Bridget Duffy

Nick, Cai, Mia, Abi, Me, Ciera and Sam at our lunch spot. These were all the interns at the conference. 

For the past week, my schedule has been packed full! Meeting new people, going to new

places, learning new things. A big part of our research project is mapping out growing spaces

within Baltimore City, and we did our first official mapping last week. The fieldwork of it was

fairly low tech, so it was fairly simple to get the hang of. I enjoyed the process because I felt like

I got to know all the ins and outs of the space, and what is actually being grown and where. I

learned (embarrassingly) for the first time what some plants and trees looked like while growing,

not just the final harvest. We ended up being there for more than three hours, just to make sure

we got everything, and that everyone knew how to properly map.

Although it’s no surprise that my biggest takeaway was the MACAA conference in Ocean City.

Meeting a bunch of other interns for the first time was so much fun! The bus tour we went on

was really interesting to me. Obviously we all know about sea level rise, but I hadn’t realized a

lot of the impacts on agriculture. There were so many acres of dead trees because the salt

water infiltration weakened them from the inside out. Most of that came after hurricane Sandy in

2012, so it’s a pretty recent environmental problem on that big of a scale.

Salt crusted soil in a corn field on the eastern shore. The salt content is so high that the corn keeps being planted inwards to avoid the water infiltration.

We got to see the impact it had on entire communities, houses that had to be abandoned

because there was too much flooding, gravesites that lay empty because the caskets floated

away. Concrete gets worn away quite quickly from salt water, so any measures that people take

only last so long. The oyster production tour was even cooler. To see the scale of reselling

oyster shells to the state, and how important that is for the industry was interesting.

A big pile of cleaned oyster shells that are going to be sold and put back into the ocean for future oyster generations. 

To be honest, my biggest takeaway was getting to spend time with all of the other interns, and

getting to learn about the projects that everyone was working on. Most of them were a lot

different from the research project that I’m a part of, so I had a lot to learn from everyone.

Several people were working on crop production and soil health, which I loved hearing about.

My job involves a lot more social interactions, and getting to know people, so I don’t get a lot of

hands-on time with specific crops.