Evergreen College - CELL

Over the past few days I visited the Center of Ecological Living and Learning (CELL) on the Campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The main campus of the college features many elements of green building, including LEED certified lecture and lab halls, an extensive recycling program, green roofs, native gardens and rainwater harvesting. The CELL Center is located away from the campus on the Evergreen Organic Farm and includes the production fields, orchards, the compost center, community gardens, a permaculture garden, a biodiesel shed, and a farm house. The farm area totals 5 acre: one acre in cultivated fields of annual vegetable, one acre in pasture, one acre in fruits and nuts. The remainder consists of various structures such as two large (90x30) and 3 smaller hoop houses for vegetable production as well as one heated and one unheated propagation greenhouse. The farm is run by a farm manager supported by several student farm aides as well as the faculty who is teaching the Practices in Sustainable Agriculture (PSA) Program.

The PSA program is where each of three quarters 25 students are trained in small scale, market farming. Besides the field production aspects students are instructed in farm planning and management, food preservation (canning and pickling), and marketing. For marketing students run a 23 member Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and a farm stand twice a week from April through October. Students can self select to be more involved in one of four areas: annual vegetables, fruits and nuts, permaculture perennials, or animals. The farm currently has layer eggs and layer ducks but broilers and pigs have been there in the past.

Besides PSA there are other academic programs making use of the farm, namely “Ecological Agriculture” and the “Food-Health-Sustainability" program. Having watched these agriculture programs at Evergreen for the last 20 years it seems that there is a strong move toward exploring the connections between food production, human nutrition, and the natural and social environment.

The strength of the agriculture programs at Evergreen lies in the fact that students can learn on the farm from spring through summer and fall. The students receive plenty of hand-on training in crop and animal production as well as marketing, farm planning and food preservation. At the same time there are many opportunities to explore the scientific, historical and social underpinnings of contemporary agriculture. All of this is supported by first rate faculty and farm staff. Another strength is the diversity of structures on the farm, including a farm classroom and kitchen, a heated greenhouse, a walk in cooler, and in the very near future a lab building with food grade labs equipment.

A weaknesses of agriculture at Evergreen is that until now there has not been a dedicated faculty for the farm training program which meant that farm operations and management are continuously changing, creating at times a chaotic work environment. The lack of adequate farm, and specifically tillage machinery, also is a limitation and a stress for soil quality. Finally the lack of control over several farm areas (which operate under student activities groups) severely limits the ability of the farm management to create a comprehensive plan for the entire Center of Ecological Living and Learning.

Based on my visit at Evergreen, I can see a number of changes in the near future for the LBCC Hort Program. We need a year round (including summer) program if we are going to teach students how to farm. We also need to strengthen the farm planning and marketing aspect. I also feel encouraged to keep pursuing a closer connection with LBCC’s Culinary Arts program to create an understanding in students for the entire food system and the connections between production, personal health and environmental sustainability.

I am very grateful for the stimulating exchanges of ideas I had with farm managers Melissa Barker and Stephen Bramwell as well as faculty Martha Rosemeyer, Steve Scheurell, David Muhleisen and my friend and Dean Paul Przybylowicz.

Horticulture at Cabrillo College

During my trip to the Santa Cruz area I visited the Horticulture Program at Cabrillo College and met with the Program Chair Peter Shaw. Since Peter was still teaching when I arrived I toured the facilities by myself and was just blown away. Horticulture has its own little kingdom on the upper campus overlooking the Monterrey Bay. The first building I encountered was the Environmental Horticulture Center Community Building which "houses a spacious lobby, community room, lecture classroom, faculty offices, a learning center/library and site of the future garden store." For hands-on teaching they have a Nursery center with state-of-the-art greenhouses, shade structures, hoop houses and a number of gardens. In the greenhouses I found various plant collections, which I later learned are some of the best in the world. Four beautifully designed botanic gardens are around the community and the nursery centers.

The program is also well staffed. Several full time and part time faculty supported by 2 teaching assistants, a nursery and garden curator and 8 student assistant teach about 150-200 individual students who take horticulture, crops and soils classes each semester. The program is financially well supported by the college but in addition to a normal operating budget they also have number of fundraising activities, which allows them to maintain and expand the facilities and create new learning opportunities.

