If you’ve visited the Student Farm before, you’ve seen diverse shades of green everywhere. Even in the winter you can find things growing. What you’ll also find, though, is plastic: white, clear, black, and grey. And there’s a lot of it.
Most people, including me, are a bit confused the first time they tour the farm. If the student farm is so focused on sustainability, why is there a gigantic tarp covering a whole field? Isn’t plastic bad for the environment?
I’m studying agricultural engineering, and I’ve learned about plastic from my research and classes. My take? Plastic isn’t great. From production to use to disposal, plastic has a reputation for hurting ecosystems and negatively affecting human health. This is backed up by science: there aren’t many papers being published about the benefits of the microplastics stored up in our bodies. After taking the class to become a Student Farm intern, though, I understand why our farm uses so much plastic.
Let’s go back to the huge tarps. Before planting, you need some sort of plan to keep weeds at bay. If we practiced farming like most farms in Pennsylvania, we might douse our weeds in a shower of herbicides before planting. Once we planted our crops, they wouldn’t have to compete with any weeds. The Student Farm doesn’t use any herbicides or pesticides to grow our food, though. Instead, we use tarps.
First, we let the weeds sprout. Then, we cover the field using a tarp. This heats the weeds up and dries them out. When we’re ready to plant, all the weeds are dead. Now we can plant our crop in a weed free field, and as a bonus there aren’t any weed seeds in that field anymore – they all sprouted and died off from the tarp.
Plastics aren’t great, but they can be extremely helpful for growing vegetables sustainably. Every plastic I’ve seen at the Student Farm is always being used to make the farm more sustainable, not less. We ship our produce in plastic because it’s durable and can be reused for years. We use plastic irrigation to conserve water. We use plastic fabric row cover to prevent pest damage so that we never have to use pesticides. Yes, plastics aren’t the best, but at the Student Farm they are being used well.
I didn’t apply for the Student Farm internship because it was directly related to my major – I just wanted to learn how to grow vegetables and see how a real farm works. As I’ve started working on the farm, I’ve realized that there are things everywhere around the farm that relate to engineering. Going into a future engineering job, I’ll take some lessons from all of the plastic. Sometimes a solution doesn’t look sustainable or environmentally friendly, but it’s actually much better than the alternative. The tarps look much less natural than a herbicide sprayed field but they’re much better for the environment even though they’re plastic. Many companies want to be sustainable, but they only end up doing what looks good instead of what actually matters. The systems thinking approach the Student Farm uses is what we all need to be doing – companies and people alike. It’s so cool to have a place at Penn State so committed to this way of thinking!