When we think of wasted food, we tend to picture the wastage happening where consumers and food meet — supermarket inventory deemed too old to sell, restaurant servings too big to finish, groceries that shoppers bring home but never eat, etc.

But a group of �ֲ���ý students recently received $2,500 for a project that hopes to head off wastage at the other end of the food distribution network: perfectly good crops that farmers plow under or otherwise dispose of, usually because it’s not cost-effective to bring them to market.

Check it out: The EcoRep team that won the Maine Food System Innovation Challenge displays their prize. From left: �ֲ���ý sustainability manager Tom Twist, Amelia Keleher ’21, Hermione Zhou ’21, Elliot Wilson ’21, Sabine Ragy ’18, Oaklea Elfstrom ’21, Sophie Landes ’21, professor Francis Eanes, Liv Guion ’21, Domi Frideger ’21. Team members not shown are Madeline McGonagle and Matt Reback, both ’18, and Nelly Junesand ’21. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The Maine Food System Innovation Challenge, a pitch competition in its third year, made the award to the �ֲ���ý team during a weekend gathering Nov. 10–12 at Saint Joseph’s College of Standish, Maine, which hosted the weekend event.

�ֲ���ý went up against teams from Bowdoin (second place), Colby, Harvard, and Saint Joseph’s colleges. Four private-sector teams competed in a separate “Enterprise” track during the weekend.

The �ֲ���ý concept, dubbed ReHarvest, capitalizes on an emerging phenomenon in the food world: organizations that put together farms and volunteer gleaners — in other words, people willing to pick what farmers call the “lost harvest” — and then distribute the salvaged produce to food banks and similar relief organizations.

As the ReHarvest presenters pointed out in their pitch, Maine is one of the states most affected by food insecurity. One in five Maine children and one in seven adults contend with limited or uncertain food supplies, making the state the most food-insecure in New England and ninth nationally, according to the USDA.

Moreover, much of the food donated to emergency providers is processed food that’s heavy in fat, salt, and preservatives — and much less nourishing than fresh produce, says one of the four ReHarvest presenters, Hermione Zhou ’21 of Shenzhen, China.

With the complementary goals of reducing lost-harvest waste and steering more food to people in need, ReHarvest will be a Web-based tool (and ultimately a mobile app) that streamlines communication among farmers, gleaners, and hunger relief organizations.

“There’s a real need to connect excess food much more effectively with people who need it,” says Francis Eanes, a visiting professor of environmental studies whose research encompasses food systems and who is advising the ReHarvest team.

Eleven �ֲ���ý students are involved in ReHarvest, most of them EcoReps — students who lead and execute projects for the �ֲ���ý sustainability office — and all but three of them first-years.

The Maine Food System Innovation Challenge charges its collegiate participants with envisioning ways to expand supplies of local and sustainably produced foodstuffs, while considering factors like climate change, possible uses of technology, and the need for more transparency in the food supply and distribution chain.

Dandelion Springs Farm in Newcastle, Maine, is the setting as Kennebec County Jail inmates pick lettuce, squash, and bok choy during 2017’s Maine Gleaning Week. The inmates had to qualify for this community service opportunity, and earned time off their sentences for taking part. (Courtesy of Healthy Communities of the Capital Area)

Farmers leave crops in the field for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they overplant a crop as insurance against bad weather. There might not be enough field hands to pick everything. And they often won’t harvest good produce that’s simply not as pretty as consumers expect.

Enter the . Organizations like the Maine Gleaning Network and Central Maine Gleaning Group dispatch volunteers to farms and orchards with crops that owners don’t plan to harvest. (Participants in this year’s Maine Gleaning Week rescued 18,000 pounds of produce, enough to make 75,000 servings.)

The gleaning organizations, in turn, distribute the recovered foodstuffs to food banks and other hunger relief organizations. In Maine, it generally falls to a few dedicated individuals and small nonprofits to coordinate the entire process.

Enter ReHarvest, “a connecting mechanism for farms, gleaners, and emergency food suppliers — something that makes it as efficient and easy as possible to connect people with each other,” says Sophie Landes ’21 of New York City, another of the presenters at the MFSIC.

Farmers could use this online tool to post crop availability, gleaners could align opportunities with their own schedules, and emergency providers could “shop” for crops to fill specific needs.

