Mote alert!

UMD President Dan Mote, who apparently has never been to the campus farm before, has decided to pay us a visit tomorrow (Thursday) around 3:15 pm. My ag professors have been encouraging all of us to go to the farm that afternoon to work with the animals, say hey to Mote, and generally show how enthused we are about agriculture. One of my professors told us that there have been proposals in recent years to reallocate the farm space for other things- projects like redoing part of Regents Drive so that it doesn't curve, which would allow the big "Comcast" sign on Comcast Center to be seen from as far away as the traffic circle. While I'm sure that's vitally important to some people, I am not so much concerned with the visibility of Comcast's logo as with the existence of our dairy barn. So if you feel like hanging out with sheep and cattle on Thursday afternoon, consider stopping by and showing that people other than ag majors care about the farm. This would be a great time to come, especially if you've never been to the farm before. I work on Thursday afternoons so I'll definitely be there, and you should be too.

Stella wants you to come visit her tomorrow

Oh, and I don't know much about the proposal to take out the dairy barn or how likely it is that something like that will actually happen, but I will most certainly be looking into that and updating when I find out more!

Happy (belated) Earth Day!

In honor of Earth Day, I thought we should talk a little bit about sustainable agriculture. I decided to look at some of the basic methods farmers use to promote sustainability and see how these methods can be adapted for very small-scale sustainable agriculture in a vegetable garden.

What I'm trying to show with this list is that sustainable does not necessarily mean more expensive, which I think is a common perception. If you want to know more about ways that farmers can cut costs and be more eco-friendly at the same time, you can check out this article (pdf) by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, which looks at how technologies like wind and solar power can be both energy- and cost-efficient for farms. And if you want to know more about how you can create a cost-effective, eco-friendly garden...just keep reading!

1. Compost. Who needs Miracle-Gro when you can make your own compost? By composting you can produce soil chock full of nutrients and turn waste that would otherwise be going into a landfill into something useful. Plus, compost improves soil percolation, which then reduces runoff- so even if you wanted to pour a bunch of nasty chemicals on your lovely composted soil (which you don't!), the impact wouldn't be as bad. Don't have enough space for a compost pile? Try worm composting, which basically involves putting some shredded newspaper, dry leaves, kitchen waste, and a little bit of soil in a big plastic box and then throwing in some worms. Awesome!
2. Use organic substances like bone meal and blood meal to add nutrients to your garden. I know that this stuff sounds gross, but it's part of sustainable agriculture: blood and bone meal are slaughterhouse byproducts. We can argue over the ethics of killing animals for food another day, but I definitely think it's a good idea to use every part of the animal we can if we're going to kill it anyway. Blood and bone meal are both compost activators, and blood meal also keeps animals like rabbits away from your garden.
3. Rotate crops. Farmers do it so they don't deplete the soil. In a vegetable garden, that's not really an issue, but it's still a good idea to switch it up every few years so that crop-specific pests don't move in permanently. By discouraging harmful insects from returning to your garden, you also avoid having to use dangerous pesticides.
4. Efficient irrigation. Try placing water barrels under your drain spouts and using what you collect to water your garden. You can collect a lot of water really fast, and it's easy to then use a watering can to water your garden. Another way to reduce water waste is to water in the early morning to limit evaporation. Also, think like a farmer and pay attention to the weather so you'll know when you can skip watering and let nature take care of it.
5. Pick your crop carefully. Whenever possible, try to pick plants that are native to your area. Native plants generally don't require as much work from you in terms of water or fertilizer, since they're already suited to the climate. They're also more likely to get help from insects native to your garden.

Once again, happy Earth Day, everybody!

Farming & Feminism

Alright, I'm going to get a little bit personal for a minute and talk about my experiences working on the campus farm here at UMD. I didn't expect this when I started working, but I've actually found being a farm hand to be a very empowering experience. The farm manager (Lindsay) will, for instance, just hand me a drill and a box full of bits and tell me to go assemble a wheelbarrow, or give me a hacksaw and some screws and ask me to mend the fence. She's an awesome manager because she assumes that I (and her other employees) can handle whatever she throws at us.

All four of the current farm hands happen to be women. Reactions to our all-female farm crew range from perplexed to amused to patronizing. When people (and by "people," I mean people we encounter in the farming world, like hay salespeople and livestock producers) automatically assume that all of us are weak, clueless, and generally incompetent, it's incredibly frustrating. The idea that we're constantly being judged for being "weaker" is completely absurd: even if women do tend to be smaller than men, does anyone actually think that a couple extra pounds of muscle mass are going to make the difference when you're dealing with a 2,000 pound Holstein? Of course not. It's become very clear to me based on my experiences this year that the farming world is still definitely male-dominated and full of not-so-subtle sexism. I've also noticed that my College of Agriculture classes are generally chock full of...women. So what's up with that?

