State of the Rockies report card released

In what has become a hallmark of the spring at Colorado College each year, the seventh annual State of the Rockies Report Card was released last week. The Report Card is the culmination of the annual State of the Rockies student/faculty collaborative research experience, a unique and high profile program in which CC students research topics pertinent to the eight state Rockies region, report on their work, and engage the campus and greater Rockies community in their findings.

“It’s a good way for CC to produce something that’s useful for the community and outside of Colorado Springs,” said Liz Kolbe, the Rockies Project Program Coordinator.

The project receives broad press coverage; Kolbe and the Project Director, Professor Walt Hecox of the Environmental Program, both conduct a great deal of outreach on the report card’s findings by giving presentations to the press, schools, community groups and museums.

The Report Card, which is available for free online, is the result of a summer’s worth of research for five to six incoming seniors each year, as well as a series of speakers that come to campus to address the issues of the report card throughout the year. 

In past years, the release of the report card has coincided with a symposium on environmental, economic and social issues in the Rockies, with high profile capstone speakers, including former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. The symposium did not occur this year for primarily budgetary reasons but is likely to return in the future.

While several articles in the Report Card converged on similar topics in past years, all of the sections in this year’s report focused on a single theme in order to better focus the content of the report and to improve opportunities for communication and collaboration among student researchers. This year’s theme is Agriculture in the Rockies.

“Historically, [agriculture] is important, because a lot of the federal policies that opened the West were put in place to settle the west with agriculture,” Kolbe said. “Because of this, even though it’s only a small percentage of the region’s GDP, in many areas it takes up a lot of the land, so it has huge impacts on the environment and communities and the character of the region.”

Senior Zoe Wick, a Sociology Major and one of the researchers for the 2010 Rockies Project, concurred. 

“I think that the most important thing I came away with from the summer research... was a deeper understanding of the role that the government plays in agriculture and the food industry, from subsidies to immigration policies.” 

Kolbe cited Wick’s work on the demographics of the agricultural industry as one of the highlights of this year’s report, noting that female farm operators have increased by 257% since 1987.

“Part of this is changing gender roles and getting away from the rural masculine identity. And, there’s a higher percentage of female operators in organic agriculture than in conventional agriculture, so as practices change, operators change as well,” Kolbe said.

Female operated farms tend to have significant differences from male operated farms, which has implications for agriculture overall in the Rockies. 

“On average, women operated farms are less than half the size of male operated farms,” Kolbe said.

The change towards farms of smaller sizes is a component of a significant focus in the Rockies Report Card: the beginning of a broad shift towards organic and small farms that provide produce for local and organic food suppliers.

“Agriculture is important because that’s the only way to establish [systems] that will help the local economy and feed healthy food to the local community. It’s part of the whole movement towards more local economies worldwide,” said Emil Dimantchev, a junior Mathematical Economics major and Rockies researcher.

Kolbe shared Dimantchev’s vision of a more sustainable direction for agriculture in the Rockies. 

“Ideally, the future of the Rockies is in diverse farming initiatives: grain fed beef, heritage varieties of crops,” he said. “Small farms are growing, but the policies in place don’t support that kind of agriculture.”

Indeed, the Report Card touches on many of the existing policies and statistics that highlight the nature of the conventional agricultural industry that continues to dominate in the Rockies. 

“Rockies agriculture is highly based around the dairy and beef industries,” Kolbe said. “In every state of the Rockies, beef or dairy is the highest grossing product, and that’s made possible by imports of grain from the Midwest, so we’re dependent on federal policy and national production to continue that industry as it stands.”

However, farm structures in the Rockies region are somewhat different than farms in other regions. Because of the region’s overall aridity, average farm size tends to be geographically larger than in the Midwest and California, the other principal agricultural regions of the country. More land is needed to supply the same level of productivity possible in wetter regions.

In addition to larger farm size and a gradual movement towards organic and small farms, there is also a substantial concentration of other alternatives to factory farm practices in the Rockies. 

“The organization of farms in the Rockies, in terms of size and ownership, is different. We have 70 percent of all the nation’s coops, institutional, and trust farm acres,” Kolbe said.

In addition to its purely educational component, the Rockies project is an opportunity for CC student researchers to gain valuable research experience, report on their findings, and engage the community as a whole.

“It’s rare for students to get the opportunity to publish as an undergraduate. This is widely circulated and the research techniques and organization required and learned is useful going into senior year and working on projects. Being accountable to more than yourself and a teacher for what’s in it is something students aren’t used to,” Kolbe said. “Plus, it’s a good way for CC students to see places outside of Vail and the Wilderness Areas -- blue collar places.”

Russell Clarke, a senior Economics major, agreed.

“Being a State of the Rockies researcher was a combination of being a researcher, a student, and being a citizen of the Rockies region,” he said, “It was a great learning experience where you can build upon your existing knowledge and create a product that can be enjoyed by members of the Rockies region.”

Wick shared Clarke’s enthusiasm. 

“Being a Rockies student researcher was a lot of hard work, but it was also extremely rewarding. We would spend hours poring over data spreadsheets and sometimes it felt like the work would never be done, but the result was detailed, data-driven findings that we could be proud of,” she said. 

Field trips are a substantial component of the Rockies research experience, and student researchers have many opportunities to meet with both experts in their field and with the everyday people whose lives they are studying.

According to Clarke, the most rewarding part of the experience was talking to people in the field who put a face to the research topics. 

“It was great to talk to the farmers and ranchers whom make up the statistics seen on a screen, but whom each have their own individual story,” he said. 

Wicke in particular was strongly impacted by a trip to the Southwestern portion of the Rockies region. The time included field trips and a week-long road trip visiting farmers and ranchers from southern Colorado to Arizona.

“It was fascinating to learn about the histories of American Indian and Latino agriculture in the Southwest, because it often seems like mainstream American nostalgia or collective memory somehow skips over the influence that these groups have had for centuries,” she said. “Especially in light of recent rhetoric on immigration policy, I think that the long history of Latino settlement in the Southwest should be emphasized more in public education.”

In their ongoing effort to engage both the CC campus and the greater Rockies community, the members of the Rockies project encourage their CC peers of all majors to get involved in the project by applying for research positions in future years, submitting photos to the photo contest, or by learning more about the subject of research.

“It’s rare for people our age to have jobs where we are constantly learning so I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to learn new things every day about agriculture, society and history in the Rockies,” Clarke said.