Bradyn Kawcak, one of our student staff members, writes about what he’s been working on at the farm.

Over the summer I have been working as an intern with the UW Farm, where I have been constantly growing and selling delicious produce every week. Seeding, planting, making beds, weeding, repairing irrigation and harvesting are just a few of the daily tasks I am responsible for. In exchange for helping the farm operate smoothly throughout the week, I have been given five agricultural beds to conduct research on.

With this opportunity I have decided to research the alternative growing method of intercropping, where two or more crops from different plant families are grown in the same agricultural bed. After doing a little more research I thought it might be interesting to compare a form of intercropping to the standard, monoculture method that occurs on most farms. With this in mind I have designed a small-scale experiment where I am intercropping cucumbers, beans, and lettuce, in hopes of collecting data on soil quality, yield and biomass. As of right now all of the plants have started to grow in the beds, and I have harvested my first round of cucumbers, with beans soon to follow.

The main point I want to prove with my project is to express how environmental factors in agriculture can be transformed into applicable financial figures. Essentially, if we collect accurate biological and ecological data in agricultural research, can we translate those numbers to dollar values? By comparing the method of intercropping with the growing style of monoculture, I hope to exemplify a financial translation that might be applicable to the everyday farmer.

In relation to my internship, I hope to provide the UW Farm with a basic method for understanding the costs of soil nutrient quality and accumulated biomass. Farms, and most businesses, rarely account for such environmental factors, and I think it would be beneficial to start adopting similar economic practices throughout the industry.