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Posted August 2, 2004: “Out here on
the farm, the physical changes you can see being made—for
me, that was something that I needed,” says Michigan
State University environmental studies major Michael Rodriguez
as he takes a break from turning compost at the Student Organic
Farm in East Lansing.
Rodriguez was initially enrolled in the school of packaging
engineering but switched majors to environmental studies after
“some of the things I was learning outside of school
were conflicting with what I was learning [inside]…mostly
revolving around consumerism,” he says. “I got
involved in environmental activism on campus.”
While the campus environmental group “got things done,”
Rodriguez says, “I discovered, after a year, that I
was getting burnt out and I started to focus more on my individual
actions.”
Rodriguez took a summer job at the 10-acre Student Organic
Farm, helping to install the first of four high tunnels. That’s
where he met John Biernbaum, Ph.D., a professor in the Department
of Plant and Soil Sciences and faculty advisor to the farm.
“This is also a type of activism, only it’s more
tangible,” says Rodriguez. “You are producing
something and showing people that things can be done. This
is where I spend most of my time outside of school.”
Experiential learning
Part of the support for the Student Organic Farm comes from
Biernbaum’s research into low-input high-tunnel season
extension. Constructed at a cost of about $2,500 to $3,000
each, three 20' x 96' and one 30' x 96' unheated high tunnels--a
combination of single-layer poly and double-layer inflated
walls--stand side by side, opening up not only a research
funding source but a whole new world of possibilities for
these student organic farmers. More high tunnels are planned,
depending on support for Biernbaum’s research.
The high tunnels--along with two heated greenhouses at the
nearby MSU horticulture farm--help make possible a 48-week
CSA, which creates a revenue stream and offers students the
chance to pick up marketing as well as new agriculture skills.
“It helps students learn about farming,” Biernbaum
says. “They’re not here in the summertime—September
3 is the first week of classes.” That’s also when
planting occurs, he says. “Plants are harvested right
before they go home for Thanksgiving, so they get to bring
salad greens home to mom and dad.”
Just 6 square feet of hoop house space produces a pound of
the cut-and-come-again mixed greens every two to four weeks,
Biernbaum says, which fetch anywhere from $4 to $8 depending
on the season. Three or four crops annually of organic tomatoes
are also grown under the structure, producing about 1 to 2
pounds per square foot each harvest.
Other crops produced inside the high tunnels and out in the
field include kohlrabi, chard, tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes,
onions, squash, carrots, beets, and a variety of herbs and
flowers.
“You can actually have students sow during the school
year; that’s one of the steps they need to make that
connection to farming.
Season-extension guru Eliot Coleman is an enthusiastic supporter
and has visited MSU’s Student Organic Farm.
“Eliot didn’t know what to think when he got
here and there were 15 or 16 students waiting to meet him—it
was 20 degrees outside,” Biernbaum (“John”
to his students) says. “I think it was really good for
him to see what he’s been working on being widely appreciated
by the students and applied here.”
Biernbaum has also traveled to Pennsylvania to learn from
low-input greenhouse
guru Steve Moore and has implemented some of the master’s
techniques, such as internal row covers. “I don't know
of any university where more pertinent and farmer-useful information
on high tunnels is being done,” Moore says of Biernbaum’s
research.
Besides year-round food production, the farm’s curriculum
includes soil health; compost management; insect, disease
and weed management; and sound whole-farm management techniques
such as cover cropping, crop rotation, and transplant and
seed-media production. Plans are under way to bring hogs on
board in order to close the nutrient cycle and to further
demonstrate a successful, healthy and humane integrated system.
Embracing community
Biernbaum says one of the farm’s goals is to educate
visitors so that they go away not asking the question “Why
is organic food so expensive?” but rather begin wondering
“Why is conventional food so cheap?”
The farm started in 2000 when agriculture student Seth Murray,
who was doing independent study with Biernbaum, approached
his professor with the question: “Other schools have
organic farms; why can’t we?” Biernbaum encouraged
Murray to voice his request to top administrators.
