This is a new multidisciplinary, mixed classroom/field course that is centered around the Hawthorne Valley cluster of Biodynamic farms in the Berkshire hills of east central New York. The farms employ nearly sustainable practices.
The foci of the course are (1) the naturally occurring energy and mass cycles; (2) their alterations by agriculture; and (3) the qualitative and quantitative differences between the perturbations imposed by industrial agriculture and smaller-scale organic farming and its variants.
The course will have two components. The first is a classroom component at the University of Chicago composed of ~6 weekly lectures with associated problem sets/exercises/readings during Fall quarter that place the environmental effects of agriculture into a global perspective. The second is a 10 day field component based at the Hawthorne Valley Farm (HVF) comprised of day hikes, road trips and on-site lectures and activities on the farm.
The HVF cluster offers a unique setting of an intensive, large-scale commercially thriving biodynamic family of farms. We will also visit a regional, industrial dairy farm for comparison of impacts and scale. Topics covered in the course include a close look at the role of environmental setting (including geology, climate and meteorology), balancing budgets in the environmental sciences, agriculture and food production, consequences of dietary choices and issues of development/conservation surrounding farming. The class will culminate in a two-group-based comparative analysis of the information gathered during the field trips, augmented by web-based data gathering. The final objective is for the groups to orally present a thorough planetary footprint analysis and comparison of industrial vs. biodynamic farming in terms of all inputs, all brought to a common denominator of energy requirements.