Some of the 135 pounds of organic peppers gleaned at Andrews Farm in Gardiner, Maine, during the first annual Maine Gleaning Week, Oct. 7–16, 2017. (Courtesy of Healthy Communities of the Capital Area)

The team based their pitch on what they learned from networking and research during the fall. They “really did their homework, and talked to a lot of folks who are doing this work on the ground. That gave a lot of credibility to their pitch,” Eanes says.

Before they can actually develop the web tool, hopefully this spring, the team plans to connect with some 20 farmers in the Lewiston-Auburn area, as well as with gleaning organizations and food-assistance providers. (Maine’s largest such organization, the Good Shepherd Food Bank, is headquartered in Auburn.)

Eanes also plans to assign some of the fieldwork to his “Urban and Regional Food Systems” class this winter. “When they have to get out there and talk to people whose job it is to address those issues on a day-to-day basis, it adds so much depth” to classroom learning that tends to be abstract, he says.

“There was just a lot of energy surrounding innovation in the food industry.”

The challenge was sponsored by the Institute for Local Food Systems Innovation, based at Saint Joseph’s. With the pitch presentations scheduled for Sunday, all the college teams spent a full day Saturday auditioning their pitches for a parade of experts.

Each of those 14 professionals, representing fields from law to banking to high-end groceries to food assistance, consulted with each team for 30 minutes.

“They made us think about the minute details, the mechanics of how everything would happen,” says Domi Frideger ’21 of Durango, Colo. “How are you going to transport the [gleaned] food? How long can you store it legally? What kind of laws are there around this? Are you going to be a nonprofit?”

“It was exhausting, but we learned so much,” says Liv Guion ’21 of Arlington, Mass.

And the peer networking was an added pleasure, Landes notes. “It was a pretty great experience to be with all the students from the other colleges, because there was just a lot of excitement and passion about everyone’s products and just a lot of energy surrounding innovation in the food industry.”

Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College

Environmental major and Watson Fellow Caroline Caldwell ’15 of Gambier, Ohio, poses with a friendly lamb at Nezinscot Farm in Turner, Maine. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As a young teenager, Caroline Caldwell ’15 lit out for a two-week New Mexico training camp to complete her skill set for the sport called the modern pentathlon.

Already competitive in horseback riding, swimming and running, three of the five stages of modern pentathlon, she wanted to round out her repertoire by learning to shoot and to fence.

It was a big hop, geographically and psychologically, to Roswell from the family farm in Gambier, Ohio. “I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Caldwell says. “It was really hard for that first week.”

But then came the payoff. “I remember finishing the camp and continuing into nationals and thinking, ‘This is awesome,'” she continues. “That sparked my desire to keep throwing myself into situations where I’m going to fly somewhere and not know anyone, and live with them and work with them.”

Caldwell will be doing exactly that later this year, thanks to the coveted Watson Fellowship, an award that supports a year of study and research abroad. This environmental studies major is one of 50 U.S. students to receive the $30,000 stipend in 2015.

Caroline Caldwell at Zapata Ranch, in Colorado, during her 2014 internship.

For her Watson year, Caldwell will undertake an exploration of sustainable livestock ranching in Australia, Finland and Tristan da Cunha, the namesake island of the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago.

“I’m trying to learn more about sustainable management in places where it’s about survival more than keeping up with a fad,” says Caldwell, who from an early age was responsible for a collection of animals on the farm in Gambier.

In all three nations, rigorous agricultural management is essential. Australia, the land of livestock “stations” or ranches that can rival small countries for size, is dry and getting drier as the climate changes. Finland presents all the agricultural challenges of a far northern land.

Grazing on Tristan, whose land is held communally by the entire population, is limited by the availability of suitable pastureland and a culture that emphasizes income equality.

The livestock operations that she’ll visit during her Watson year, Caldwell explains, employ practices informed by ecological knowledge handed down over generations. Those operations must be self-sufficient, because their locations present few economic or environmental alternatives.

“There isn’t really a fallback plan for them,” she says. “These farms and ranches operate in stark contrast to America’s wealthy subsidized farms that have modern high-tech machinery and a powerful economic status as massive cattle exporters.

