I Want to Collaborate with Adrienna

Adrienna Maxwell is my classmate at ESF and she intends to work as an avodcate for a better agricultural system. As ESF is not an agricultural school, finding someone else interested in farms was very exciting.  We both worked in the writing center and became fast friends.

I really appreciate listening to what Adrienna has to say because we are approaching careers in agriculture from wildly different perspectives. She grew up helping with family beef and dairy operations while my mom was teaching my sister and I to read the ingredients on organic cereal with gorillas on the box. “It’s in my family, we’ve always farmed.” She said.

Academically, we are pretty different too. She is majoring in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Biological Applications and minors in Renewable Energy and Environmental Writing and Rhetoric. I'm in the writing minor as well, but am majoring in Environmental Resources Engineering. Her focus is talking to the people with some technical business and my focus is all technical business and sometimes they let me talk to people. We complement each other nicely.

Adrienna’s parents’ cows were always grass-fed, but not certified organic. She was never terribly impressed with organic beef because certification was both costly and not necessarily indicative of sustainable farming practices. Nearby organic farms would often give their cows expensive corn feed. Cows are ruminating animals and are healthier when fed grasses, not grains. The organic certification standards also preclude giving antibiotics to sick animals that would benefit from them. Her family’s herd was never larger than 20 to 40 cows on many hundreds of acres that allowed for rotational grazing and keeping tabs on the health of individual animals.

Unfortunately, Chris and Tracy Maxwell could not charge a fair price for their milk because they were never certified organic. This ultimately is what caused them to give up dairy farming and return to the family beef operation. Adrienna’s mother ran the farm during the week with Adrienna and her siblings helping after school. Her father ran the farm on weekends in addition to working three jobs as a contract engineer. All of this was not enough to pay their bills. This was a common story among small dairy farmers who were consistently paid less than the milk was worth.

This story is absolutely devastating, but effectively illustrated something that I had read about a studied: farming is a hard business. Hearing about the Maxwell's dairy helped me understand just a little bit more what family farms are up against all the time.

The Maxwell family is part of a larger farming community. Beef cattle are auctioned at Empire Livestock Marketing in Burton, NY and their milk was processed by Agrimark. All of the farmers knew each other and were familiar with the products, business and farming practices of their neighbors. Adrienna joked that half of them were her relatives and that they should have all just worked together. Although Maxwell Farms does not have a website, she was kind enough to direct me to her neighbors at Maple Hill Creamery, who sell their products at the Regional Market in Syracuse. This close-knit community is typical of small-scale agriculture in New York State.

At ESF, Adrienna is conducting independent research under Dr. Charlie Hall about the energy efficiency of U.S. food systems. She will be considering all of the energy and material inputs from one step before the crops go into the ground all the way through consumers putting the food into their mouths. Ecological engineers study systems like this using the concept of emergy, or “energy memory”, the energy required at all steps of a process to create a product. This project is only in its infancy, but the scope is likely to include examining the top ten crops cultivated in the United States. She intends to find out for herself if industrial-scale agriculture is indeed more productive than small family farms and at what price.

Growing up on a farm has helped Adrienna define the parameters of her study; as she puts it, “I live in the middle of the research project.” Putting numbers to scientific data is only a vehicle for getting more people on board with reevaluating and reconsidering commercial agriculture. Ideally, sending people to hay in the field for an afternoon would be her way to impress upon her audience the amount of labor and love that goes into family farms.
Although she could have majored in agriculture elsewhere, understanding farming in the context of a broad education in environmental issues gives her the perspective she needs to reach outside of the farming community. I hope to cross paths with Adrienna after graduation and work together to build a better food system.