The Study of Humans

Humans are complicated creatures and that is why I hardly interact with them. I can understand plants and animals interacting with the environment. I can even understand the relationship between humans and the environment. But when it comes to studying human nature and behavior, it all goes over my head.  

Dangerous Mission

We were trudging through five feet of tall grass. The soil was sinking beneath our weight. The land topography was anything but even, unexpected drops and rises caused us to panic and yell out to the other to be careful. Using our d-nets as make shift machetes we cut a path through the dense grass. Our destination, a part of the Wilson Creek. Science was about to take place.  

A City Girl’s Day On The Farm

I learned so much just by visiting the Red Cedar Demonstration Farm last week. One thing is learning about conservation agriculture through a textbook and another is seeing it right before your eyes. I thought I knew what no-till farming was until I saw what no-till farming really is. I was in awe. I never thought about how even if a field had been converted into no-till for a couple of years’ the soil still showed signs of compaction. It was still so compacted that even after 10 minutes of water sitting on top of it, it would not percolate down.  John Sippl, the district conversationalist, shoveled out 7-inches of soil and we all were able to see the layers of compaction. I was under the impression that no-till would have fixed this but John explained how no-till is used to mitigate erosion. No till serves as a method to grow crops without disturbing the soil thus decreasing erosion but in order to decrease this compaction, John explained how cover crops roots adds complexity to the soil structure which leads water to percolate into the soil easily as well as lessen erosion too.

Menomonie is Oddly Beautiful

The snippets that I have seen of this charming small town are beautifully odd. Odd in a good way! The first odd thing that I noticed is that professors from different fields are actually interacting with one another. In the application process for this internship, we had to answer questions on what interdisciplinary research means and most importantly what it means to us. I do not remember how I answered the question but I am realizing now that I did not know what interdisciplinary research truly means, how it functions, or how it even looks like until I came to Menomonie. Interdisciplinary research means to use knowledge from a variety of academic fields to approach an issue. I have seen this for the first time in how my team leader and geography professor, Innisfree McKinnon interacts with the biology professor Arthur Kneeland. Arthur is adding his knowledge to our project and even training us on collecting sensitive insect species in streams and rivers. Through this, he is helping the geography team access and map the health of the water in the Red Cedar Watershed.