Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America

By Laura Sayre, Sean Clark and Frederick L. Kirschenmann

“Essays from staff on 15 farms . . . illustrate the trials, tribulations and sheer joys of establishing and maintaining such enterprises.” —USA Today

Originally published in 2011, Fields of Learning remains the single best resource for students, faculty, and administrators involved in starting or supporting campus farms. Featuring detailed profiles of fifteen diverse student farms on college and university campuses across North America, the book also serves as a history of the student farm movement, showing how the idea of campus farms has come in and out of fashion over the past century and how the tenacious work of students, faculty, and other campus community members has upheld and reimagined the objectives of student farming over time. Ranging in size from less than an acre to hundreds of acres, supplying food to campus dining halls or community food banks, and hosting scientific research projects or youth education programs, student farms highlight the interdisciplinary richness and multifunctionality of agriculture, supporting academic work across a range of fields while simultaneously building community engagement and stimulating critical conversations about environmental and social justice. As institutions of higher learning face new challenges linked to the global climate crisis and public health emergency, this book holds continued relevance for readers in North America and beyond.

“A timely and hopeful book.” —Jason Peters, editor of Wendell Berry: Life and Work

“The opportunity for students to spend time learning on campus farms is not just a good idea—it should be mandatory.” —Gary Hirshberg, President & CEO, Stonyfield Farm

“An excellent book, useful for anyone interested in the past, or the future, of the student farm movement.” —Journal of Agricultural & Food Information

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780813140292

Book preview

Introduction

The Student Farm Movement in Context

LAURA SAYRE

The past decade has seen the revival of an old pedagogical idea: finding ways to combine liberal arts undergraduate education with hands-on, practical farming and gardening experience. Scores of largely student-motivated, student-run, on-campus farms and market gardens, ranging in size from less than an acre to dozens of acres, have been established at a wide variety of universities and colleges across North America. Typically, the goal is to provide basic training in organic production and marketing while linking to more formal academic work in agroecology, environmental studies, or other disciplines and, at the same, facilitating broader campus sustainability objectives such as the recycling of food wastes and the provision of local food for dining halls. Frequently, there is a community service element as well, as students grow food to be donated to local food banks, install gardens at nearby secondary schools, or host farm tours for elementary school groups.

The size and dynamism of this movement are truly remarkable. Fifteen or twenty years ago, on-campus farms were largely unheard of, with just a handful of programs in place at a few unique institutions. Today, the situation has changed radically: the 2009 College Sustainability Report Card, examining three hundred leading universities and colleges in the United States and Canada, found that 82 percent do at least some local food purchasing, 55 percent have food waste–composting programs, and 29 percent have community gardens or student farms on campus.¹ Although it is easy (and probably advisable) to be wary of such broad-based sustainability claims, the research conducted for this book suggests that there are, indeed, about a hundred, if not more, higher education institutions in North America with on-campus farms or gardens of some sort, with more being established each year. From Minnesota to Idaho, from Quebec to South Carolina, college and university students are, in increasing numbers, putting up hoophouses, supplying salad greens to on-campus cafés, maintaining rototillers, selling radishes at local farmers markets, making compost, moving chicken tractors, tapping maple trees—in short, doing all the thousand things that go into small-scale organic farming and market gardening. Even ten years ago, these were not activities that formed part of your typical college education.

This transformation is being driven first of all by overwhelming student interest and demand. In the wake of books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and films like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me and Aaron Woolf’s King Corn, students and young people are taking an unprecedented interest in where their food comes from and why it matters. They want to know why the standard liberal arts curriculum has so little to say about the modern agrifood system and what a curriculum would look like that did bring this central element of human existence under consideration. College and university professors and administrators, meanwhile, are responding to these demands. New courses with titles like Food, Agriculture, and Society, From Farm to Fork, Food Politics, and (more directly) Organic Fruit and Vegetable Production are logging record enrollments. New sustainable food systems majors and concentrations are being established. Many of these courses and programs seek to incorporate some kind of experiential learning into their syllabi and look to campus farms and gardens as places to do so. In other cases, students are asking for and receiving small parcels of campus land to create gardens and grow food as an extracurricular activity, for instance, under the auspices of a student club. As a commentator in the Chronicle of Higher Education put the case in March 2008: With the attention that colleges are paying to local foods and to sustainability, perhaps more institutions should offer basic lessons in agricultural skills, as a way to make students familiar with an important American industry, if not to make farmers out of them. Recently, scholars have worried that young people are disconnected from nature, so why not let students carve out a corner of the campus to start a small farm?²