It turns out that a lot of women in the College of Ag, including me, are aspiring veterinarians. Many are planning to become small animal vets, which is awesome, and some want to continue to work in agriculture by becoming livestock vets, which is awesome too. Although women make up a significant majority of students in vet school these days, livestock vets are still predominantly male. There is also a shortage of livestock vets in general right now; the Iowa Veterinary Medical Association writes that the fact that women compose the majority of vet students "is seen by some as a bad sign for the livestock business. Female vets have traditionally preferred small-animal practices." Hmm...this "preference" for small animals couldn't have anything to do with not wanting to deal with constant insinuations that we can't handle livestock, could it? It's a tough situation, because attitudes towards women in agriculture won't change until we "prove" ourselves, but it's the existence of the assumptions that we have to subvert that make a career in agriculture so unappealing to so many women.

Anyway, that's why I spent the first half of this post describing why I think Lindsay is such a great manager: she doesn't create an atmosphere where her employees, as women, need to prove anything, and that is incredibly refreshing. I think it's fantastic that so many of my fellow livestock vet wannabes here are women, and I'm glad we have people like Lindsay and our UMD vet, Dr. Angela Black, to help us out along the way.

Above: a cow that isn't going to move unless it wants to,
regardless of the gender of the person trying to make it

Micro agriculture

My roommate Margaret and I planted a tiny garden in our room this weekend! We have three different types of herbs, three kinds of flowers, and even tomatoes! The pots are tiny and we're going to have to transplant everything after it gets to be about three inches tall. I'm also sort of concerned because everything's growing in a pretty hostile environment: right in front of our window fan. I'm actually ridiculously excited about this, though! Look how cute:

So here's a radical idea...

...castration hurts. A lot.

While that may seem obvious to, well, pretty much everyone, there are no state or federal laws regarding the use of painkillers when castrating livestock. To get an idea of why that's so incredibly uncool, let's take a look at some of the different castration methods commonly used in the US (grossness warning)...

1. banding: you can use an elastrator (left) to place what is an incredibly tight rubber around the entire scrotum, and then wait two or three weeks for the flesh to atrophy, rot, and eventually fall off- yum!

2. bloodless: you can use a tool called a emasculator (right), which basically crushes the blood vessels running to the testicles and simultaneously cuts the spermatic cord

3. surgical: this involves cutting off the bottom third of the scrotum, pulling the testicles out and severing them, and then sewing the rest of the scrotum back up (this is the only method I've ever witnessed in my extremely limited castrating experience, and the procedure I saw involved a lot of painkillers)

So, in conclusion: ouch.

It is, of course, possible to use anesthetics, and a lot of producers do. Even for producers who don't have the time or money to use painkillers, there are a lot of effective ways to manage pain and stress, such as castrating when the animals are young, before the tissue that's going to be removed is fully developed. The thing is, though, it's perfectly legal to castrate even fully grown animals without painkillers if that's what you want to do. So what are we going to do about that?

Well, one day I showed up at work on the campus farm only to discover that Lucy, our fistulated dairy cow, had had her forehead shaved. Upon further investigation, I discovered that researchers here at Maryland are using her as a test subject in a project that uses electroencephalographs (EEGs) to record how her brain activity changes in response to various stimuli. Their goal is to quantify the ways in which animals feel pain, and to use this information to build an irrefutable argument about why it's wrong to perform procedures like castration and de-horning on adult livestock without painkillers. While the conclusion might seem obvious (I don't think anyone actually thinks that cows don't feel physical pain in the same way humans do), the researchers hope that approaching the argument from a scientific perspective will help create momentum to pass legislation regulating castration techniques. Honestly, this stuff isn't a big priority in Annapolis right now, but I certainly wish them the best of luck.

Welcome!

Hey, everybody! My name is Molly, and the two things in the world I care about most are livestock (sheep!) and activism (many different kinds). I'm a student in the College of Agriculture, and I want to explore the different political issues that the ag students at Maryland tend to be involved in, because up until now, my love for all things agriculture and my activism have been entirely separate. The first few posts on this blog are just going to be about issues that I already know exist in the agricultural world, but then I hope to focus more specifically on things happening here on campus as I get in touch with students who are already organizing around ag-related issues.