Good News Everyone!!! (The joysplosion thread)

So my summer job is so awesome. I'm basically hitched onto one of the most prestigious research institutes in New Zealand, that's focussing very specifically on ways to reduce the use of pesticides and herbicides (which are produced from fossil fuels, and additionally require fossil fuels to apply them via chopper or vehicle or what have you) in New Zealand agriculture. Seeing's we get a fair chunk of our money from selling shit you grow on a bit of land, this is important stuff.

The research centre's currently focussed around three facets of growing biodiesel. That's canola, or oil seed rape. Part one's dealing with the chemical mechanics of planting, raising, and harvesting a crop of this stuff in your field, how much resource like fertiliser you have to put in, how it influences crops the following years (crop rotation's a regular thing in Canterbury, which is where the centre and I are based), things like that. Part two's dealing with some kind of symbiotic fungi nobody knows all that much about, and part three's ecosystem bioprotection. That's the part most of the other summer students and I are working on, covering all sorts of novel ways to make biodiesel plants grow better.

I spent my first day on the job making the most of the free wireless internet we've got in our summer student office, and then going and digging up worms (One idea was fertilising canola with treated sewage instead of fossil fuel-based fertiliser, but testing that alternative out on earthworms beforehand to see how it might otherwise affect the soil ecosystem). Tomorrow I have to go and plant buckwheat, lay out some transect lines, and maybe husbandrise some ladybirds.

This job is gonna be amaaaaaaaaaazing