Community Farm Service Learning

For my service learning, I wanted to do something different from last quarter, because last quarter I did Trashy Tuesdays, and although it was a fun time, I wanted a new experience so, I went to the farm. The name of the service learning is the Campus Community Farm, and basically our task was to help around the farm by feeding caterpillars, shoveling fertilizers and chopping firewood. The name of the organizer was Lia Andrews, who can be emailed at(lia.andrews@email.edcc.edu, who was although I did not see her there, heard nice things about. During my three hours of volunteering, I decided to go between shoveling fertilizers and chopping firewood. For the fertilizers, the plan was to wheelbarrow fertilizers to the little garden area and place it accordingly. And for the wood chopping, which was my personal favorite, we chopped logs of wood and put them in the pile to be used as firewood later. Below you can see me chopping some firewood to be used.

Photo taken by Evelyn Michaud, a fellow volunteer

While there, I learned the farm was originally a waste zone where poison plants and other
debris was dumped. Hearing that, I was actually a little skeptical since you couldn’t tell just
by looking at it. This made me think about how science could play a role in our society.
By using new scientific methods, we can repurpose places that are inhospitable into places
that can benefit society. Although this may be a daunting task to take on, it is not impossible,
as shown by our own community farm. A place that was filled with hazards and poison,
turned into something that not only benefits human life, but host other lives such as
caterpillars.But this can’t be done alone, and that's where volunteers come in. The task of
creating and upholding something such as a farm from a waste zone is hard and can’t be
done alone. Although I wasn’t there for the creation of the farm, I can attest that
maintenance is a challenge all on it own as it took several of us to move the wheelbarrow
and shovel the fertilizers. Besides the transformation of the farm, while volunteering I
noticed that what we were doing goes more in depth and actual relates to the biology
in our course.

While working on the farm, I learned that the reason that it was called a farm was there
were caterpillars that are actually raised on the grounds, and have been for a little while.
Although this didn’t immediately click with me, later I found out that this relates to
our classes and how we learned how animals evolve for the fitness of the their environment.
Although technically they aren’t evolving for the environment over but more so for the needs
of the farm, they are still changing every generation into organism that better suit the need
of their “environment”. From this, we can weave the biology from our course into other fields
like agriculture. If we breed animals such as insects to either help pollinate or predate on
pest, then it can increase the efficiency of the crops we grow which can go into the
community and help people.

Overall this was a really fun volunteering opportunity and I would really like to go back there
again. Chopping the wood was fun and it was overall a good time. Some questions that I have
are as followed.

Could the farm be expanded to contain more stuff such as livestock.

What would be the limitation of having livestock on campus.

What are some common issues that arrive on the farm and how do the people get around those issues.

And lastly, what plans are being made to make the farm more efficient in growing the crops.