Why do science in the middle of nowhere?

December 17, 2023 9:29 AM

You are a scientist in a work of fiction. What kind of research are you doing? More below the fold.

You are paying a farmer to let you live in his house with him and his family for several months while you conduct some type of research which requires you to be present at the extremely remote location where the farm is situated, a very great distance from any city and from the university where you are employed. It’s something other than astonomy, a type of research where it may be helpful specifically to be residing with a farmer and which requires you to be awake during the day. It probably involves diddling around with small objects, rather than livestock - you are spending a lot of time in your room testing samples or whatever and doing math etc etc etc, and are also spending a lot of time outside doing whatever you need to do to get the raw data/objects to test for your research. You also help the farmer with his work from time to time as a courtesy/as part of the payment for the fact that he is letting you stay in his home, but the research is something of a type where you aren’t necessarily hanging out with the farmer all the time every day.

What type of research are you doing, which might be fun for a reader to read about during the portions of the story which don’t involve stuff like solving crimes?

posted by Whale Oil to Science & Nature (31 answers total)

You're searching the farmer's dirt for bacteria that produce novel, effective antibiotics. It's a thing that microbiologists do.
posted by alex1965 at 9:35 AM on December 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

Biologist observing a species? I know someone who does this for salmon in rural Northern California. They travel around different waterways counting fish and trying to estimate population health. Sometimes snorkeling and diving is involved. They’re employed by the Department of Fish and Game.
posted by migurski at 9:35 AM on December 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Archaeology? Maybe there's a dig on the farmer's land?
posted by Sauce Trough at 9:46 AM on December 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

There's a mineral present in local soils that you believe may be essential to formulating a radically more efficient (higher stored energy to weight ratio) battery or say a room-temperature super-conductor, and it's additionally helpful for experimentation to be in a barn in a remote area so human source RF and electro-magnetism is at a minimum.
posted by MattD at 9:52 AM on December 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Some kind of botany or soil science seems belivable. Like studying a rare type of plant that only grows in streams in that valley, say, or collecting soil samples from the ridges where the sheep are grazing.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:54 AM on December 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Looking for insects other than dung beetles who use the milky way to navigate?
posted by underclocked at 9:55 AM on December 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Along the same lines as alex1965, you could be cultivating/identifying rare types of cellular slime mold that had been found only in the soil there and were too delicate to be shipped in soil samples. You'd need an autoclave and maybe a fume hood or something that could be rigged appropriately. (Do dairy farmers have sterilization needs? Maybe a kiln and an extra kitchen hood would do?) You could run macro-level experiments in the house or barn or field/forest, then do protein purification and/or PCR in the kitchen and send samples off for sequencing. Oh, or store in a deep freezer until you left. Bring a few months of media/supplies for your petri dishes or have them shipped.
posted by unknowncommand at 10:02 AM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Rocky Mountain Biological Labs is very, very remote if you want to borrow from existing research, such as pollination, wildflowers, and more. A scientist could easily stay with a local farmer there to have some buffer with residential grad students.
posted by childofTethys at 10:03 AM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

You're minutely examining core soil samples, to prove that there was indeed a toxic chemical plant on that site many decades ago, though the township vehemently denies it, as do the farmers.
posted by BostonTerrier at 10:16 AM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was on a project back in the 80s, doing a study on re-certifying a pesticide. We took dogs into sprayed fields to look for birds that might have been killed by the application. Many of our people, and the dogs, lived in an old farmhouse. Lots of testing going on. Dogs' blood had to be tested, etc.
posted by Windopaene at 10:20 AM on December 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I like all these answers so far, glad to have some ideas to read up on in detail/google so that I don't have something wildly implausible for the character to be working on.
posted by Whale Oil at 11:03 AM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

You are near Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, discovering new fossils from the pre-Cambrian era. Outdoor field work is weather dependent: if the seas are too rough you cannot safely go about chipping rocks. Those days you're back at the farm tweezering and dental drilling the over-burden to reveal your specimens . . . and writing up your field notes.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:05 AM on December 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

There's a plant pathogen that's increasing in significance. You are tracking the movements of the farmer, his tools, his equipment, air currents, etc. to try to figure out the dominant mode of transmission. You are also checking for mutations.
posted by amtho at 11:23 AM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Slightly askew, but perhaps there is an ancient cave complex nearby and you are recording and taking minute samples of the paleolithic art?
posted by praemunire at 12:33 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Green Bank Observatory is in the middle of the national Quiet Zone. I realize that a lot of radio astronomy can be performed remotely, but there are astronomers stationed there, and there could also be scientists doing science on the radio telescopes themselves (rather than through them).
posted by adamrice at 12:59 PM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

