Farming for the Future

The Olney Friends School all-student farm program, farming smart for the future:

1. Farming for the future will protect and create healthy soil:

Define what healthy soil is;
Recognize the agricultural practices that enhance/protect healthy soil and those that ruin healthy soil;
Learn how long it takes to develop soil and how fast we are losing it now;
Classroom projects: Environmental Science soil unit/lab of double digging;
Chemistry soil testing;
Humanities 10 while digging potatoes talk about soil, plowing on contour, winter cover crops;
Humanities 12 while planting tulips and herbs talk about soil, compost;
Humanities 11 while harvesting buckwheat talk about soil.

2. Smart farming uses much less petroleum (has a much lower carbon footprint):

Compare petroleum used in organic, local, and conventional foods.
For every meal a person can eat locally, 16 barrels or 672 gallons of oil are saved. So if we were able to have one all-local meal a week, Olney Friends School would save 2,419,200 gallons of oil.
Kitchen and farm staff making announcements about farm/local ingredients at the noon meal, at Morning Collection, and printing asterisks on the menu to designate farm/local items.
Humanities 12 studies industrialization of food, tours big chicken farm vs. Olney’s chickens, reads Michael Pollen’s chapter on tulips, plants tulips.
ELL class helps to take care of pigs.
Whenever possible, have classes plant and harvest our vegetables and fruit and take care of animals for our meat and eggs.

3. Smart farming grows healthy food:

Eating more vegetables and food without toxins, meat, milk and eggs from grass-fed animals improves heart health and decreases chance of diabetes and problems associated with obesity.
Health class project, reinforced with food bulletin board and announcements.
Further increase the number of fresh green vegetable and whole-grain choices available.

4. Farming for the future uses non-GMO genetically diverse varieties saved and selected for our locale:

Humanities 10 reads potato chapter in Michael Pollen’s Botany of Desire; digs potatoes; taste-tests potato varieties.
Humanities 10 grows early American dinner of beans, corn, pumpkin (uses heirloom varieties).
Humanities 9 focuses on apples (collect, make cider, make apple butter, observe/taste wild apples and varieties of developed apples).
Humanities 11 plants, harvests, and cooks buckwheat and barley with honey.
Humanities 9 plants, harvests, and cooks a victory garden.
Farm grows non-GMO heirloom grains (buckwheat, hard spring wheat, corn, rye, oats) for kitchen use and for chicken/hog feed.
Farm saves seed and selects seed that excels in our location: field peas (nitrogen-fixing green manure crop and dried peas), field corn (from genetically diverse non-GMO strain), other grains (rye, wheat, and oats); 9 types of dried beans.

5. Healthy low-carbon footprint meat is based on grass-fed animals:

Celebrate school beef in announcements; give out relevant facts.
School farm raises all beef used at school, most of pork.
Support local agriculture businesses/economy (feed store, butcher shop).
Enjoy eggs from free-range chickens (on hiatus 2011-2012); meat from free-range chickens fed locally grown feed.

6. How/what to grow in your own individual garden: grow vegetables in a small, beautiful way that provides significant calories.

The Quadrangle and Sunnyside gardens, adjacent to the Main Building: Use as demonstration gardens, and also as a site for Meeting for Worship and general hangout areas.
Conceptual Physics class uses garden tools in simple tools section.
Humanities, Environmental Science, and Chemistry classes use nearby gardens as needed.
Art class uses for inspiration, paints furniture and/or signs.
Geometry class figures out areas of beds and vegetables that can be grown there.

7. Improve/educate students’ palates.

Guest chefs use our own ingredients.
Taste tests when we have lots of varieties of any particular vegetable/fruit, for example the apple taste testing and celebration of our orchard.
At every opportunity, train palate to taste differences and enjoy foods without salt, butter, or sugar.
Work to get community buy-in on having vegetables in season. Celebrate first and last harvests (e.g., lots of summer squash in summer, lots of kale in winter, not same vegetables year round).
Identify names of many vegetables in Spanish and ELL classes.
Welcome and encourage vegetable recipes and types from native countries.
Ask for student input in planning seed order.

8. At every opportunity, teach responsibility as consumer to support smart agriculture.

Eating local vegetables in season reduces carbon footprint, because little transportation, processing, and storage costs.
Eating vegetables (e.g., winter squash, potatoes, root vegetables) that can be stored in root cellar saves processing costs and electricity.

9. At every opportunity, teach how to work in a team.

10. At every opportunity, teach how to use and take care of tools.

Have tool shed, with oil, linseed, rags, sharpening tools, labeled hanging places.
Buy more and better-quality tools.
Have tool training “certification” before allowed to use tools; give certificate.