The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Dagny Okafor a grant to cross-check a community garden's compost-bin thermometer against a laboratory-calibrated reference and to write the checking routine into the roster.
A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant has Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Dagny Okafor logging the reading beside a laboratory reference at every working bee
A community garden’s compost bin runs hot enough to kill weed seeds only if someone can say, with any confidence, what temperature it has actually reached. At the garden the University has adopted for its newest funded project, that number has come from one stick thermometer, pushed in by whichever volunteer arrives first on a Sunday, and read against a scale nobody has checked since the thermometer was bought. The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund is paying to find out whether it still agrees with anything.
The grant funds a season of paired readings: the garden’s own thermometer beside a laboratory-calibrated reference probe, logged at every Sunday working bee, with the gap between the two written down rather than assumed away. Where the readings diverge past a set threshold, the garden’s thermometer is recalibrated or replaced. The monthly cross-check then becomes a standing line on the roster, not a project that ends when the grant does.
A reading nobody has ever checked against anything else isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just a story the garden has agreed to believe.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
Co-grantee Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, called the compost bin “a smaller version of every instrument I usually spend my time on: nobody plans to stop checking it, and then several years go by.”
The School of Continuous Improvement counts the bin among the least glamorous instruments its stewardship agenda has reached, and among the more useful for saying what the agenda is actually for. The grant is $219,436, awarded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Checking a Community Garden's Compost Thermometer Against a Laboratory Standard · $219,436 · awarded to Osei Vandermeer , Dagny Okafor