Jacob has supplied me with a lot of different resources throughout the past two weeks as a way of fostering some ideas for when I take my experiences back to the classroom to share with my students. These resources are going to be pivotal in how I actually create my product and introduce the key concepts of my lesson, so props to that.

In conclusion to Week 2 here at the USDA-NRCS, we are essentially doing field work each day, as we seldom stay in the office…which is great! The main highlight of Week 2 is something quite different from the litter sheds of Week 1. Instead, I was able to do some field work dealing with surveying and a lagoon.

First off, let’s talk about surveying (no, not the Steve Harvey kind of survey). “Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, and science of determining the terrestrial or three-dimensional position of points and the distances and angles between them.” To keep it brief, land surveying is knowing the topography of an area so you know how much material you need to build a facility on that area of land.

Question #1: Why is land surveying important to a farmer? (Think about why would they need to know the dimensions of an area of land before building on it)

Consider this. Have you ever been traveling through Duplin County and notice these little signs that have someone’s name and then a company? For example “Jane Doe, Butterball” or “John Doe, Nash Johnson”? That is the farmer’s name and the company, or integrator, that they are working for. You know…all those turkeys, chickens, and hogs have to go somewhere!

Surveying sites is important, but it is time-consuming. A land surveyor has to use specially-designed GPS equipment in order for it to work (they used to do it all by hand before!).

The other thing we discussed this past week was closures. Closures are areas of land that are no longer in function, so they close it down. However, in this case it was a closure for a lagoon. A sewage lagoon is a large pond into which the sewage or effluent from the sewage system flows. Sewage lagoons are also called “effluent ponds.” The sewage and effluent are broken down by germs in the lagoon. Lagoons are popular with hog farms, where all of the waste is placed in a “pond” and then later on is pumped as “sludge” that is used to fertilize big crop fields.

Lagoons can be a tricky subject if you don’t have your math correct. You need enough gallons of sludge from the lagoon to pump onto your land. If you don’t have enough, you’re in for a shortage. However, if you pump too much sludge onto the land, then it will become runoff and can have a major effect on the water quality in that region.