Why not indeed? The arguments in favor of student farming are many and will be explored at length in the course of this book. But, at their most basic level, they come down to this: in these days of obesity and diabetes, of high-pressure work and learning environments and total digital media saturation, it’s good for students to put down their books (or close their computers) occasionally and get outside, to get some exercise, to learn what a real tomato tastes like and how to grow one, to put their hands in the earth, to learn how to wield a spade. Having a student-run farm or garden on campus enables universities to demonstrate their commitment to environmental ideals while letting students explore how those ideals might be applied in the real world. Student farms are at once seedbeds and test plots for agrarian values, all too necessary in our increasingly urban and suburban world.

But how exactly do universities and colleges manage these programs? What do they cost? How much land do they require? How do students or faculty go about setting them up? What do they look like in the winter—or in the summer, for that matter, when most students are away? What happens when key students graduate? What about livestock? Student-run campus farms sound great in principle, in other words, but how do they work in practice? And how can they be meaningfully and usefully integrated with the broadest possible range of courses in order to serve a diverse cross section of students and other members of the campus community, not just those with a particular interest in organic farming? Should every college and university have a student farm? Could every college and university have one? In today’s academic climate, with food-and-farming topics gaining ground in anthropology, history, sociology, geography, political science, and many other fields, it may be less radical to propose the centrality of agriculture, in Colin Duncan’s phrase.³ But, at the same time, this very popularity of agricultural issues lends new urgency to the cause of student farming experience as a practical matter. A research paper on, say, cut-flower production in Ecuador will take on a different aspect when it is written by a student who has herself spent some long hours in the hot sun at the end of a hoe.

Fields of Learning is the first book to profile this rapidly expanding movement and address these and other pressing questions. As a collection of essays by individuals directly involved with innovative college farm programs nationwide, it emphasizes practical details while also examining larger pedagogical concerns. It cautions against common pitfalls and honestly assesses ongoing challenges. While the shared aim of the editors and contributors is to convince readers of the multilayered value and rich interest of student farming, these are not mere puff pieces for the college view-book: the authors describe setbacks and failures as well as triumphs and successes; they raise questions as well as providing answers. If the current student farm movement is to continue to flourish—as we believe and hope it will—it will do so by engaging in an active public and scholarly discussion of the means and ends of experiential food system education within university and college curricula. Discussions of student farming to date have taken place largely within the student farming community itself—for instance, at conferences organized by the Sustainable Agriculture Education Association, founded in 2006—or within the individual institutions where student farms are in operation.⁴ The aim of this book is to extend those conversations to include a wider set of constituencies, including students of all kinds, academics across all disciplines, administrators, other college and university staff members, parents, food system activists, policymakers, farmers, farmworkers—in short, all citizens and community members with an interest in the twin futures of agriculture and education.

Figure I.1. Spring transplants in the greenhouse at the Dartmouth College student organic farm. (Courtesy Laura Sayre.)

Toward that end, this book takes a broad approach, charting the student farm movement as it has developed, survived, and flourished in North America since the nineteenth century. Many readers may be unaware that the student farming tradition extends back this far or, indeed, that it is not entirely the product of the recent surge of popular interest in sustainable and organic food and farming. In fact, however, student farming has deep roots in North America, and an understanding of that history may be essential to ensuring that the current wave of enthusiasm for student farms doesn’t turn out to be just a fad. It is our belief that the on-campus farming initiatives being set up today, in the early twenty-first century, can learn a great deal from student farms established fifteen, thirty, even a hundred years ago—both in terms of the everyday details of farm management and in terms of the larger institutional dilemmas of how to administer and integrate the lessons of student farming within the diverse objectives of tertiary education. It is surprising how many of the seemingly novel challenges and questions posed by campus-based farms today were raised as well by observers of the movement in its earliest decades. Similarly, this book considers examples of student farming at a diverse range of institutions, from large land-grant universities to small liberal arts colleges, from exclusive private universities to open-admission community colleges. One of the most interesting aspects of the student farm movement is that it cuts across institutional categories, cropping up with equal vigor in all these settings. Some aspects of student farming are characteristic of the type of institution in question; others transcend institutional factors and have more to do with geography or the age of the project.