“It’s much more effective for a student to say
‘You know what? I’m not getting what I want at
this land-grant university’” than for a faculty
member to make such a plea, says environmental studies professor
Laurie Thorp, Ph.D., who heads up MSU’s Residential
Initiative on the Study of the Environment (RISE) program
and has several students under her tutelage plugged into the
Student Organic Farm. (Murray is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Cornell
University.)
“A lot of people would come and go, and that was a
real problem for us,” says Lynn Rhodes, who helped Murray
draft the original letter to administrators and who entered
the horticulture department as a freshman when he was a senior.
In on the ground floor of the student farm, Rhodes, who graduated
in May, has seen the project through many growing pains. A
real breakthrough, she says, was the acquisition of a dedicated
workforce when the farm figured out a way to pay student workers.
Volunteers are just hard to come by consistently, she says.
The paid positions also help carry the farm through the summer
months.
Three 16 week CSA cycles “match up perfectly with our
semesters,” Rhodes says. Each 16-week share costs $350,
and the farm just boosted its membership from 25 to 50 subscribers—designed
for a family of four—per cycle (there’s a longer
waiting list, but the consensus was to grow cautiously in
order to maintain high standards).
“The first week of distribution is the first semester
of the year,” Rhodes says. “With us having the
hoophouses and John doing his research and experimenting with
winter greens, we get to use that with our CSA.”
While the ideal has always been to have a lot of undergraduate
subscribers, lack of adequate cooking facilities in dormitories
has dictated that most of the farm’s CSA customers are
grad students, professors, and other university staff. (A
planned community dormitory for students in the RISE program
may help change that.)
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One of the farm’s goals is to
educate visitors so that they go away not asking the question
“Why is organic food so expensive?” but rather
begin wondering “Why is conventional food so cheap?” |
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Easy going Rhodes is typical of these young farmers, much
more eager to lead by example than to point out any shortcomings
in the agriculture department. “I like to be more subtle
in my approach, show folks what works and what’s the
right thing to do. If you can subtly creep into someone’s
life and get them to see what’s going on…It’s
just a better approach.”
She does offer that the whole system model of the Student
Organic Farm makes possible a more meaningful learning experience.
“How can you really get to know a plant by just cutting
off a twig and setting it on the table? It’s too disconnected
and fragmented. [The Student Organic Farm] is a chance to
put into practice things that you’re hearing about,
learning about, reading about, and writing about. Horticulture
is a tough subject if you’re not connecting it to something
real and tangible.”
And, as Rhodes—who earned 3 independent study credits
for walking the farm through organic certification—has
learned firsthand, farming can be tough, too.
“It’s been really exciting for me to have started
this. If I was going to start my own farm, I now know what
questions you have to ask. What decisions do you have to make?
What are you going to grow, and who are you going to sell
to? How long is the growing season? Just the kind of questions
you are going to have to ask if you are going to start a farm...And
if I go work on a farm that wants to get certified, I’ve
been through that process.”
In that spirit of the whole, these farmers—students
and teachers alike—make an extra effort to include the
entire campus population. “It’s open to all majors,”
says Rhodes. Indeed, the departments of food science, resource
development, entomology, horticulture, and environmental studies
have all benefited from what the Student Organic Farm has
to offer, but the opportunities go beyond academics. “Everyone
eats,” Rhodes observes, “and in my opinion everyone
should have the opportunity to be involved in eating locally.”
“One of the things I really like out here is that there
are so many disciplines interested in taking sustainable agriculture
in a lot of different directions,” says Ashley Sprouse,
an alternative education major whose been instrumental in
outreach to low-income students both at the on-campus children’s
garden and at their Lansing-area elementary school.
Deep ecology
The Student Organic Farm runs around the core values of “diversity,
trust, love, curiosity, awareness, and oneness” with
the mission “to cultivate a sustainable, community supported
farm.”
