The Plan
I have the same plan as yesterday for today...to research. My goal is to, once and for all, end my research on Christine Jones. Besides that, I don’t believe I have anything scheduled for today. There was talk about me coming to a meeting where, I believe, everyone comes together and talks about which apples they are going to sell at which time, though this was only briefly mentioned so I’m unsure if that’s really the plan. Assuming it is though, I plan to research as much as possible beforehand so as to accomplish my goal of finishing my article on Christine and hopefully start looking at One Health.
What I’ve Learned
Today I ended up going to that meeting that was barely mentioned, and even though I didn’t follow essentially everything that they said (because they were speaking French) by the end of it I was still exhausted. The whole thing ended up lasting four hours and 15 minutes and was exactly what I was told it was going to be...all about who’s selling what, and when. For the first hour, I actively engaged in the meeting, though when I say engaged, what I really mean is that I tried super hard to understand what they were saying as well as what was being projected up on the screen. After an hour though, I felt like I had had the full apple producer meeting experience, and proceeded to hop on the wifi and research. I did what I told myself I would do, and got through the last Christine Jones article...WOOHOO! After that, I then focused my energy on the One Health idea which is the really cool idea of creating greater collaboration between all human, animal, and environmental science fields so as to advance our understanding of health, seeing as they’re often interlinked. After that, I went on to watch one of the best Ted Talks I've ever watched by Allan Savory who essentially made Holistic Management and informed us about how through Holistic Management and planned grazing one can avoid desertification, address the water and hunger crisis, and, if done across half the world’s grasslands, can reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon back to the levels that were seen during the preindustrial age, solving the problem of climate change. Besides Allan, I also looked into a french agronomist named André Voisin who came up with the idea of rational grazing which is essentially rotational grazing. Apparently, this man and his ideas were one of the main sources of inspiration for Allan’s Holistic Management. Additionally, I also started to research Elaine Inghams who, due to the complexity of her work, I only read one bit of information on. That information, however, was really a game-changer though seeing as it was the fact Elaine was the one that talked about soil food web….not Jill Clapperton… I took 3+ pages of notes exclusively on Jill in an attempt to find information on ”her” idea of the soil food web but in reality, I could have searched for days and never would have found anything seeing as it was Elaine that I was thinking of this whole time... Because of the density of Elaine’s text though, I decided to put it off until I could better concentrate and wasn’t in a room of 12 adults frivolously speaking a language I don’t understand. Instead, I focused on something a little bit easier: mineralization. Which, if you were wondering, is when complex organic compounds in organic matter turn into simpler organic compounds or mineralized nutrients due to microbes.
Reflection
Out of all the days of the intensive, I felt like I accomplished the most today. I knocked out Jill, One Health, Allan Savory, André Voisin, mineralization and got to attend a really official meeting. Out of everything I did though, the thing that stood with me the most, aside from how tiring running an apple orchard must be, is that Ted Talk on Holistic Management and how Holistic Management would be able to bring us back to preindustrial carbon levels. That fact alone really sent me over the edge seeing as I was already interested in agriculture, but after hearing that it really made me consider the idea of possibly pursuing regenerative agriculture in college and maybe even a career.