Kaila Colmenero supported agriculture production at a rooftop greenhouse providing quality, fresh produce to the surrounding community through Controlled Environment Agriculture.
Why did you choose this internship?
I chose this internship because I wanted to gain hands-on experience in managing local food production. I wanted to know what kinds of advantages Controlled Environment Agriculture could offer growers, gardeners, and farmers alike within the environmental context of the Sonoran desert. Understanding the benefits and limitations of these systems in extreme and/or diverse environments can provide insights on how to improve or customize a grow space to be accessible to different communities. Having the opportunity to personally face the challenges that come with managing these systems long term gives me perspective on how to design a system with community needs in mind to minimize unnecessary strain and encourage consistent long-term use.
How is the internship related to applied humanities?
This internship is related to applied humanities because it's a direct response to communities facing food insecurity. For example, in our Innovation and the Human Condition course (PAH 420), we partnered with the Campus Pantry, a resource that provides access to free produce, snacks, pantry staples, and ready to eat meals to a population mostly composed of students who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to get healthy food consistently. As our cities continue to change, the amount of low income neighborhoods losing access to affordable, healthy foods is steadily increasing, resulting in more food deserts popping up in urban areas and continuing to cause strain in rural communities. Incorporating Controlled Environment Agriculture and sustainable systems into new builds through urban planning, or even repurposing unused spaces already present in the community, would essentially provide an oasis to a food desert, making fresh fruits and vegetables accessible and affordable to their surrounding communities.
What kind of work did you do throughout your internship experience?
Through my internship I mainly learned how to properly take care of plants to ensure a sustainable long term harvest. In Controlled Environment Agriculture one of the main advantages is that you can curate an environment for plants to sustain a level of productivity that they could never reach through traditional agriculture. I worked on building and maintaining the environment; making sure that the grow space is curated to the needs of the plants being grown, temperature, humidity, air circulation, light quantity and quality, and, especially importantly, fertilizer and irrigation. Most of the environmental controls can be automated relatively simply with the exception of the fertilizer. Specific recipes for nutrient solutions can be created to grow desired crops, but understanding the chemistry and interactions between the nutrients, plants, and water is more complex than you might expect.
Outside of curating the environment, I needed to keep up with the growth of the plants: pruning suckers, maintaining an appropriate canopy length, preventing and mitigating any pest outbreaks, lowering and leaning, and harvesting regularly.
How did your Applied Humanities major coursework help prepare you or give you unique insight for the internship experience?
PAH 420 coursework focused on engaging with local organizations working toward improving food accessibility in Tucson. Through that class I found out about Pima County food delivery programs for seniors, meal prep packages and tutorials made available for K-12 students in schools, and a whole community of local growers and farmers selling through multiple regular markets. I learned how to source relevant geographic information about the population of Tucson, how to locate food deserts, finding low income/ disadvantaged communities, mapping out existing resource centers, and triangulating where new resources would be most effective and accessible to those they would benefit. Plus with so much community engagement I was able to network with some of the existing mutual aid organizations already operating in Tucson, with my knowledge of CEA systems and community connections, I thought that maybe I can introduce sustainable systems into the community at large through these organizations.
What was your favorite or most satisfying part of your internship?
My favorite part of my internship was harvesting. Every week we'd harvest the lowest truss of each tomato plant, take the cucumbers that were the appropriate size (or bigger), and collect the green chiles that have reached maturity. Even though the greenhouse itself is maybe half the size of most classrooms on campus, we would be harvesting upwards of 80 pounds of produce every week, and that's on the low end! Seeing first hand the amount of food that even a small greenhouse, run by two students who weren't even full time workers, can provide to our community on a regular basis was astounding. I worry for my community, for the challenges it faces and the obstacles we are yet to encounter, but seeing how much CEA can contribute with relatively minimal laborious efforts brings me hope. We can reincorporate accessible food on a local level, we can integrate these systems into larger industry practices, and we can absolutely use CEA to make sure that everyone has access to affordable, healthy foods.
How has your internship experience influenced your plans for your future?
My plans for the future are just barely coming into focus. Studying the relationships between plants and people to figure out how we can re-incorporate healthy interactions back into standard practice for the benefit of both the larger human population and the ecosystem, is large and impactful and vague. Working at the rooftop greenhouse gave me ground to stand on; it gave me tangible experience in impacting my local food system, and I have new insights on the technologies we have developed to improve the process of growing produce and the potential these systems have to impact our food systems from a local level up to industry practices.
Knowing how to curate an environment or understanding how to maintain stability in a plant are skills that I can cultivate in myself well enough to teach to others and to make CEA accessible to communities facing food insecurity. I could use these skills in a commercial growing context to improve industry practices through research backed specificity. I could crunch numbers and present to big decision makers the benefits, social impacts, and (of course) monetary gain that would come from investing in furthering our understanding of sustainable systems and normalizing these practices in our modern cultures. It's still vague to be honest, but I want to use what I've learned to make a positive impact on how American society engages with food on as large of a scale as I can reach.
What advice do you have for other students as they search for and/or begin their internship?
When you're just starting up don't put too much pressure on yourself; it's easy to fall into a worry loop about new responsibilities and expectations, but remember, you are here to learn. Your goal is to gain experience and ultimately to make a positive impact through whatever medium you choose, so don't get caught up in the details. Take every experience as a lesson and do your best to learn from your successes as well as your mistakes. Don't take yourself too seriously; this is not high stakes. Keep an open mind to the knowledge you're gaining, an active imagination of how you can use it, and busy hands practicing the skills you'll need to execute it.
Also, ask questions! Take advantage of being surrounded by people who know more than you, you won't always have the luxury of being able to fall back on the knowledge of an expert. You are the expert of tomorrow, but right now you are still digging the well of knowledge that you will be drawing from throughout your future.