Heather VanWormer is an anthropologist who recently obtained
her Ph.D. at MSU. Over the course of her studies, Van Wormer
helped faculty advisor Laura Delind, Ph.D., with her pioneering
work with CSAs in a four-state area including Michigan. New
Farm caught up with Van Wormer on CSA pickup day at the Student
Organic Farm. What does she make of the success of this student-run
farm and the burgeoning CSA movement in general?
“It’s a criticism of our food system and people
not eating locally—local species, local season and local
community…It’s a way to get reconnected to the
local food system instead of getting bananas from Chile…And
it tastes better.”
For these young students considering farming as a vocation,
Van Wormer says, the CSA model offers a way for them to see
that there’s a community willing to back them up. “For
farmers, it’s a way for somebody to share the risk.
If it hails, nobody gets any spinach. If there’s a squash
boom, everyone benefits.”
The challenge for any CSA, Van Wormer says, is to make that
community connection.
“I think this CSA is already connected through public
education, the horticulture department, the children’s
garden—that outreach is already here…It’s
a great learning environment; they don’t have to build
it from scratch.”
While it’s true that the Student Organic Farm is not
fully self-funded, neither is any other academic department
on campus. “It’s okay to make mistakes here and
not have my livelihood on the line,” observes Rhodes.
“I can gain the experience and have the guidance….I
can have ideas, go through the process and say ‘What
do you think about this?’ and not be ruined or lose
my land because of a bad choice.”
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"It’s been really exciting
for me to have started this. If I was going to start my
own farm, I now know what questions you have to ask. What
decisions do you have to make? What are you going to grow,
and who are you going to sell to? How long is the growing
season? Just the kind of questions you are going to have
to ask if you are going to start a farm...” |
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But Biernbaum’s ultimate goal is financial solvency, not
because it is required by administrators (it’s not) but
simply to show these young farmers, and the rest of the world,
that this is a workable model.
“Sustainability can be profitable,” he says.
“Our hope is demonstrating that it’s true…We’ve
got to have the data.”
The idea is not to go back in time, Biernbaum says, but to
go forward with those ideas of value that have been left behind.
“Sustainability is about being responsible to those
who come forward. But the [The Iroquois Confederacy] concept
of ‘seven generations’ is not just seven generations
forward, but seven generations back. And it doesn’t
mean you have to do what they did, but consider what choices
they made and what it means. We have to understand their stories.”
“And there’s a word for that,” adds Thorp.
“It’s called ‘Wisdom.’”
“Here in this academic system, we have minds out of
control,” offers Biernbaum. “They are overactive…The
mind, when it works alone, is a dangerous thing. It’s
like the adolescent who becomes fixated on one thing and that’s
all they can see…”
“How else could we allow things like war to happen?
How else could we allow things like GMOs? We are kind of in
the adolescent stage and kind of coming out of it. Hopefully
we can put the mind in its place…”
“We’re coming into this mature stage of putting
things back together …Farming connects to health by
turning off the mind. Why do we need gardens in schools? We
need to turn off the mind. You get people out connected with
nature and the rest takes care of itself.”
Biernbaum concedes that of a dozen students, perhaps only
three or four will make successful farmers. He also understands
that there are myriad other lessons to be learned here, such
as an appreciating for the real value of food and the meaning
of community.
Teacher as Student
Relatively alone in an agriculture school that largely embraces
former secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s pronouncement
of “get big or get out” (with all its implications
of high inputs and subsidies), Biernbaum has learned over
time to be sensitive to the fact that, when he talks about
his own vision of low inputs and local economies of scale,
he may inadvertently be offending someone.
“I’ve watched students get madder and madder
and madder,” he says, finally realizing that “by
questioning [conventional agriculture], I was basically saying
that their parents and their grandparents were stupid.”
But, like any good mentor, Biernbaum realizes that learning
is a lifelong process.
“If we just come out here and do what we think is right…we
don’t have to be evangelists.
“The students help out a lot with that.”
Dan Sullivan is senior editor at The New Farm.
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