What qualifies as a student farm? A full survey of all North American educational establishments that have or have had some kind of farm as a part of their infrastructure is beyond the scope of this book. The U.S. land-grant university system in particular, with its founding mission to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, occupies an important position with regard to the student farm movement without actually being synonymous with it.⁵ While this book profiles four examples of student farms at land-grant universities, it in no way pretends to offer a comprehensive history of land-grant university farms. There are also a number of educational farm programs in North America operating at the middle school and/or high school level, within both the private and the public sectors, as well as a small number of independent, non-degree-granting entities, such as the Michael Fields Institute in Wisconsin, that offer formal training in organic farming and market gardening. For the purposes of the present volume, we decided to limit our focus to tertiary education and to accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities. Furthermore, we agreed on two essential, if somewhat loosely defined, criteria for student farming: first, there must be some level of student initiative or possibilities for student leadership associated with the farm; second, there must be a degree of attention and concern paid to questions of environmental stewardship and sustainability. (Note that the contributors to this volume tend to use student farm more or less interchangeably with other terms, including college farm, campus farm, student organic farm, and student educational farm.)

This book also adopts a case-study approach, with fifteen chapters profiling fifteen student farms at colleges and universities across the United States and Canada (see fig. I.2.). Each chapter is written by a faculty or staff member who either helped establish the student farm or has been directly involved with it for many years—in several cases, for more than a decade—and who is, thus, uniquely qualified to describe that farm’s history, evolution, organization, and rationale. In addition, most chapters feature at least one short contribution by a current or former student reflecting on the myriad riches of campus-based farming, riches at once large and small, tangible and intangible, practical and intellectual, predictable and unforeseen. The specific goals of this collection are to instruct students, faculty, and administrators in the benefits and challenges of establishing and running campus farms; to contextualize and revitalize a tradition of hands-on, place-based pedagogy; to summarize the range of curricula related to on-campus farming projects and the range of management structures used to administer them; and to underscore the conviction that farming can be both a valuable part of any undergraduate education and, for some students, a viable career path. As the stories in this book testify, young people from all walks of life find student farm programs to be enormously enriching, empowering, even life-changing experiences. Student farms convince some students that they want to be farmers, help others figure out what kind of farmers they want to be, and persuade still others that they want to pursue other careers and life choices to positively affect our contemporary food system. As such, the student farm movement promises to play a critical role in the formation of what some are calling generation organic or generation O, the next generation of sustainable farmers and the communities that support them. The essays in this book explore why and how that happens.

Figure I.2. Student farms represented in this book.

AGRICULTURE, EDUCATION, AND SUSTAINABILITY

What, then, is the proper relation between agriculture and higher education? What is the role of the former in the latter or of the latter in the former? It’s a testimony to the radical nature of the subject that, outside the specialized field of agricultural education itself, the list of writers and thinkers to address these questions is relatively short. Progressive-era thinkers like Liberty Hyde Bailey and John Dewey championed the nature-study movement in the early twentieth century as a way of introducing a reverence and a wonder for the natural world into elementary school education; school gardens were promoted as a practical, tangible way of connecting children to nature and to community and also as a way of bridging the gap between urban and rural.⁶ Bailey was likewise concerned with the problem of educating farmers as a means of improving rural life; his long career at Cornell University included the founding of its College of Agriculture and the development of horticulture as a professional science. Bailey is a paradoxical figure, however, in that the agrarian ideals expressed in many of his writings would, in some sense, be undercut by the professionalization of the agricultural sciences he did so much to advance. Still, student farm advocates can find ample support for their cause in his prolific work. We must understand that the introduction of agriculture into the schools is not a concession to farming or to farmers. It is a school subject by right, he argued in 1911. Nevertheless, he conceded, The presumption is still against successful agriculture work in the literary and liberal arts institutions, because such teaching demands a point of view on education that the men in these institutions are likely not to possess.⁷ For Bailey, the education of nonfarmers about farming was a future terrain, essential but less immediately practicable than educating farmers or schoolchildren.

Figure I.3. Meat goats on pasture at the Berea College Farm. (Courtesy Laura Sayre.)