“I want to explore how sustainability is inherent in each community’s culture, and how they have adjusted to political and economic influences within the bounds of their natural environments.”

Watson Fellow Caroline Caldwell ’15 greets a goat at Nezinscot Farm. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Caldwell’s Watson plan reads like a blueprint of her personality and passions. It’s a blueprint that she refined and polished at �ֲ���ý. For her, �ֲ���ý was the place to find focus and fresh challenges for a robust energy, a love of the outdoors and a voracious appetite for new skills, the more hands-on the better.

Whether it’s wielding a chainsaw, tending to livestock wounds or learning to sew (thanks to the �ֲ���ý theater course “Pattern Drafting and Draping”), Caldwell says that she just loves “physically being able to replicate what other people can do.”

Caldwell developed her capacity for hard work on the family farm, which her parents ran in addition to day jobs in education. (They now operate the college farm at Kenyon.) As she notes in her Watson proposal, “At age 7 I could show you the difference between new soybean and corn sprouts, and by 14 I could look at any hay bale and identify the various grass types packed into the bale.”)

At �ֲ���ý, Caldwell started out with the swim team and gravitated to rowing. “Rowing has really shaped me as a person,” she says. “Whenever I feel like I can’t do something any longer, if I’m exhausted or mentally burned out, I think back to rowing practice — ‘Well, if I could get through that, then I can get through this.'”

Caldwell’s Watson itinerary reflects her �ֲ���ý journey. For her senior thesis, with Holly Ewing as adviser, she looked at land preservation organizations in Maine, Maryland and Ohio. Her study-abroad experience in the Turks and Caicos Islands whetted her interest in the challenges of island life.

And Caldwell’s Otis Fellowship, a �ֲ���ý grant supporting off-campus research with an environmental theme, enabled her to undertake a three-month internship, in spring 2014, at The Nature Conservancy’s Zapata Ranch in Colorado.

Watson Fellow Caroline Caldwell ’15 at Nezinscot Farm in Turner, Maine. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The 103,000-acre ranch supports some 3,000 bison and 300 cattle in an environment where strict management of water use and grazing is crucial. “A lot of the cottonwoods around the ranch were dying,” she says, “because the water table has dropped so much.”

The internship “introduced me to large-scale ranching and the success that comes from managing entire ecosystems instead of focusing separately on the crops or livestock,” Caldwell explains. The experience was eye-opening after life on an Ohio farm where the land is fertile and rainwater plentiful.

“I felt Zapata Ranch was the beginning of my life in sustainable ranching, and I realized how much more I want to learn.”

Caldwell readily credits �ֲ���ý for helping prepare her, in ways both specific and broad, for both the Watson experience and what comes next. Like many �ֲ���ý seniors whose work with fellowship advisers (in her case, Nancy Kleckner, biologist and �ֲ���ý’ Watson liaison, and Robert Strong, lecturer in English and the college’s graduate fellowship adviser) has paid off with an award, Caldwell feels that guidance was decisive.

On the broad scale, Caldwell could write the theme song for the liberal arts experience. “The fact that there are opportunities to explore almost any interest is just phenomenal. I think coming here and taking that leap of faith has led to so many other opportunities.”

She adds, “I’m going to look back to my �ֲ���ý experience for a lot of inner strength because it has pushed me in ways that I didn’t think possible.” Coming from Caroline Caldwell, that’s saying a lot.

Any �ֲ���ý student will tell you that gathering together in one dining hall, enjoying food prepared in kitchens nearby, creates community.

Learning why food, place and hospitality are such a great recipe for communal experience was the topic for students in the Short Term course “Food, Culture and Performance.”

Each morning, the students gathered with their professor, Myron Beasley, to “learn the theory associated with food politics, community, and the issues of hunger.” They also studied Maine farming, the area’s history and sustainable practices.

In the afternoon, they trekked to nearby to work with farm co-owner Gloria Varney, their partner for the course.

At the organic farm, theory met practice as students learned just where their food, quite literally, gets born.

And on May 21, the course culminated with a “performative dinner,” created and served by students to 50-plus guests at the Turner farm. The meal featured food raised on the farm and prepared by the students, including meat from animals slaughtered earlier in the spring.

