Hej,
today we had our second excursion during the course ‘Environmental issues in crop production’. We visited Värpinge gård near Lund. We organised ourself to get there and then talked around three hours with the farmer about his farm. He runs, besides his vegetable, honey, egg and grain production, an ecological golf course as well, with some Agroforestry and permaculture elements right in the middle of the golf area.
We neither had a task during this farm visit, nor we had to work afterwards with the information we got. This was nice, because then we could just be there and asked any questions we want. This course I took had only a few lectures during the week and Thursday and Friday were usually free. Now we finished the lecture part and at the moment we are working in small groups for our Life Cycle Assessment-case. My group is working with apple production and we analyse and evaluate the different steps of the process regarding its emissions and environmental impacts. This is really interesting! Before Christmas we have to hand in a report with max. 10 pages and present our results. The individual assignment (there are two: the group work and the individual one) we have to hand in in January, so there is plenty of time. We could chose the topic by ourself for the individual paper, so you have the possibility to get to know more about agriculture topics which you are interested in. There are also reading seminars in this course, in total four, where you have read two or three papers and develop one question to each of the papers and also answer it for yourself. This work you have to hand in as well, and discuss it in one afternoon within the course the following week. That was really nice, because the discussions were always intense and you discussed, for example the Nitrate Directive, from a lot point of views.
As you can see, this course is not as busy as the first one or as Ludwigs course-but you will read something about his course in the next posts. 🙂