Among Bailey’s intellectual and spiritual heirs in the contemporary sustainable agriculture movement are Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, and Wes Jackson, all of whom—again paradoxically—have scathingly critiqued the land-grant and extension systems Bailey helped develop. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the professionalization and institutionalization of agriculture as a science had gone too far, losing all sight of interdisciplinary education or the need to communicate with nonfarmers. This point was made powerfully as early as 1974, in a landmark article by André and Jean Mayer titled Agriculture, the Island Empire. The Mayers argued that what they described as the present isolation of agriculture in American academic life held serious implications for the future of the earth and its people. For a variety of historical reasons, the Mayers observed, the utilitarian ideals embodied in the foundational structures of the United States for the development of agricultural expertise—including the Morrill Act of 1862, which established the land-grant colleges, the Hatch Act of 1887, which created the agricultural experiment stations, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which authorized federal funding for cooperative extension—had given way to a gradual separation of theoretical and practical knowledge that was effectively insulating agricultural research from outside critique.⁸

The consequences of this separation could be seen in many spheres, the Mayers went on: in the breeding of crop varieties without regard for nutrition or taste; in the political isolation of the farming interest; in the elaboration of new environmental studies curricula with barely a glancing regard for agriculture. But the gravest outcome, in a nation with fewer and fewer farmers, was the cultivation of new generations of students with little idea of agriculture’s profound importance: The failure of our secondary schools and liberal arts colleges to teach even rudimentary courses on agriculture means that an enormous majority, even among well-educated Americans, are totally ignorant of an area of knowledge basic to their daily style of life, to their family economics, and indeed to their survival. It also means that our policies of agricultural trade and technical assistance, as important to our foreign relations as food production is to our domestic economy, are discussed in the absence of sound information, if indeed they are discussed at all. Agriculture is so widely relevant to human concerns, in other words—to natural resource use and individual health, to economics and international relations—that it not only transcends traditional academic disciplines but also demands a level of basic practical familiarity even among those whose professional lives are unconnected to it. As the Mayers put it, That colleges of agriculture seem anomalous at great universities such as the Universities of Wisconsin or California is more than a betrayal of history; it is an intellectual disaster.⁹ (They might have added Bailey’s institution, Cornell, to the list.) The argument went both ways, in other words: the study of agriculture needs to be enriched and questioned by the perspectives of nonagriculturists, and the lives and thinking of nonagriculturists need to be enriched and questioned by the study of agriculture.

From today’s perspective, the Mayers’ article appears deeply prescient: a powerful indictment of the disciplinary and cultural divisions that were increasingly coming to isolate food producers from the wider food-consuming public, simultaneously obscuring the political processes affecting the food system on both the global and the local level. Others, including Berry, Logsdon, and Jackson, would sound many of these same themes, further observing that the modern system of higher education as a whole militates against attachment to place—an essential feature of agrarianism—by presuming that the most promising undergraduate and graduate students will be educated in one location and then, in all likelihood, whisked away for a career somewhere else. But it was another member of the Berry-Logsdon-Jackson intellectual circle, David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, who explicitly extended this line of thinking to propose the establishment of college farms as at least a partial remedy for this whole suite of problems. Working outside the land-grant system, Orr was more inclined to see the potential of small-scale, hands-on farming as a means of enriching a liberal arts education than to focus on the need to reform the land-grant system itself.

For Orr, the rich possibilities of college-based farming were an extension of his idea of ecological literacy: the belief that no student could be roundly educated without developing some sense of place, including a basic familiarity with the natural systems of his or her (in many cases adopted) local region.¹⁰ In the short, provocative essay Agriculture and the Liberal Arts, published in 1994, he noted that, in earlier eras, students’ direct, familial experience with farming as a way of life had supplied precisely that level of ecological literacy that was now so palpably lacking. He proposed a heterogeneous list of the many benefits, both pedagogical and institutional, to be gained by including agriculture as a part of a complete liberal arts education. College farms, he argued (I’m paraphrasing here):

1. can instill an ethic of work while promoting ecological awareness;

2. offer interdisciplinary field sites for the study of plants, soils, and other natural systems;

3. help revitalize local, rural economies;

4. protect biodiversity;

5. mitigate carbon impacts by reducing food miles and/or planting trees;