It would make sense for the scientist to be studying the effect of some aspect of farming or ranching practices on some part of the ecosystem. Maybe the owner of this farm (which I'm actually picturing as a sheep or cattle ranch in Montana or Wyoming) has implemented some type of grazing management that is intended to encourage healthier growth of native plants or prevent erosion. Or maybe he's raising buffalo or elk or some exotic antelope species. The scientist wants to study how what's being done on that particular farm is affecting the types and numbers of mammals or birds or insects or native grasses or soil bacteria. Maybe he's comparing this farm to a neighboring one with more traditional practices or to nearby ungrazed land. He could be studying the impact to one specific species like sage grouse or a rare butterfly or he could be looking at something broader like numbers and breeding success of all bird species.

If you want the farmer and the scientist to have a good relationship, the farmer is doing something the scientist feels is beneficial and the scientist's work is proving just how beneficial it is. If you want them to have a strained relationship, the scientist's work is showing that this farm has more erosion or less wildlife than a neighboring conserved area or farm with better management practices.
posted by Redstart at 1:25 PM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Margaret Atwood spent large parts of her childhood in the wilder parts of Quebec because her father was an entomologist (however, they didn’t even live on a farm). She has said that bears didn’t scare her but flush toilets freaked her out.
posted by Phanx at 1:42 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

You also need to explain how this scientist knows enough to be useful labor on a farm. Maybe they grew up on a similar farm/ranch? If it’s a small, potentially organic farm, those need a lot more hand labor, but some rando is not going to be helpful in a lot of commercial-scale agriculture. (I’m a scientist trained in another discipline who works in ag now and I still kinda suck at farm work despite having previously worked a growing season on a small organic farm and gardening a lot. It’s all skilled labor!)
posted by momus_window at 1:56 PM on December 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Your guy is researching some aspect of wheat (maybe a rare allergen absent in some old varieties) in an area of old farms (where there are early wheat varieties hanging as on as 'weeds' or as small crops).

Some of The Land Institute's work looks like this - plenty of scope for finding unanswered questions there too. This would also enable your character to maintain credibility and reduce their chances of being caught 'where they shouldn't be'. In my experience many ag researcher types have an outdoors /farm background.
posted by unearthed at 2:11 PM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

An institution we work with actually rented an old and remote house on the beach for a team to do various marine research projects. researching specific marine related things might fit your bill. Eg, measuring tidal flow over time, my SO will know exactly the sort of thing, if you want me to ask.

Specific to farming, we did some work with miniature vessels containing cow shit that required fresh samples on the regular. We were looking at methane production using anaerobic digestion. The next stage was to do a mini digester on one or more real farms. This would have been open to whichever farmer would have been up for letting us build one on site. The farmer would be responsible for the collecting and dumping manure into the digester, the researcher could easily be justified as spending time in their room testing samples for bacterial population against, for example, different levels of mixing and CH4 production.
posted by biffa at 3:45 PM on December 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Geologist studying ground water? Out digging and sampling from boreholes, indoors testing samples. I have a friend who’s done this in a wide variety of places around the world.
posted by penguin pie at 4:06 PM on December 17, 2023

Put your scientist near a creek or small lake for some reason. There's so much interesting stuff going near (wildlife), under (algae, tadpoles, turtles, fish, sunken treasure!) or on (neat insects!) the water that you'll have lots of opportunity to keep readers interested.
posted by dws at 4:46 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I happen to know a few specific examples of archaeological work that happened on farms:

- The remains of the Steamboat Malta was discovered, buried, in the middle of a cornfield quite recently. (2nd article.) The steamboat sank in the 1800s, the area silted in and buried the steamboat and all its treasure etc, the Missouri River changed its course, and the former riverbed (with the sunken steamboat embedded in it) became part of the rich river bottoms that later became a farm. The location was excavated enough to confirm it is the location of the wreck, but the complete excavation remains to be done.

- The Steamboat Arabia was discovered in similar fashion. It was completely excavated and the results displayed in a museum now.

- The Gumbo Point archeological site, the Plattner Site, and the Utz Site all are significant Native American archaeological sites located on current (or in one case, former) farms along the Missouri River - in fact, in the same general area. So you could imagine an archaeologist working on one of or perhaps all of those sites, and living with a farmer who owns one of the sites.

- Missouri's only dinosaur fossils were found in an isolated ravine on a family farm. Another source - though note that the exact location shown on the map is not the location of the excavation site. (More paleontology than archaeology I guess.)

The thing that maybe isn't totally realistic to your scenario for any of these is, that most archaeological & paleontological digs are not done by a lone researcher. They will bring in a whole team, usually something associated with a university, with various student helpers, people hired to help, scientists leading the effort, etc.

