Chandra Clarke

Offering Whatever Light I Can

Bought The Farm

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I wonder how many readers out there are contemplating an early retirement, complete with half-formed dreams of moving out to the countryside? You know, escaping the cell phone networks and email boxes to work the land and grow food in some sort of idyllic, slow-moving, rural setting.

Boy, have I got news for you.

Farming hasn’t been a matter of working the land in simplicity for several decades of course, but now more than ever, things are changing. The Internet has already revolutionized the way we shop for books and the way we receive medical advice; now it is set to overturn how we do business with farmers.

For instance, you no longer have to live in the country to farm. An online company called Omlet in the UK sells “hen kits” to wanna-be “urban farmers” who want fresh eggs. A hen kit includes an organically raised, vaccinated hen, as well as a totally modern-looking hen house called an Eglu. Indeed, the houses are *so* designer, they could easily be renamed iCluck.

Then there’s Kuh Leasing, a Swiss company that allows you to lease a kuh, er, cow for a season. No bull — your bovine buddy vacations in the Swiss Alps over the summer; you get all the Swiss cheese produced from her milk — anywhere from between 60−120 kilograms of cheese per year.

Personally, I thought this was an awful lot of cheese for one person to eat in a year until I mentioned it to a friend, who has never met a cheese he didn’t like. He’s waiting impatiently for me to finish writing this and get off the computer, credit card in hand, udderly entranced by the idea.

Meanwhile, all you oenophiles out there can quit graping about being ignored in this revolution. The Internet can also bring you wine — direct from the vine. One service allows you to make your own wine from grapes sourced from California vineyards. Vine Share allows you to rent an entire row of vines in France or Italy. Adopt-A-Vine allows you to be charitable and, well, adopt a vine, presumably saving it from a hard life on the streets. Or something.

Of course, no gourmet kitchen is complete without a decent supply of olive oil, and the Internet can supply that too. A company called Nudo allows you to adopt your own olive tree online. Not only do you get the oil produced from the tree, you also a booklet describing the tree and the grove it lives in. In some dinner party circles, this can provide some serious street cred:

EMMA: This insalata caprese is just marvellous! I simply must have the recipe!
YOU: Ah, the secret is the olive oil dressing. Made from pendolino olives, you know, from my little patch in Le Marche.
EMMA: Le Marche… Italy?
YOU: Oh yes, the Il Sogno grove did very well this year.
EMMA: You mean this is your own personal olive oil?
YOU: Of course! We have it flown in twice a year.
EMMA: But… but… you work in the mailroom!
YOU: Well, one does what one must for amusement during the day, darling.

All kidding aside, these ideas are revolutionary because they change farm economics. By marketing direct to consumers, farmers bypass the middlemen in the food production and distribution completely. They get steady incomes and more security knowing their year’s production is already purchased. Consumers can know more about the source of their food and make choices accordingly.

And as more and more producers switch to this kind of business model, you and I will have more choices. Indeed, I’ve heard that we’ll soon be able to buy whole sides of beef online; the only thing holding producers back is the speed of the Internet.

Downloading a decent portion of prime rib can clog up even a broadband connection, you know.

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

California Condor Science

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Californian Condor 50 MC
Let’s get this out of the way early—the California condor is not the prettiest of birds. With a wingspan of as much as 10 ft (3 m) and a weight of around 25 lbs (12 kg), it’s scary big. However, it performs an important function in our environment as a scavenger bird, eating carrion, or dead animals.

Those dining habits, however, are making it difficult to conserve the species. Condors end up eating a lot of lead in the form of bullet fragments in the carcasses of animals hunted with lead ammunition. This means that condors frequently suffer from lead poisoning. Lead is toxic to most organs and tissues in the body; symptoms of lead poisoning in humans can include pain, confusion, headache, and irritability, as well as seizures, coma, and death. Condors also suffer from DDT poisoning, problems with habitat destruction, and poaching.

Condor Watch is a new project designed to help protect this important bird. As part of a plan to both help and study the condor, uncontaminated animal carcasses are put out for the birds to feed on at feeding stations across the state of California. While the condors are eating, remotely triggered cameras snap photos to try to capture the tag number of each condor and observe their behavior around the carcass. Researchers would like you to sift through hundreds of thousands of photographs to help them better understand the social interactions and individual personalities of condors. Yes, you read that right—you too can be a condor psychologist.

Participating is easy: once you’ve registered at the project site, you simply identify all the animals in a photo, and then, whenever possible, provide the tag ID. A tutorial on the site will walk you the procedure for tagging the images.

An added bonus to this project is that you’ll get to enjoy, virtually at least, a lot of California sunshine in the process!

Image Credit: Christian Mehlführer via Wikimedia Commons

Museum Records

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Have you ever been through a museum and caught a glimpse into a back room? One that looked tantalizingly full of interesting records and objects not yet out on display? Well, the folks at Zooniverse are offering you the chance to have a closer look at some of these things.

Notes from Nature is a brand new project that has digitized thousands of specimen images, labels and ledgers from museum collections and biologists. These collections document where species and populations exist now and where they existed before, so they are key to uncovering the patterns of changes over time. Scientists use such data to address key environmental issues, such as the impacts of climate change.

Right now, there are two collections available to transcribe. The SERNEC collection is made of herbarium specimens: flowers and plants pressed onto sheets along with descriptive labels. The Calbug collection is made of pinned insect specimens drawn from eight California institutions. There will soon be an ornithological (birds) collection from the Natural History Museum.

To participate, you simply need to sign up or login with your Zooinverse login at the site, pick a collection, and start transcribing what you see on the screen. In this project, you can also earn badges for your transcription efforts, as a record of your contribution.

Image by Ponyo- from Pixabay

To bee or not to bee

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While the sight of a bee may freak some people out, it gladdens a farmer’s heart. That’s because bees are vital to agriculture, where they play a key role in pollinating our crops.

Unfortunately, North American bee populations have been under a lot of pressure lately. In addition to the so-called colony collapse disorder, which is still befuddling bee keepers, a type of fly known as the zombie fly (Apocephalus borealis) has taken to parasitizing honey bees in California and South Dakota, turning them into … you guessed it, zombees.

Female zombie flies will  lay their eggs in live honey bees. The egg hatches into a larva (maggot), and the maggots begin feeding on the bee. After  a number of days, an infected honey bee  will abandon its hive during the night and fly toward a source of light, where it will die. Once the maggots finish eating the bee, they exit the bee and form pupae. In two to four weeks, the pupae hatch into adult flies, and it all starts again.

ZomBee Watch is a citizen science project sponsored by the San Francisco State University Department of Biology, the San Francisco State University Center for Computing for Life Sciences, and the Natural History Museum of LA County. The goal is to find out how much of a threat these flies are, by determining where honey bees are being parasitized. To participate, you’ll need to create a light trap near a bee hive, (carefully) collect any bees that collect near the light, and do a pupae count if zombie flies emerge, and send photos of your data to the Zombee Watch website. There’s a complete tutorial here.

In this project, it’s important to note that reporting dead bees that don’t have any pupae emerging is just as important as reporting when they do emerge. This is because it gives researchers a more accurate picture of how far the new zombie fly habit has spread, and it may also give further clues as to the cause of colony collapse disorder.

Ready to get started? Here’s where you can register.

Photo by Dmitry Grigoriev on Unsplash