Their Mother's day plant sale is a 3-day event grossing over $110,000!!!! (LBCC's is a $2000 event). A smaller poinsettia sale on Christmas gives them another few thousand dollars in their operating budget. They also run community lecture series each semester charging $40 for five lectures. This semester's topic is "Permaculture Design for Suburban Landscapes". In addition, they support their program with produce sale from their newly installed, organically certified market garden. Produce is sold to the college food service at whole sale prices but more profitably to a delicatessen store and at their own garden store. Soon community members and college staff will be able to check online what they have for sale.

This was quiet an amazing visit and I came back with many ideas I will implement over time at LBCC. In the short term, I can certainly see starting a volunteer program and a lecture series. I also feel that we could expand our produce sale to the community and run a larger plant sale once we have more greenhouse space.

I am looking forward to my next trip to the Ecological Agriculture Program and the Center for Ecological Living and Learning at Evergreen College.

LifeLab - UC Santa Cruz

I have long been interested in training K-12 teachers in sustainable food production and continue to serve as an adviser for the "Planting Seeds of Change" program at the Seven Oak Middle School in Lebanon, OR. It was therefor great to visit the LifeLab at UC Santa Cruz. It is a wonderful place and dedicated staff there have created the premier organization for outdoor science teacher training. They primarily work "directly with teachers to help them use school gardens and hands-on science programs effectively."

I met with the Executive Director, Gail Harlamoff, who showed me around the place and patiently answered my questions. LifeLab started over 30 years ago with a few elementary school teachers in Santa Cruz who believed in the value of school gardens. They pulled together some resources and started consulting and from there it just snowballed. Since then they were able to secure millions of grant dollars from the NSF and various foundations, train thousands of educators and enrich many, many children's education and lives. A grant from the Packard foundation allowed them to build the current LifeLab, housed on the UC Santa Cruz Campus. The experiential garden area is the cutest place I have seen in along time.

Gail and I talked much about how we can improve "food literacy". We shared stories about how food system illiterate many agriculture and culinary arts college students are and what could be done to improve that. That is of special importance to me as I am trying to connect my college's horticulture and culinary arts programs. LifeLab offers a garden-enhanced nutrition eduction program called "Plant it, Grow it, Eat it". It would be huge step if ag and culinary students could take or if I could duplicate it at LBCC. We talked about other ideas such as asking culinary students to create meals from what is available in a market garden at a particular time of the year.

Another program we talked about at length is called "Food What?" according to their website "a youth empowerment program using food, through sustainable agriculture and health, as the vehicle for bringing about personal growth and transformation.a program for teens". I was impressed with the gardens the teens managed and the stories Gail shared.

This was another great visit which will help me form my ideas for the educational experience I want to create.

CASFS - UC Santa Cruz

My first day on my first visit - it was awesome. The campus setting is just amazing - a huge area of wide open grass land savanna, conifer forests, and oak woodlands high above the Monterey Bay (click here for a video tour) . The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) I visited is a 25 acre site on the lower campus (pictured above). Ten acres are under cultivation, 5 acres in annual row crops and 5 in fruit trees and other perennial crops. The farm and gardens of the center are used as a training area for undergraduate and graduate students, for teachers, and for new farmers. On this first day I was mostly interested in learning about the apprenticeship program in Ecological Horticulture which provides "training in the concepts and practices of organic gardening and small-scale farming." I went on tour with Jonathon Landeck, Assistant Director of the Center.

The apprenticeship program is a significant part of the Center's activities and has a total operating budget of over $700.000. Half of the budget comes from the tuition and sales and the other half has to be raised by the center staff from foundations and other donors. This effort allows the center to train 35-40 apprentices during a 6 month intensive training program. They receive usually more than 200 applications for those few spots. Serving as instructors and supervisors during 700 hours in the field are 2 farm managers, 3 site managers and 7 student mentors. 300 hours of formal education is done in part by the center staff but mostly by outside experts. The apprentices and farm staff run a CSA (community supported agriculture) program with 130 community members and they also have a roadside stand where they learn to sell produce and interact with customers.

It is clear that to pull something like this apprenticeship program off at LBCC we would need a lot of collaboration with other institutions and organizations. Our model might be different though and we may start small and see how it develops.

I am very much looking forward to tomorrow's visit of the LifeLab, an organization that helps schools develop learning gardens. I will also look at the Horticulture Program at Cabrillo College.