Hi everybody! My name is Mikaela, and I am an intern on the Student Farm this summer! As an English major, I get a lot of questions about why I’ve chosen to spend my summer working on the farm.
So, I chose to apply to be an intern on the farm after seeing an advertisement for it so that I could spend a summer outside in the sun, and expand my knowledge about sustainable food systems and the process our food goes through before it eventually makes it into our tummies. After graduating, I plan to attend grad school to get my Masters in Business with a focus on Community Development in the hopes of working for (or maybe even starting my own) a nonprofit. Therefore, the community partnerships with local food bank programs and the CSA program (Community Shared Agriculture) are what interested me the most. I don’t have any idea, quite yet, what sort of nonprofit I would like to work for, since a lot of things interest me and there are so many needs in the world!
But, this summer, I hope to gain a lot of experience learning about sustainable food systems both for profit and not for profit. By working on the Student Farm, I hope to learn the process of growing a crop from start to finish so that I can one day do it on my own, since this is one great way to eat healthy and provide food for yourself and (others). I Iove to eat (and cook) foods with fresh and local ingredients, as you can see on the left! I am so excited to learn so many new things honestly, from the growing process to way a CSA operates to harvesting, and know that I will learn even more than I expect (I already have just in the training process)!
I spent last semester studying abroad in New Zealand, and was able to spend some time visiting and working on a sheep farm. In their culture, sheep farming is a large industry, as a matter of fact there are 60 million sheep in the country and only 3 million people. I learned a lot there about farming that is corporately dominated in order to mass produce and make the most money possible, with little concern for much else so the Student Farm will be a whole different experience!