Category — Education

A Permaculture Research Institute Program (PRI)

Why Become a Certified Urban Farmer?

In 2011, PRI Cold Climate successfully completed a groundbreaking model for creating a local, just, sustainable, and economically viable food system in our cold climate region. With over a decade of experience in urban soils, water management, sustainable landscape design, high-yield urban agriculture production, and season extension, PRI Cold Climate brought together a new, comprehensive educational curriculum that launched the region’s very first Urban Farming Certification Program.

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Sweden, which is the the home of garden schools, takes the lead and has 2,000 of them.

Scientific American Magazine
Oct 27, 1900
Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in America, began life on August 28, 1845.

From a Department of State pamphlet:

In France school farms increased rapidly, and in 1852 there were seventy, the number allowed by law.

The following are some of the advantages of the system: The children obtain an intimate knowledge and intercourse with nature, they learn about the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. It educates boys beyond the tendency to pilfer fruits and flowers in orchards, and instills in children a fondness of rural life.

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By Sharon Gamson Danks
New Village Press
Nov 2010

Sharon Gamson Danks, environmental planner and founding partner of Bay Tree Design, Inc. in Berkeley, California, has visited and documented over 175 green schoolyards in North America, Europe and Japan, and has shaped and facilitated the master planning process for dozens of ecological schoolyards.

Asphalt to Ecosystems is a compelling color guidebook for designing and building natural schoolyard environments that enhance childhood learning and play experiences while providing connection with the natural world.

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Essays about the founding and management of fifteen of the most influential student farms in North America.

Edited By Laura Sayre, Sean Clark
University Press of Kentucky
2011

Where will the next generation of farmers come from? What will their farms look like? Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America provides a concrete set of answers to these urgent questions, describing how, at a wide range of colleges and universities across the United States and Canada, students, faculty, and staff have joined together to establish on-campus farms as outdoor laboratories for agricultural and cultural education. From one-acre gardens to five-hundred-acre crop and livestock farms, student farms foster hands-on food-system literacy in a world where the shortcomings of input-intensive conventional agriculture have become increasingly apparent. They provide a context in which disciplinary boundaries are bridged, intellectual and manual skills are cultivated together, and abstract ideas about sustainability are put to the test.

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Spud harvest: Mount Allison students pick potatoes at the school’s 9.7 – hectare farm. Photo by Andrew Tolson.

“People need to learn self-reliance and how to grow their own food responsibly—for themselves, their families and their communities.”

By Jason McBride
Macleans
November 2 2011

Excerpts:

This past September, New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University held an event unprecedented in its 172-year-long history: a you-pick potato harvest. For the first five Saturdays of the new school year, students and Sackville residents were able to pick Russet and Superior potatoes from a boggy, 9.7-hectare farm in the heart of the campus. The rest of the spud harvest—a yield of 30,000 pounds—was transformed, to the delight of many ravenous undergrads, into fresh, hand-cut french fries and mashed potatoes in the kitchen at Jennings Hall.

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Illustration: Tavis Coburn.

While we’re busy teaching our kids to tend school gardens, they’re failing provincial tests in reading, writing and math. The folly of the new enviro-propaganda

By Jan Wong
Toronto Life
October 2011

Excerpt:

This fall, hundreds of Toronto students are harvesting beets and zucchini from their school gardens. I say: nice photo op, bad idea. The argument for school gardens assumes that by grubbing in the dirt, kids will learn to love eating vegetables. They won’t think chickens hatch into this world as deep-fried nuggets. And they’ll develop a respect for nature.

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Urban Agriculture – Innovative Farming Systems for the 21st Century

Online Class (December 19 – January 20, 2012)
Instructor: Helena Farrell

Description: The course explores the subject of Urban Agriculture through the investigation and evaluation of current urban farming system. Using case studies, students will practice critical research skills including information gathering, analysis and assessment, as a means for learning about contemporary urban farming systems and issues in the field. The first half of the course will involve focused investigation of particular urban farming designs using national and international examples.

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Kindergarteners hand over their class piggy bank for the farm fundraiser. They raised $20.54!

