I made significant progress on my informal interviews this week. I will be interviewing individuals from four groups of people: farmers, community stakeholders, non-farming landowners, and solar developers. I created sets of questions for community stakeholder interviews and farmer interviews and worked with my supervisor, Barb, and my mentor, T, to revise them. I continued to identify farmers to interview and I contacted those farmers to request interviews. I also completed two community stakeholder interviews this week. Finally, I used input from T and Barb to identify non-farming landowners and solar developers to interview.
One key success this week was in project management. I developed a spreadsheet as an organization system for my interviews last week, and this week I populated the spreadsheet with contact information and details about each farm visit, community stakeholder interview, developer interview, and landowner interview. That table is included below, with interviewees’ personal information hidden for privacy. I am frequently updating the table as I schedule a time for each interview, and it is shared with T and Barb from CCE Tioga so that we can all stay on the same page about the interviews. This spreadsheet allows me to visualize all of my interviews together and avoid double-booking interviews. I am able to track my progress on my summer project through this tool.
Overall, the main focus of this week was planning for and scheduling interviews. I was also able to update several groups of people who support me in this project about my progress. I attended and gave a project update at the CCE Tioga Board meeting, the CCE Tioga all-staff meeting, and the regional Agriculture and Solar Initiatives group meeting. I look forward to getting out in the field to visit farms in Tioga County in the coming weeks!