6. recycle yard and food wastes; and

7. teach problem solving and strategies for institutional change.¹¹

It’s interesting to note that Orr didn’t include teach students how to grow healthy food as among the benefits of student farms. But let’s consider these seven points. Speaking very broadly, point 2 is pedagogical, point 3 economic, and points 4–6 ecological. Points 1 and 7 are more complex and really speak to the shaping of individual minds—and, yes, bodies. They have to do with the formation of students’ understanding of what is possible in the world, with negotiations of power between individuals and institutions, with the molding of responsibilities and expectations and obligations. Interestingly, for many of the contributors to this volume, these are the most fundamental lessons to be learned on a student farm.

The relation between agriculture and higher education, then, turns out to have far-reaching implications for the latter as well as for the former. On the one hand, student farms can be considered as a species within the genus community farm, itself a diverse grouping that Brian Donahue has justly characterized as the schools of agrarianism—places where people of all ages and from all walks of life can learn something about how food is grown, about what agricultural landscapes look like, about who inhabits them and why, and how things came to be this way.¹² On the other hand, the bringing of that diverse constituency into the farm fields threatens to pose fundamental questions about how those fields are managed, and, thus, about how agriculture in general is managed, and, thus, about a whole range of social and political and economic questions that are inextricably linked to agriculture. As Bailey put it, Agriculture is not a technical profession or merely an industry, but a civilization.¹³ As meeting grounds for the mutual interrogation of agriculture and higher education, then, student farms become loci for the exploration of what we now call sustainability. A campus farm is where students can put their hands to the plow, figuratively and sometimes literally: a place where abstract intellectual discussions about sustainability are put to the test, where ideals yield to action. It is in that transition from theory to practice, that physical testing, that the most radical and compelling forms of learning take place.

Figure I.4. A modular greenhouse at the Sterling College Farm. (Courtesy Laura Sayre.)

The essays in this volume—and the student farm projects they represent—may not all explicitly address all these issues, but they all reflect a sense that student farms are somehow more than the sum of their parts and that it is this that makes them most valuable. Three themes that will recur in the following essays are worth pointing out here. The first is the issue of funding, or what might be called the tension between production and instruction. Many of the projects described in this book were launched with grant funding and have then, like all grant-funded programming, been faced with identifying new sources of revenue in order to continue their work. While some colleges and universities have found that student farms make excellent magnets for donor support, this situation can itself generate fresh challenges (e.g., if administrators feel that the student farm is drawing benefactor interest away from other projects deemed more vital). Managers of long-term student farm programs frequently find themselves having to argue that, as educational endeavors, student farms shouldn’t be expected to pay for themselves any more than should basketball teams or history departments. (Another pertinent quote from L. H. Bailey: To make a school farm pay for itself and for the school is impossible unless the school is a very poor or exceedingly small one.)¹⁴ Younger student farms, on the other hand, are more likely to aim for financial self-sufficiency as a rationale for their continued existence. In this regard, the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model (in which farm customers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly share of the farm’s harvest) has been crucial to many student farms’ recent success. The CSA setup simplifies marketing in many respects, offers a fixed return relatively early in the season, and (at least in theory) creates a loyal clientele prepared to accept occasional crop failures or less-than-perfect produce.

In a sense, the issue of profitability falls doubly hard on student farms since many nonfarmers fail to understand the precarious economic terms of almost any contemporary agricultural enterprise. Simply put, it’s not easy to make a living farming. On the one hand, starting a farm is like starting any business: it requires a certain amount of capital investment and the development and perfection of functional systems in order to reach a level of profitability or even to break even. Many business startups fail for all kinds of reasons, even those run by talented people with a promising new product or service to offer. Within the organic and sustainable farming community, five years is a generally accepted time frame for reaching that key profitability threshold, a time frame that may fall well outside the tolerance of the average benefactor or provost’s office. On the other hand, many conventional farms today rely on federal subsidies to balance their books, the costs of production for many basic commodities—corn, soybeans, milk, sugarcane, cotton—frequently exceeding their farm-gate price. A typical student farm must, therefore, attempt to establish a farming system that is a good deal more economically efficient than average, despite the fact that its primary purpose is the training of an inexperienced workforce. On top of all this, many student farms are sensitive about being perceived as unfairly competing with other area farmers in bringing their goods to market.

