The Borlaug Blog

If I’m going to be completely honest, I haven’t done too much this week. But, a lot has been on my mind.

First, starting with research. I have collected 31 responses to my questionnaire. For each question, I condensed all answers that my respondent’s gave into 5 or 6 multiple choice responses. For, for a question like “In what ways do you mitigate climate change on your farm?”, I began with 26 different open ended responses and converted them into the categories: (1) New Technology, (2) Improved Crop Varieties, (3) Water Conservation Measures, (4) Pest Control, (5) Agronomic Practices, and (6) None. After assigning a number corresponding to what category the response fit into to that for every question, I wrote those numbers on the margin of each page of every questionnaire. Then, I copied those into a spreadsheet in Excel. Initially, after six hours of copying the numbers into the spreadsheet, IT ALL DELETED. Apparently, my computer does not have any more data to store anything else. Probably should’ve deleted my 8 minute Spanish imovie. I just sulked for a while. Then, Hope and I went over to Abneel’s house for dinner. Over ramen, she told us how she once lost her spreadsheet which had 900 respondents and 60+ questions for each questionnaire. It took her a month to finish. After that, and watching 12 Fail (recommended by my mom!) on Netflix, I got back to it the next morning. It turns out that the on browser Excel is so much easier to write in than the application. I also was blasting Rex Orange County the whole time so the experience was much more enjoyable the second time. But, it was kinda sad to condense these farmers stories into a simple data point...[CONTINUE READING]