This weekend, we had the pleasure of hosting 3 students from the Scan Design Fellowship Program through the University of Wisconsin – Madison. This program is designed to foster Danish American relations by providing support through scholarships and cultural activities to undergraduate and graduate students in all majors who have been accepted to study abroad. The students, coming from the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, visited Driftless Curiosity to learn about small-scale organic agriculture, including Amish agriculture, on Saturday and maple syrup production on Sunday. We created a custom program for the group which included farm tours, planting kohlrabi with the vacuum seeder, measuring the temperature of the compost pile, feeding the sheep, and eye-opening visits to the Amish businesses, Morning Star Produce and Hidden Springs Produce, where they got to see their ice room for refrigeration, as well as the process of shoeing a horse. On Sunday, they returned for a hike to the sugarbush, where they worked together to start a fire to get the boiler going, tapped a tree, and filtered sap. Back at the farm kitchen, they learned about the Brix scale, boiling point elevation, monitoring syrup temperatures, and hot packing finished syrup. There were a lot of firsts this weekend and these guys had the best questions! Curiosity was definitely in the air, and it is always a joy to host groups who ask lots of questions and are eager to participate. We had so much fun and look forward to working with the Scan Design Fellowship Program in the future. I’m so thankful to the program coordinator, Angie Hubbard, for reaching out to us and co-creating this amazing weekend.
~Joy
