitting next to a small dance floor where people were correctly swing dancing! We waited till everyone left before we decided to bust a couple of moves ;) I even taught a few people how to swing dance.

Blueberry picking and watermelon breaks

Last day on the Small Farm! We finished up as much of the blueberry picking as possible and had an awesome watermelon break! It was really hot so I doubt I was working at 100%, but it was still a good wrap up for our time out there. I'm going to miss working on the farm with Steve and all the other interns.

Beach trip: Round two!

Well the title says it all. We just happened to change up our destination for a bit. On Saturday we decided to get up very early to leave for Atlantic Beach as close to 6 as possible, which inevitably was a little past six, for the whole day. We made a coffee run to wake us all up and then Jeremy, Claire, Gabriella, Louise, Wendi and I headed East! The weather was gorgeous the whole day and we arrived around nine and got a prime parking spot right next to the beach! We spread out our towels, sunscreened up with every intention of not getting burned (I even waited to go in the water which if you know me you know how hard that is) and layed out for about an hour. After this hour Wendi and I got up to go swimming and realized that the beach had gone from having a group of people every 50 feet to having a group of people every 5 feet! How the heck Wendi and I didn't notice this until we got up is a mystery to me. We went swimming for a while but the waves were pretty intense so we headed in and just snacked and layed out while listening to Zac Brown Band until about 2. We decided it would be a good idea to head inside for the hottest part of the day so we drove to nearby Beaufort, a fairly affluent fishing/yachting community for lunch. We ate a delicious seafood lunch (yay crabcakes) at Clawsons close to the waterfront and then went looking around all the little shops in Beaufort. It really took me back in time because Beaufort is the place that we used to take our campers on Long Cruise from Camp Seafarer. It made me realize how much I miss being a camp counselor. It especially hit me when we passed the outpost that the campers sleep in and the Sanitary Fish Market and Restaurant where we took them for dinner. But I understand that my time as a counselor has passed and I'm moving on to bigger things, I just wished I could have made an effort to at least visit camp this summer. The drive home was pretty bad because as usual I just about burned the skin off of part of my body and this time it happened to be the back of my legs. Before you lecture me on the importance of sunscreen (mom), I made every effort not to get burned by using SPF 30 sunscreen and reapplying every hour, but unfortunately I was sitting down every time I was reapplying so the back of my legs and my derriere got no sunscreen love and were thus punished pretty harshly by the sun. Sun kissed skin my ass, more like sun slapped. I can never get this sunscreen thing right. I'm still paying for it three days later.

Sunday was nice and relaxed and I even had a visitor :) Ali came to visit me from Raleigh and I showed her around all the hot spots in Goldsboro (if you know Goldsboro you would be laughing right about now), but she did seem to really enjoy visiting the small farm and picking some blueberries. We just hung out the afternoon and watched Shawshank Redemption with a delicious pasta dinner.

Pregnancy checks!

On Friday morning Claire and I got up just after 5 am to go to the dairy and helped Dr. Ally and some of his vet students do some pregnancy checks. We went through with them and tried to identify some of the cows, which I can see is going to take a lot of practice. We got to feel early pregnancies that were still at the floor of the pelvic and only about the size of a golf ball, some that were past a hundred days and had migrated into the abdomen. I also learned how to feel for placentoms which can also indicate a pregnancy when the fetus is too far down to feel. The way these pregnancy checks work is that we insert our hand into the cows large intestine and because of the way the reproductive tract and digestive tract line up we can feel down through the wall of the intestine to the reproductive tract. We don't go through the reproductive tract because of risk of contamination. We also got to see a diagnosis of a cow with some breathing problem. The vet students noticed that the pulse of the cow was very visible through the jugular artery when the cows neck was stretched out, which indicated a heart problem. From there they listened to her heart and discovered that there was fluid either around the heart or the lungs. Dr. Ally then explained to us two possible diagnosis. The first was hardware disease where the cow swallows a piece a metal (hardware) and it gets lodged in the reticulum causing heart problems. The second diagnosis is a type of cancer that effects the lymphatic system and is fatal to the cow. Because the cow had previous respiratory problems as well as being older, the later diagnosis was the more likely one which means the cow would be culled from the herd. Interesting right? I love being reminded of why I want to be a vet :) The rest of the day we were in Raleigh doing research in the library and walking around to see the campus a little. I love giving tours of the campus because I love the campus and when you are passionate about something it tends to rub off on people (like my soul food seasoning here ;)

Side note: We went to Toraros last night for some food and drinks and everyone was quite surprised to see me with some makeup on and nicer clothes. Occasionally I like to get dressed up and look nice and I guess that isn't really reflected usually in my personality because I tend to pay attention to other things first. At Toraros Marisa and Remy sang a duet together and then announced their marriage, which has become quite an elaborate joke between everyone, but funny none the less. After Toraros Kristen, Remy, Gabriella and myself continued the party in the kitchen of the boys house where we shared stories of our childhood especially involving our parents. Always good to reminisce and even better to hear stories from other peoples families. I guess it really makes me happy to hear people appreciate their families because it's no longer a given in our society nowadays.

It only takes a spark to get a fire going

On Wednesday evening we were all invited to a potluck at Shorlette's house (mansion) with all of us interns, the SWARM kids and Shorlette and Caitlyn, the community director who had come to speak with us previously this summer. The food was really good (something I'm really going to miss about this summer) and Wendi and I collaborated on some fresh blueberry lemonade. We started the discussion with an ice breaker called Roses and Thorns in which each person says their rose, or positive thing of the week, and their thorn, or negative thing of the week. We then launched into a good hour and a half discussion about building communities and rallying people around specific causes. One of the most important ideas that was thrown out there was the concept of active and passive hope. Passive hope is seeing a problem and hoping that it gets better or that someone will work to resolve it, without your direct involvement. Active hope is done mostly through action by engaging in a movement or cause. Passive hope was argued to be extremely dangerous and damaging when things don't turn out the desired way. I would have to disagree with the notion that passive hope is stupid however, because sometimes you just can't put your heart, soul and efforts into a cause. There are so many worthy causes in our society and to throw our efforts into each and everyone would mean that we aren't truly committed. Passive hope is the only way of sustaining a positive outlook on the situation. True, you do run the risk of being very upset when things don't improve, but isn't that a risk worth taking when the alternative is not having hope at all? I do, however, believe that active hope is the way to go. We also talked about collaboration between causes and to learn to find common ground in order to unite various groups and increase their strength. I didn't have a lot to say throughout the discussion (strange right ;) because I was too busy listening and trying to process all the other ideas that were being said. In otherwords, I was actively listening. This conversation was very important and gave me some good ideas to use in the future. Now as our time begins to wrap up here, I am beginning to wonder about when in the future I will get to have these types of conversation again.