A student clears food from the tables during the outdoor performative dinner at Nezinscot Farm on May 21. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

A performative dinner, explains Beasley, an associate professor of American cultural studies and African American studies, is akin to performance art. With the latter, “the artist is both the subject and the object of the art-making.”

During a performative dinner, “the food becomes both the object and subject, to make known the cultural politics surrounding the object — in this case, the food.”

In its May 28 edition, The Portland Press Herald took note of the distinctive course offering, publishing a major feature under the headline “�ֲ���ý students dig in to understand farming.”

Below, 12 photographs by Sarah Crosby capture what Beasley calls the “integration of food and culture and community.”

5:58 p.m.: Gather ye Bobcats

Sporting yellow “Team Nezinscot” T-shirts, Penelope Ganske ’17 of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Harrison Brown ’17 of Mount Kisco, N.Y., offer guests a tour of Nezinscot Farm before the evening’s meal.

On the quilt and T-shirts, the phrase “A Place to Gather” is the students’ interpretation of “Nezinscot,” an Abenaki word meaning “to descend upon.”

6:04 p.m.: Garden party

During a pre-dinner tour, guests walk through the farm’s herb garden, dubbed the “Medicine Garden.” Students encourage the guests to find and pick an herb that “calls to you.” Tibetan prayer flags wave in the breeze.

6:12 p.m.: Bee my honey

Wearing bee suits, Kelsey Mehegan ’15 of Duxbury, Mass., left, and Krista Prouty ’15 of Norwell, Mass., offer fresh, raw honey samples to guests.

6:26 p.m.: Cultivating the liberal arts

Ron Begin of Lewiston samples chèvre (goat cheese), kale and cilantro pesto, and chive butter. All of the food was prepared by students.

“From the natural sciences to the humanities to the social sciences, everything is right there on a farm,” Beasley says. “When I think of the liberal arts, it is about integration and interdisciplinarity, and we can see all of that functioning on the farm.”

6:40 p.m.: Farm to table

A platter of meat — roasted lamb and smoked turkey — from animals raised on the farm. “We looked at what we wanted to eat, what we had available to us as far as resources, and designed a meal around that,” says Gloria Varney. “This meal was the culmination of five weeks of experiential learning.”

6:51 p.m.: What’s on the menu

Associate Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio passes sourdough bread down the table.

The meal featured roasted lamb, smoked turkey, scotch eggs made with maple turkey sausage, green salad with shaved aged chèvre and maple-glazed carrots. Guests drank shrub vinegars (a sweetened, flavored vinegar drink) and dandelion wine. Dessert was pets de sœurs (a pastry cake) with blueberry compote, served with fresh whipped cream.

6:55 p.m.: Dining director

Myron Beasley directs students as they serve food. Beasley has presented the course twice before, telling the Press Herald that exploring ideas about food “is a way of unraveling a lot of social and political issues.”

7:01 p.m.: Successful recipe

Gloria Varney and Myron Beasley listen to student stories during the meal. “The ultimate goal for the course,” he says, was to “integrate this notion of food and culture and community.”

7:04 p.m.: Mealtime story

Christina Felonis ’17 of Athens, Greece, rises to tell the guests about meals in her Greek family. The class built on the concept of hospitality, and both students and guests told stories to enrich the communal vibe.

7:12 p.m.: Wine and dine

A guest reaches for the dandelion wine, made from springtime dandelions on the farm.

“For students to have access to this place and to learn from it is profound because not many people will ever have this kind of experience,” Beasley says.

7:30 p.m.: ‘Go to it!’

Students serve food and clear dishes.

During the weeks leading up to the meal, Varney taught the students what they needed to know to prepare and serve a meal. That day, she told them, “OK, we’ve gotten here. Go to it!” And, she says, “They just came through.”

7:40 p.m.: When day turns to dining

The students hand-made the dinner decorations, including these felt orbs. “It’s a beautiful day and a feast on a farm,” said dinner guest Jeff Gould of Portland.

Greg Anderson, an assistant in instruction in biology, works with a student doing field work on a Brunswick mudflat of the kind that’s occasionally closed to clam harvesters for conservation reasons. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Historic friction between two marine fisheries groups is playing out once again in Maine, where proposed legislation would give coastal towns the power to prohibit bloodworm digging in areas closed to clam harvesting.