But all the sites mentioned above are quirky enough that you could imagine some lone researcher personally obsessed with them, working to personally excavate or do enough research on the site to justify research funding to bring a larger team in later etc. In particular the steamboat excavators are a quirky bunch and tend to spend a lot of time tramping around fields, examining satellite maps, historic records etc etc etc trying to nail down where one shipwreck or another is located. Then once one has been (possibly) located, there are trial excavations etc etc etc, sometimes leading to a more complete excavation in the end, and sometimes not.

The Hawleys, who discovered the two buried steamboats mentioned above along with a bunch more, are complete nuts in the best possible way. So they could potentially be models for an interesting character. Greg Hawley, David Hawley, Hawleys' excavation story.
posted by flug at 6:34 PM on December 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

I grew up in the Serengeti because my dad was a field biologist studying birds. Several-day camping trips out to catch birds in mist nets, record data about them, band and release them, measuring various things about the grasslands in which they were caught, back to the house to crunch data.

Other scientists on the station at the time studied lions (following them in a Land Rover all night) and grasslands (although I don’t know any details on that one).
posted by telophase at 6:54 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

fyi some of these are only done in teams, even by quirky scientists with little funding. Echoing flug, these days archaeology, for instance, is not done by one person alone. Always done by a group of people, and they would also be bagging up the samples to process elsewhere rather than analyzing them in a room in the farm.

I also suspect several of the other field sciences would also involve taking samples away to analyze... So you should think of a science where the samples have to be looked at immediately and don't need fancy equipment, or the data is written down in some way. The field biologist who catches birds, releases them, and only takes back notes to analyze, for instance.
posted by EllaEm at 9:03 PM on December 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it doesn't seem very realistic to have much in the way of sample analysis being done in a farmhouse bedroom. If you really want the scientist to spend a lot of time working in their room, maybe they should be studying insects. Maybe they need to ID a lot of small insects and they bring them back to their room where they can look at them under a dissecting scope and consult their identification books.
posted by Redstart at 9:47 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

You are studying bees, and which flowers they visit over time, and how it effects their honey. You are doing this to try to match a honey sample from an archeological dig.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:15 AM on December 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

You could be operating a drone to collect data over a wide area, for measuring deforestation, regrowth after a fire, methane levels, natural or unnatural radiation from ground sources, wildlife counts, seasonal variations in albedo, etc. The bench time could be spent maintaining the drone, tinkering with instruments, and charging batteries.
posted by cardboard at 9:06 AM on December 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not quite what you’re asking for, but so close I think you would enjoy watching the Norwegian movie “Kitchen stories”. In the 1950s, a team of Swedish researchers plans to revolutionize the home kitchen. After observing the modern housewife, they set their sights on typical bachelors. Scientist Folke (Tomas Norström) is sent to a rural Norwegian town, where he tracks the kitchen behavior of odd single man Isak (Joachim Calmeyer). Folke is under strict orders to avoid personal interactions with his subject at all costs, but despite warnings from his superiors, he strikes up a strange camaraderie with Isak.
posted by meijusa at 11:41 AM on December 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's definitely a new kind of bug or insect not really observed or known before now. Your scientist is on it!
posted by bluedaisy at 12:52 PM on December 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

For inspiration, you could browse the careers of scientists from agricultural research institutes like Rothamsted.

I had a summer research assistant job once, working with entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) and entomopathogenic fungi (EPFs). The idea was to see if certain species of EPN or EPF could be used to combat harmful insects, like pine weevils, as an alternative to chemical methods.

Maybe once a week you'd go out and take samples of soil cores and bark from pine stumps and bring them back to the lab for testing. But the testing didn't require much equipment, and the lab was never that clean. You'd put your field materials into Falcon tubes and "bait" them with a larva at the top of the pile. Wait five days and dissect the larvae into a petri dish, and see if it's been infected.

I mostly remember endless days spent sitting at a microscope preparing nematode suspensions. Scrape down the length of an infected larva with the back of a scalpel and observe what spills out. Click with a mechanical tally counter to enumerate the EPNs. Aliquot into a test tube. Repeat for the next fifty larvae. There were bench experiments as well, to fill in the time between field trips. Like, how many EPNs do you need to spray on a log for it to be infested? Or how quickly can EPNs migrate through soils with different percentages of sand, or moisture? More dissections, more counting.

I suppose to make that more fun to read about, it might be set somewhere like a vineyard, or an olive or orange grove, with economic concerns about diseases like Xyllela fastidiosa affecting exports (a big deal for some developing countries). I don't know if EPNs would help with that one specifically, but I can see some research online on it, so maybe?
posted by rollick at 4:12 PM on December 18, 2023