Land Use and Stewardship


Preamble and statement of commitment


Earlham owns extensive properties in Wayne County and nearby counties. For purposes of this report, we define four property categories:

  • Main Campus: College-owned property from the College houses on the north side of National Road to the south side of the football field, and from the boundary of the Earlham Cemetery on the west to the west side of College Avenue on the east.
  • Back Campus: approximately 115 acres of property defined as the region south of the football stadium to the south edge of the horse pastures, to the edge of Earlham's woods on the west and including "Brick City" on the east.
  • Forested Properties: a number of separate properties that are covered with mature forest vegetation.
  • Earlham Farm: all Earlham property owned south of the current horse pastures, excluding Miller Farm and its immediate surroundings. This land includes a 420 acre commercial farm as well as some extensive forests.

Because each of these categories involves different uses, the environmental impacts and opportunities for improvement vary for each category.

What Earlham has done and is doing about its land use stewardship on the Main Campus


The main campus is the most heavily populated and utilized land area at Earlham as well as a "show place" meant to please employees, students, and prospective students and their families. There are some important environmental issues that revolve around lawn care and maintenance, and landscape plantings and their care.

Relative to most other institutions, Earlham takes a minimalist approach to the use of biocides and fertilizers on lawns. The College contracts with a commercial lawn care company which applies broad-leaf and pre-emergent crabgrass herbicides along with fertilizer once a year. This application occurs during spring break when the campus population is much reduced and when these pesticides (particularly the pre-emergent crabgrass herbicide) are most effective. The goal is weed management, not a weed-free lawn. This sort of weed management also reduces the need for frequent mowing, a major contributor to greenhouse gasses.

Herbicides are applied to athletic fields more frequently than to lawns because weeds can cause uneven playing surfaces and pose an injury hazard to athletes. Insecticides are applied in order to control grubs to reduce mole burrows.

From an environmental standpoint, maintaining vast expanses of lawn and landscapeplantings that require intensive management and care is not ecologically sustainable. Maintaining such an artificial landscape involves fossil fuel use which contributes to global climate change. The runoff from biocides and fertilizers cause environmental pollution and may pose a risk to members of the community.

Another environmental problem has to do with the species composition of the landscape plantings on front campus. Many non-native plants have been routinely cultivated in landscape plantings in America in the past. New non-native species are regularly introduced from overseas. Many of these species escape cultivation and become established in the wild. This is particularly true of many berry-producing shrubs whose fruits are eaten by birds which disseminate their seeds. Being non-native, these plant species are relatively free from predators and disease agents adapted to attack them, and so their populations grow rapidly, often with negative impacts on native species. Next to habitat destruction and fragmentation, ecologists identify invasive species as the second most severe threat to sustaining biodiversity on this planet.

 

What Earlham has done and is doing about its land use stewardship on Back Campus

The back campus area is used intensively for a variety of purposes. The land contains tennis courts, athletic fields, the equestrian program (stables, indoor arena, and pastures), the astronomical observatory of the Physics Department, two challenge education facilities (the "high ropes" and "low ropes" areas), Norwich Lodge Conference Center, and an actively-managed and heavily-used biological reserve containing abandoned old fields, forest segments of various age, a reconstructed tall-grass prairie, and two ponds.

The varied-use pattern on back campus is not likely to change in the near future, though some of these uses are in conflict. One problem is the eutrophication of the two ponds by fertilizer runoff from the playing fields (Teale Pond) and manure runoff from the equestrian area (Garner Pond). Within the last five years this nutrient loading has led to fish die-offs in both ponds and thick layers of duckweed scum on the surface of both ponds during the summer and fall.

Invasive species are another issue in the back campus area. Much of the area is overrun by very dense and mature honeysuckle (Lonicera maakii and Lonicera x bella) populations.

 

What Earlham has done and is doing about its land use stewardship on Forested Properties

Earlham College owns a number of separate properties that are covered with mature forest vegetation. Parts of the Earlham Farm contain mature forest, and there are two never-ploughed upland forest fragments on the west side of the Earlham Farm that total about 20 acres. The approximately 100 acre forest along the Whitewater River floodplain south of the Richmond Sanitary District Sewage Treatment Plant is ecologically quite significant in our region for being a relatively undisturbed old-growth floodplain forest.

