NI Green Team
The National Instruments Green Team is an all-volunteer internal organization at NI headquarters that works to reduce the ecological footprint of NI and its employees. The team, established in 2008, worked on many projects in 2011 that helped NI in its commitment to be a responsible citizen to the global community. Two of these projects are highlighted here.
Community-Supported Agriculture Pickup Station
The Green Team worked with Johnson’s Backyard Garden, a local, organic farm, to establish a community-supported agriculture (CSA) pickup station at NI headquarters. When employees subscribe to the farm’s CSA, they pay a fee to receive regular boxes of goods, usually produced by the farm. The challenge is that subscribers usually must drive to the farm to pick up their boxes, and the farms aren’t always conveniently located. Because there is a pickup station at headquarters, employees who subscribe can retrieve their produce each Thursday before leaving work.
Earth Week
The third annual Earth Week celebration at headquarters was the most highly attended yet, with hundreds of employees participating. Events included a cooking contest, a trash-to-treasure event at which employees could take items that their coworkers no longer wanted, a presentation by the farmer who founded the Digital Farm Collective, and a go-local fair featuring a variety of Austin-area vendors. Employees could also participate in activities on their own, such as pledging to eat at least one vegetarian meal and taking public transportation to work one day that week.
Organic Gardening at Work
Brittany Wilson, Corporate Content Specialist
Brittany initially joined the NI community garden effort in purely a support role after hearing a few apartment-dwelling coworkers talk about the long waitlists at community gardens around Austin. “I had no intention of doing any actual gardening based on a failed backyard experiment with a Topsy Turvy tomato planter,” she said.
However, after two months of helping to prepare the garden site, including manual labor such as transplanting native grasses and obliterating non-native invasive grasses from the garden site, she found herself extremely invested in the NI community garden and planted her first plot of summer vegetables and herbs.
She says that while she hasn’t seen any bumper crops or drastically lowered her grocery bill, she’s more active and feels healthier because of the labor she puts into maintaining the garden.
“I’m excited to keep working in the garden because I know that as the collective knowledge of the NI gardeners increases, the community aspect and the output of the garden will really start to thrive,” Brittany said.
Michael McNichol
IE at National Instruments
NI Manufacturing Engineer Michael McNichol wanted his family to live in an eco-friendly home, so he built one himself from the ground up. He bought a vacant lot, and three years later he had built an energy-efficient house complete with a small organic garden and other personal touches such as a pond made from a repurposed stock tank. He and his wife used recycled materials whenever possible.
To build a fence, for example, Mike used an old tin roof that a friend was throwing away. His backyard was initially filled with decomposed granite, but when a neighbor bought too much sod, Mike took some of it to build a small lawn where he can play catch with his son.
“You don't need a lot of money to make your microenvironment something that you enjoy,” he said.
Mike’s work was featured on a local television program in 2011 as the Garden of the Week. You can view the video here.