The second theme is intrinsically linked to the first and has to do with striking a balance between student leadership and staff or faculty direction. Should student farms be absolutely guided by students alone? For some, this would appear to be the essentially defining quality of a student farm endeavor. In practice, however, long-running campus farm programs usually find that some level of formal mentoring of students is essential. Student turnover and shifting student interests, the frequent overlap between spring planting and final exam periods, the need to negotiate among the varied priorities of different groups of students, and the concerns of administrators (with regard to issues like safety, aesthetics, and accountability) all lend weight to the establishment of a nonstudent student farm director of some sort. But, as will be seen in the following essays, these same faculty and staff directors remain highly conscious of the need to preserve spaces within the farm for the expression of student initiative and experimentation—not just for students’ own satisfaction, but for the continued vitality of the whole project. Paradoxically, the longer a student farm is in operation, and the more firmly established it becomes on campus, it seems, the more likely students themselves are to lobby for the funding of a permanent staff position, despite the fact that the early years of the project, when students had to figure out everything for themselves, may be celebrated as having been among the most enriching. In a sense, student farms could be said to go through their own life cycle, with an early, slightly chaotic developmental phase followed by maturation into a more fixed form. The challenge is to maintain flexibility and preserve avenues for student input even as the operation grows larger and more complex.

The final theme of note relates to the profound interdisciplinarity of student farming. Although most student farms seem to find a home within environmental studies or agronomy/horticulture departments, others are housed elsewhere or exist independently. Regardless of a farm’s departmental affiliation, moreover, participating students and faculty tend to come from all divisions of the college or university. College farms can be (and are) used as outdoor classrooms for courses in biology, economics, horticulture, animal husbandry, engineering, creative writing, history, anthropology, development studies, soil science, plant ecology, business management, and more. Remarkably, a survey of student farm managers and instructors conducted by Heather Karsten and her colleagues at Pennsylvania State University in 2007 found that the thirty-four respondents to the survey had taught a combined total of ninety-nine different courses to 2,965 students over the preceding three years.¹⁵ If I had to guess, I’d venture that those roughly three thousand students represented dozens of different backgrounds, major fields of study, and future aspirations. As one researcher reporting on the University of Minnesota’s new student farm project put it, A student-run organic farm providing opportunities for experiential learning can uncover a population of students interested in growing organic food.¹⁶ It’s not necessarily clear, even to the organizers of a student farm, where the center of gravity of student support for the farm will eventually prove to be—and, indeed, that center may shift over time. This is just one way in which student farms challenge traditional disciplinary assumptions.

Among the three themes just outlined, the issue of interdisciplinarity, in my view, deserves special emphasis because it runs counter not just to prevailing ideas about agriculture and education but even to prevailing assumptions within the student farm movement. My own interest in student farms, it is perhaps worth specifying, originates not so much in direct experience with an on-campus farm project as in contending with its notable absence: I’ve never worked on a student farm (apart from a few days here and there), but I did a great deal of farming as a student. After spending three postcollege years at the Land Institute, in Kansas (where we had an intern program integrating organic gardening, agricultural field research work, reading and writing assignments, classroom discussions, regular guest lectures, and public programs), I spent most of my graduate school career working on an organic vegetable farm that is now one of the largest and most successful CSAs in the nation.¹⁷ Most of my fellow graduate students and professors thought I was crazy, although a few came out to the farm to volunteer for an afternoon or became CSA members. Today, Princeton has a student-run garden, an on-campus farmers market, and a handful of courses relating to food and agriculture. It remains to be seen whether Princeton will take the next step and establish some kind of full-fledged food system studies program encompassing an experiential element.

It is an open question among student farm advocates whether the establishment of a student-managed organic garden at, say, Princeton University, Iowa State University, or Middlebury College represents the more radical step forward in the redefinition of food system education. For some observers, a primary distinction is to be drawn between student farms and gardens at schools with academic programs in agriculture and those at schools without academic programs in agriculture. Schools with academic programs in agriculture obviously have more immediate opportunities to link student farmwork to academic coursework. On the other hand, schools without academic programs in agriculture are in many ways freer to develop new linkages between the scholarly study of food, farming systems, and natural resource use (e.g., from the perspective of history, anthropology, geography, rural sociology, or American studies) and students’ experience in the field (the real, physical field, the one with the soil and the plants in it). Students themselves can be extremely resourceful in pointing out these linkages: a group of students at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, for example, strengthened their case for the establishment of a student garden on campus by pointing out that the school had created and maintained an extensive victory garden during and after the Second World War, providing a legitimating precedent in the eyes of college administrators. What unites agricultural and non-agricultural colleges and universities today, however, is that the majority of students at both now come to higher education without extensive previous farm experience, a situation that throws up for renegotiation most established assumptions about the role, structure, and objectives of agricultural education.