Earlham also owns several properties that have been donated to the College as nature reserves. Cring Woods in Jay County near Portland, Indiana is a 60 acre old-growth forest that includes the largest known swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor) in the state of Indiana.

Within Wayne County the College owns the following nature areas:

Sedgwick's Rock Preserve (donated in 1973), a 13 acre old-growth forest containing some rare calciphilic (calcium-loving) herbs on unusual geological formations. The preserve also has a relatively oligotrophic (unpolluted) small stream flowing through the property.

  • Wildman Woods (donated in 1990), is a 40 acre forest containing old growth and younger successional forest segments. It also contains small creeks. This property is an integral part of the largest continuously forested area in the region.
  • Test Biological Reserve (donated in 2001), is a 100 acre property containing an 18 acre forest that has been selectively logged but never plowed, including 3 acres of marshy wetlands and a segment of the Nolands Fork of the Whitewater River. Most of this property is currently in farmland which will be slowly developed into a variety of natural ecosystems in the future.
  • Reller Woods (donated in 2003), is a 28 acre late successional forest noted for its spring-ephemeral wildflowers.

Many species of organisms, particularly those adapted to successionally mature (i.e. old-growth) ecosystems, are declining due to habitat destruction and fragmentation. The current biodiversity crisis is among the most pressing and vexing environmental problems we face today. The College must remain mindful that its forest holdings are ecologically significant regionally as biodiversity reserves for these old-growth species. In the foreseeable future, disturbed forest fragments will likely remain common over the landscape, but undisturbed forests will likely remain rare and may even become rarer. As an educational institution committed to teaching environmental science and promoting more sustainable living practices including those that seek to maintain biodiversity, the College is committed to maintaining these reserves in their natural old-growth state.

What Earlham has done and is doing about its land use stewardship on the Earlham Farm

The 420 acre Earlham commercial farm is a fairly conventional farm typical of the Midwest. The farm is leased to and operated by a local farmer who, for the most part, employs conventional farming technology and practices. The majority of the land is used to raise a yearly corn crop. There is some rotation with soybeans and occasionally wheat is raised on some of the land. Conventional tillage is employed over most of the land to discourage weed growth. No-till farming is used 50% of the time with soybeans crops. Some fields are plowed in the fall, making soil more erodible. The most erodible areas have been planted with grass or wheat filter strips.

In the past, pest control was accomplished by frequent tillage and application of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. Recently, Bt corn has been planted to control root borers, lessening the application of insecticides and reducing tillage frequency. Use of Round-Up-ready soybeans allows use of Round-Up, a non-persistent, less environmentally detrimental herbicide. Conventional ammonia (for nitrogen) and phosphorous supplements are used for fertilizer. Sewage sludge from the nearby treatment plant is applied and tilled in approximately every five years, reducing landfill waste.

During the fall of 2007, students writing in The Earlham Active and The Earlham Word raised objections to dumping practices on College property adjacent to Miller Farm. This site has been in existence for, we believe, 50 years or more. Now secured by a fence and locked gate, the area had been used by the College to dispose of organic waste (leaves, tree limbs, grass clippings) from campus as well as dirt, rocks, and raw brick and concrete. Rather than transport this material to a specialty construction waste landfill, Earlham believed it to be environmentally responsible to let this material decompose naturally on its own property.

In more recent years Earlham had allowed contractors to discard waste materials from College improvement and maintenance projects at the site. The College had instructed contractors to place only “clean waste,” in accordance with Indiana solid waste disposal regulations (329IAC 30-3-1). However, other materials have been observed at the site. Earlham’s Environmental Responsibility Committee, working with Director of Facilities Alan Bigger, invited officials from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) to visit the site and offer recommendations.

Following the site visit by officials from IDEM’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Technical Assistance in November 2007, the Environmental Responsibility Committee reviewed IDEM’s recommendations, approved a response plan and shared IDEM’s response with the campus. The Committee’s plan, announced in February 2008, includes:

  • cleaning up the site and removing items excluded by IDEM,
  • applying for a yard waste permit from the state of Indiana,
  • enhancing the existing composting program at Miller Farm,
  • continuing to maintain positive control over the site by more closely monitoring its use, and
  • continuing to use the site for materials allowed by IDEM.

In addition, the Committee anticipates working with Earlham educators and scientists to design ongoing student-faculty research to monitor water quality in areas surrounding the site.