Occasionally, a Maine town will close a flat to allow younger seed clams to mature. Currently, such closures doen’t apply to worm diggers.

The proposed legislation assumes that seeded flats need to be protected from both clam and worm digging, an assumption that riles worm diggers.

“Somebody is always trying to get us kicked out of their town,” said worm dealer Phil Harrington during a recent meeting in Brunswick to discuss the legislation.

�ֲ���ý marine biologist Will Ambrose tends to side with the worm diggers, reporter Beth Brogan that the “impact worm digging has on clams has probably been overstated.”

Ambrose tells the BDN that according to his and his students’ research, not a lot of clams are “impacted to the point of death by worm digging.”

He also points to research by colleague and collaborator Brian Beal, a marine ecologist at the University of Maine, that specifically looks at how worm digging affects young clams. Beal concludes that “blood wormers should continue to harvest commercially from areas closed to shellfishing without reprisal or fear that they are causing damage to populations of juvenile soft-shell clams.”

“I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

The hostility between the two digging groups, Ambrose adds, “goes back to at least 1979…because these groups do not mix, for a whole variety of reasons: socioeconomic, geopolitical — they just don’t get along. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

In 2005, environmental studies major Eben Sypitkowski ’05 spent time with worm diggers while doing his honors thesis on bloodworm digging.

He described for �ֲ���ý Magazine the offbeat culture of the hardy yet disenfranchised worm diggers, and how there’s enviable talent in being able to “keep your butt to the wind and your hoe in the mud when your back is killing you.”

Jesse Laflamme ’00, manager of Pete & Gerry’s Organics, oversees an operation that’s the antithesis of factory farming. Hens live cage-free in open barns, lay their eggs where they wish, and have outdoor access. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

A story posted on MSN’s portal for small businesses and entrepreneurs, Business on Main, includes Pete & Gerry’s Organics, the family egg business managed by Jesse Laflamme ’00.

Under the headline “,” writer Joanna Krotz notes that “Pete and Gerry’s, located in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, is a regional powerhouse, distributing ‘certified humane’ organic eggs up and down the East Coast.”

Laflamme says compound annual growth is at 35 percent, “with revenue north of $50 million.” He also works to support family farms by partnering with 40 or so neighbors, some of whom switched to egg production after the success of Pete and Gerry’s.

Tomi Chipman '14 stands with her father, Doug, in one of their greenhouses in Poland, Maine. Photograph by Jose Leiva/Sun Journal.

The and her father Doug on the front page of its Father’s Day 2012 issue. Chipman plans to work the family farm after graduation, joining her father in a tradition that stretches back 231 years.

Chipman’s decision would make her the 8th generation to work the family’s 60 acres in western Maine. After years of expansion, the Chipmans still own the original land their ancestor farmed in the late 1700s.

With two more years at �ֲ���ý ahead of her, Chipman will complete a major in biology. She plans to spend her breaks and summers helping out on the farm — naturally.

During a Thamo festival, Judson Peck poses with villagers who hold knives dotted with yak butter, a sign of blessing for a village shrine.

Mount Everest (left) and Lhotse (right) glow in the late-afternoon November sun about 20 miles from Thamo, elevation 12,000 feet.

The late-November morning sun begins to warm a greenhouse in the village of Thamo, within Sagarmatha National Park.

Organic gardening practices allow good pests, such as aphid-eating ladybugs, to live in the greenhouses.

By measuring the amount of ice in glasses of water inside and outside the greenhouses, Peck could calculate the intensity of the nighttime cold.

Nepalese villagers use high-altitude greenhouses to supplement centuries-old farming practices

Photographs and text by Judson Peck ’11

My plan was simple. The execution was tricky.

I would take a small plane into the Khumbu region of Nepal, then trek alone without guide or porter into Sagarmatha National Park, the highest mountain ecosystem in the world. Then I would settle into a village to research the plastic greenhouses used by Sherpa villagers to grow and harvest vegetables during the long, harsh winter.

My first challenge: Where the heck were these greenhouses? It’s not like they dot a Google map.

I had spent the previous few months in Kathmandu with the School for International Training, part of my �ֲ���ý Junior Semester Abroad program. There, I learned about Nepal’s history, politics, culture, and development issues. Then I began my independent study project. This was last November.