Figure I.5. February at the Hampshire College Farm Center. (Courtesy Laura Sayre.)

The student farm movement, in short, raises questions about pedagogy, about learning styles and methods, about the role of agriculture in contemporary cultural and economic life, about the organization of intellectual inquiry and academic thought. At its heart, it asks, Who should be farming? Who will be farming in the future? Where will new farming knowledge come from? How will old farming wisdom be transmitted and preserved? The widening crisis within mainstream agriculture on a global level has thrown all these questions up for debate. The deep diversity—this fertile chaos—within the goals and interests of student farming is, ultimately, one of its greatest strengths. It promises to reinvigorate higher education, public life, practical farming, and our collective future in the decades to come.

READING FIELDS OF LEARNING

As mentioned earlier, the essays in this book are organized chronologically by the year of each college farm’s founding—those years being indicated by the date in parentheses following the name of each school in the chapter title. This arrangement highlights the historical unfolding of the student farm movement while revealing lines of influence and commonalities cutting across standard institutional categories (land-grant university, private liberal arts college, etc.). In engaging contributors, we sought to do justice to the diversity of programs and projects in operation and to represent the movement’s geographic breadth while at the same time showcasing programs that have achieved a wide impact. There are, of course, many outstanding and influential programs in existence that, given space limitations, we were unable to include in this book. By way of partial recompense, and to illustrate the overall dimensions of the student farm movement, key information about every student farm project currently operating in the United States and Canada is included in the appendix to this book (although, given the dynamism of the movement, any list of this sort is necessarily provisional).

The body of this book is divided into four parts reflecting four phases of student farm development in North America. Part 1, Roots, features farms established in the nineteenth century or the early twentieth, usually in near chronological proximity with the founding of their home institutions. The present volume includes essays describing student farm activities at Berea College, in Kentucky, where the farm has been a part of college life since 1871; at Wilmington College in Ohio, where the college farm dates to 1946; and at Sterling College in northeastern Vermont, which has had a farm since 1962. Other schools falling into this category include Deep Springs College in the high desert of eastern California (which has operated as part of a farm/ranch since its founding in 1917) and Warren Wilson College in North Carolina (originally founded as the Asheville Farm School in 1894).

To varying degrees, all these schools draw on a legacy of educational thought emphasizing a balance of physical and mental training. As early as the early nineteenth century, the manual labor school movement in the United States established farms and workshops at seminaries and academies in hopes of at once improving the scholars’ health and helping defray the cost of their education.¹⁸ Today, Berea, Sterling, the College of the Ozarks, and Warren Wilson are all federally recognized work colleges, a designation under which all students are required to participate in college-run labor programs, generally for ten to fifteen hours a week. By putting all students on a level playing field with regard to labor obligations, the work college system lends itself well to student farm activities, but work college farms still contend with many of the same challenges faced by student farms elsewhere. In chapter 1, Sean Clark, an associate professor of agriculture and natural resources at Berea College (and coeditor of this book), describes how the long history of the Berea College Farm reveals how few of the current tensions associated with student farming are really new: efforts to recycle food waste from student dining halls, for instance, met with practical difficulties a century ago, just as they do today. Clark’s essay also shows how the larger historical and economic forces affecting agriculture in the United States over the past 150 years have necessitated a continual readjustment of the college farm’s organization and rationale. Student farms must remain flexible to a changing agricultural landscape, he concludes, even as they seek to demonstrate new possibilities for sustainable farming.

Wilmington College, located in Wilmington, Ohio, and the subject of chapter 2, is one of a handful of private agricultural colleges remaining in the United States (others include Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, and Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pennsylvania). Often operating with a strong religious affiliation, private agricultural colleges face an uphill battle