Soldiers of the Soil: A Historical Review of the United States School Garden Army

By Rose Hayden-Smith
4-H Youth Development and Master Gardener Advisor,
UCCE-Ventura County
WINTER 2006, 20 pages

“Every boy and every girl should be a producer. Production is the first principle in education. The growing of plants and animals should therefore become an integral part of the school program. Such is the aim of the U.S. School Garden Army.”

With these words, the federal Bureau of Education (BOE) launched the United States School Garden Army (USSGA) during World War I. The USSGA represented an unprecedented governmental effort to make agricultural education a formal part of the public school curriculum throughout the United States.

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PHOTO BY KAREN LANDMAN. In Milwaukee, the Growing Power organization offers tours of its urban farm to give people, especially children, a chance to see where their food comes from.

Yes in My Backyard

Landscape architecture professor Karen Landman hits the road to see how people in Canada and the United States are bringing farming to the city

BY TERESA PITMAN
University of Guelph

Prof. Karen Landman, Environmental Design and Rural Development, grew up on a dairy farm, but she says her father wouldn’t recognize as farmers the people she met this summer when she travelled more than 18,000 kilometres across the western United States and Canada to study urban agriculture. They were growing food commercially in the city.

“I met with academics, social advocates, people who train others in the techniques of urban farming and, of course, urban farmers themselves,” she says.

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University of Guelph – Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium

November 13, 2009

Academics, municipal planners, community activists, gardeners and farmers will gather at the University of Guelph next week to cultivate connections between city-dwellers and the food on their tables by encouraging farming in urban areas.

Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium is a first for Guelph and takes place Nov. 20 at the Arboretum. The all-day event is hosted by the University and several local partners, including the Backyard Bounty project.

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The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

by R. J. Ruppenthal

With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow up to 20 percent of their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container “terracing.” Those with access to yards can produce even more.

Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vegetable farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental disruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods.

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Sunshine Community Garden, Austin, Texas.

The Dallas Morning News
November 13, 2009

Did you know that more Texas kids are believed to be studying agriculture and agricultural science in urban and suburban high schools than in the state’s rural academies?

As education officials told Dallas Morning News reporter Matt Peterson earlier this week, most of the ag-related jobs now and in the future are based in urban areas, not on the farm. “For that reason,” said the Texas Education Agency’s Ron Whitson, “I think these courses are very relevant to our young people.”

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