I knew the greenhouses were up there — somewhere — deep in Sagarmatha National Park, which encompasses part of Mount Everest (“Sagarmatha” is the Nepali name for Everest).

And I knew that the greenhouses had been donated to villages within the park as part of a program that compensates villages for the fact that the area’s tightly restricted natural resources are off-limits. But no one had done much research on how they were being used and their effect on these tight-knit communities.

So I trekked around to different places like Namche, Khumjung, Khunde, and Thame. Then, at 12,000 feet, I discovered the village of Thamo, sitting on a plateau against the rocky mountainside, home to about 35 households and 10 donated greenhouses that were flown by helicopter from Kathmandu.

The growing season had ended by my November visit, and Thamo in November is much like Maine in late fall — on the brink of winter. But even in the coldest weather and climates, from the Arctic tundra to the high mountains of Khumbu, only the growing season is limited. As anyone who’s thrown an old bedsheet over tomato plants before a cold September night knows, you can extend the harvest season by creating a warm and protected microclimate.

The donated greenhouses that create this microclimate at 12,000 feet feature thick, clear plastic that has been UV-stabilized so it won’t disintegrate. To withstand the mountain winds, the plastic is firmly attached to metal poles.

At dawn I sometimes woke to the clanging of bells as yak caravans plodded beneath my window.

In Thamo, I stayed at a guesthouse of the sort typically used by trekkers. As the sole guest most of the time, I was treated like family. I chatted in Nepali with the children about their schoolwork and ate daal bhaat — a traditional dish of rice and a kind of lentil soup — with the mother in the kitchen (the father worked at a nearby hotel and was away much of the time).

At night, my bedroom went well below freezing; most evenings I’d snuggle into my sleeping bag, wearing my winter jacket, and do my reading, like Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, who farms in Harborside, Maine.

One night I lay awake listening to the chants of four monks reverberate through the cold house as they blessed the family for the coming year. At dawn I sometimes woke to the clanging of bells as yak caravans plodded beneath my window carrying loads of woolens and knock-off North Face jackets from Tibet.

Every morning I trudged outside and broke the ice in the water bucket, then washed my face in freezing agony before the sun steamed it off my head. I didn’t bathe during my stay, partly because the bathing area was being used to hang drying meat and partly so I would fit in with daily life in the mountains.

I’d hoped to use my broken Nepali to interview the villagers but soon learned that they mostly speak Sherpa. I soon found a translator: Nawan, a trekking guide who has summited Everest himself.

As Nawan and I went from home to home, I learned that Sherpa culture demands that tea be served to visitors. Lots of tea meant many bathroom breaks but the tea-drinking sessions also fostered a relaxed setting for informal discussions.

On my last day in the village, a festival inaugurated the new village shrine. Among the rituals is placing yak butter on the men’s knives, khukuri, as a blessing and waving bamboo shafts with silk scarves attached. Four monks beat drums as the villagers chanted and drank raksi, a traditional and really strong distilled drink.

Afterward, there was dancing, then we staggered home over the rough terrain, knives in hand.

To New Heights

from my stay in Thamo, where high-altitude greenhouses have literally taken gardening to new heights:

• In the villagers’ traditional outdoor gardens and in the greenhouses, they grow mostly green leafy vegetables: lettuce, spinach, Chinese cabbage. During the June-September monsoon season, they grow everything from chilies and tomatoes to beans and squash.

• The greenhouses do save villagers money by producing inexpensive vegetables. But most of the food is eaten by families, so not enough is left over to sell in nearby Namche for income, as was hoped by the agencies that donated the greenhouses. (Still, it’s a big benefit to have year-round veggies.)

• My sense is that the greenhouses have not changed existing social or gender roles, as the women still do most of the gardening. The men often porter goods or guide trekkers, as Thamo is near the gateway to Mount Everest.

• Garden pests are a problem during the monsoon season. To combat pests, growers should improve the soil, since pests feast on weak plants. The growers already sweeten the acidic soil with wood ash, eggshells, and bone meal, but should also spread more compost and introduce “green manure”: plants that protect the soil and add nitrogen.

Environmental studies major Judson Peck is from Topsham, Vt. For his senior thesis in 2010–11, he will try to determine the political and environmental factors that create food scarcity in Nepal.