Our Small-Scale Intensive Farm Training project's first four hoop houses are all sporting their coverings, just in time as early winter weather blows into Montana. And as the program changes the grounds of NCAT's headquarters in Butte, the changes are now being tracked from the air. From a kite, to be precise.
Camille Green, the AmeriCorps volunteer who's coordinating work on the SIFT farm, organized a volunteer day with members of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS). Rather than pounding rebar for raised beds or stretching plastic across hoop house ribs, they flew a high-flying kite with an attached point-and-shoot camera rigged to take photos continuously.
A PLOTS volunteer steadies a kite with an attached
point-and-shoot camera as it flies over the SIFT hoophouses. |
PLOTS is a grassroots aerial mapping project that started with the recent Gulf oil spill. Since then, the organization has broadened its scope, and do-it-yourself volunteers around the country are using its innovative and affordable mapping techniques as tools to help address local environmental and social issues. The information is then shared on the PLOTS website.
In addition to documenting the SIFT program as it grows, the aerial mapping will help put NCAT's headquarters in historical perspective. NCAT's building and the land where SIFT is being developed was once a county "poor farm hospital" far outside Butte's city limits.
"What really makes an urban farm unique, besides its scale, is that it must be thought of in an urban context, as well as in a climatic or environmental one," Green said. "There are positive and negative aspects of that. The aerial mapping helps me to understand the different urban interfaces that we must work within, and see where the challenges and opportunities lie."
Even though Butte, with the surrounding mountains and wide open skies, may seem like a rural area in many regards, the SIFT project is a good example of urban farming.
To read more about the mapping and the project itself, check out this month's SIFT newsletter.
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