“You arrived looking like a lawyer, now you look like a farmer.”

So said one volunteer to Scott the other day. As the expression goes, Scott is not a farmer, but he plays one in Japan. And he sure works like one. As you may recall from an earlier post, Scott is assigned to the Farm team for the duration of his time at ARI.

ARI teaches and practices sustainable, organic farming. Which means no herbicides or pesticides in its fields. Which means the fields are weeded by hand.

Since Scott arrived the Farm team has spent most of its time weeding the ten soy bean fields around ARI. The Farm team works two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon (now that Sunrise farm is over). That is a lot of weeds. Scott also has spent a morning picking beetles off soy bean plants (no pesticides).

Farm team also has been thinning out carrots. Carrots are planted three seeds per hole and some seeds do better than others. So at a point the team goes out and pull the smaller carrots and leaves the biggest carrot to grow. The pulled carrots are fed to the livestock.

Even though we stopped Sunrise farm it still has been unusually hot and humid. Afternoon temperatures get into the mid-80s and the morning humidity is 95%.