Week Six with Extension by Heather Knauss

Me harvesting peppers

"This week we looked at the complexities of feeding a world, sharing resources and circular agricultural processes and economies to solve critical issues of food production, food waste, energy and human health. We also took a deeper look at the nexus of ecological processes and societal activates.” (Quote from Andrea Franchini in our weekly blog prompt) On the Urban Research Farm based out of the Anne Arundel County Extension Office the goal is to take back our farm land. The problem is, due to the fast urbanization of our world, farmland is disappearing. That problem then also creates the problem of where are people going to get their food in fifty years? The issue of urbanization not only creates a problem for the farmers and their livelihood but it also creates a huge problem for the average person. Many people are working hard to find solutions to this issue, for example all of the indoor farms that can be found in cities. They produce food that they sell to local markets, this practice also helps to cut down on carbon emissions which is another problem. Yet at the Urban Research Farm we have taken a different approach. Instead of moving the farming inside we are focused on proving that you can still farm on a small plot of land. Using the one acre plot we have there’s a lot of crops we are growing, and all the tools and practices we use are things that are easy to obtain for the average person. The research farm has been a huge success so far, in the future I know it will only continue to get better.

Where I have had to use critical thinking during this internship is in creating the flyers for the open house. At first I tried making a trifold but that task is easier said than done so I switched to single page flyers. That format made it impossible to fit everything on one page so I ended up creating single page, double sided flyers with the information on the front and recipes on the back. In the end the result for the first flyer looks amazing and so will the second once it is finished.

I have also had to use critical thinking when reviewing 4-H lessons. A few of the activities that are laid out in the books don’t work how they are supposed to, or they seem great on paper but aren’t that great when they are tested in person. By actually sitting down and doing the activities more than once it can give a great sense of whether the activity is good, needs to be scrapped, or simply needs the materials changed. I have gotten to experience and weed out all three of those types of activities. The two activities chosen for the first lesson, one of the activities needed to be scrapped because there was no substance to it, especially for the age range. The second activity for that lesson was great and worked 99% of the time. The lesson I was handed after that needed a few material changes but otherwise was wonderful. If I had to do anything differently I might have tried a little harder to fix the first activity but overall I think I did a great job.

Me hoeing pumpkins

Another area that required critical thinking was the pepper plants were becoming too heavy this week and the plants were beginning to wilt a bit from lack of water, even though the drip lines were only unhooked for one day. To solve this issue we decided to harvest all of the bigger peppers to keep them from falling before hooking the drip irrigation back up.