MEMO

Date: November 10, 2010

To: Santa Clause

From: Marti Hoekstra, Victoria Albers, Ashley Abernathey

Subject: Antibiotic Resistance in Farming

Introduction

The goal of our project is to provide education about modern agriculture and whether or not it contributes to antibiotic resistance. Our project entitled, “Antibiotic Use in Conventional and Organic Farming” focuses on the differences between conventional and organic farming. We have been working to collect information from organic farmers to get their perception on the issue. We obtained data through two email interviews. Our group also conducted an interview with a barn nutritionist at NDSU to get his perspective on antibiotic use in farm animals. Our project will explore the differences between these two types of farming and how each type makes an impact on antibiotic resistance.

Work Completed

Our proposal for our project was complete by Monday, September 27th which consisted of our original plan and goals for our project. We aimed to have our interviews collected from our organic farmers by Friday, October 8th. This date had to be adjusted due to their busy harvest time. We sent off the interview questions the first week in October, but were unable to receive them until 2 weeks after our planned goal. We just adjusted our schedule to fit these needs as harvest times obviously cannot be helped! Our interview with the barn nutritionist was collected by this date falling right into schedule. Our bibliography was complete including 30 sources (10 sources for each group member) by Monday, October 18th.

Work Scheduled

Our next plan for action is to combine all of the data we have collected so far and make it into an organized paper form. We will analyze the information from our interviews so that it can be used in our final sources. We are currently working on an outline of our first draft which our goal is to have done by the end of next week (Friday, November 19th). We will continue to meet weekly to get this done in a timely fashion. We will then be able to finalize this draft to turn in by the 24th. The due date for final submission is Friday, December 3rd and our portfolio is finally due Monday, December 13th.

To supplement our paper, we would like to do an interview with a conventional farmer through email, time permitting. To do this, we will need to make a list of questions and get it emailed to the farmer. If we don’t get it sent out and completed by Wednesday, Nov. 17 we will disregard this idea.

Conclusion

We believe our group so far has done an excellent job at staying organized and on the schedule of deadlines. The work our group has produced has been outstanding thus far. We have kept our communication open and have been able to work out meeting times to accomplish our tasks. We will continue to produce high quality work beating all deadlines provided.