Denver Green School seeds new innovation – growing their own food

Chris Cunnyngham
Big Think
September 21, 2011

Excerpt:

A previously abandoned one-acre field behind the school has been taken over by Sprout City Farms, a project devoted to “innovative urban farms on underutilized land, rooting farmers in the city and bringing good food to neighborhoods.” The food grown is then sold back to the school to be served in the cafeteria. As you may imagine, there were lawyers involved at various steps of the process but Allen Potter, 6th Grade teacher and founding partner of the school, was quick to point out that school district lawyers “were actually our allies in this.”

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Vestal Park, North Little Rock, Arkansas.

Argenta CDC receives $39,000 grant from Walmart Foundation to create youth urban agriculture initiative

Excerpt:

(North Little Rock, Ark.) — The Walmart State Giving Program has awarded Argenta Community Development Corporation a $39,000 grant to launch the Vestal Urban Farm Project for 220 students at Boone Park Elementary and Argenta Academy, the North Little Rock School District’s alternative high school.

For participants, the $39,000 Foundation Grant will fund and foster academic and business opportunities, health and wellness initiatives, self-esteem and environmental stewardship through hands-on participation in all aspects of the creation, implementation, management and marketing of a sustainable urban farm. The farm will be located on one acre of land in Vestal Park in North Little Rock’s Baring Cross Neighborhood.

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Sprout City Farms, in partnership with the Denver Green School, Denver Urban Gardens, and Denver Public Schools, is building a one-acre vegetable farm in a corner of the schoolyard at the Denver Green School (DGS).

DGS is a public elementary and middle school (pre-K to 8th grade) focused on environmental and social sustainability through a “hands-on, brains-on,” project-based approach to learning. The Denver Green School Community Farm aligns perfectly with the values of the school, providing opportunities for students to engage in the natural world, food production, and interaction with the local community. It also gives them space to run around outside chasing grasshoppers.

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Potato Harvest Day – Students at Queen Mary Elementary School work with Summerhill Seniors

Video by Charlie Miller and Damian Inwood
The Edible Garden Project

Excerpts:

Two years ago the Queen Mary Community Garden was built in North Vancouver. Included in the garden were four large plots dedicated to the students at Queen Mary Elementary School – right next door.

Students take part in planning, planting, and maintaining the garden plots for their classroom. We work with students from grade 3, 5, and 7. They each have a compost bucket in their classrooms that they empty in the garden composters; a great was to learn about closing the loops between food waste and helping their garden grow.

See more here.

Whole Kids Foundation™ Taking Root With School Garden Grant Program – To be considered, applications must be received by 5pm CST, December 31, 2011.

AUSTIN, Texas. (Aug. 17, 2011) — Whole Kids Foundation in partnership with FoodCorps is now accepting online grant applications for its first major initiative, the School Garden Grant Program, which will be funded by a six-week, in-store donation drive at all Whole Foods Market stores, and online at wholekidsfoundation.org, from Aug. 17 to Sept. 30.

Created to help schools grow students’ relationships with food through gardening, the new program stems from the nonprofit’s mission of supporting schools’ efforts to improve children’s nutrition.

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Grow Mobile visits up to 3 schools a week in Rochester and 9 surrounding counties

“The Grow Mobile Van is an educational tool that is part of the Foodlink / Green Living Technologies (GLTi) partnership to promote Urban Agriculture and Healthy Eating. The Grow Mobile is retro-fitted with multiple technologies including a working hydroponic system that grows starter plants for the GLTi Mobile Edible Walls also fitted into the van. Complete with worm teas for organic fertilizer and indoor grow lights, the van is operational 12 months of the year.

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They produce their own salsa that is sold in six grocery stores around the metro.

By: Curtis Jay
NBC News
08/25/2011

Excerpt:

KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Near the Legends in Kansas City, Kansas, a small farm sits that produces more than just vegetables.

It also cultivates the lives of inner-city boys through a program called “BoysGrow” , founded by John Gordon, Jr., “We’re instilling respect, pride into these guys they already have it.. now they’re part of something.”

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Hunters Point Boys & Girls Club in San Francisco.

Today show’s Jenna Bush Hager (Jenna Bush) visits school garden for celebration of Chez Panisse’s 40th anniversary

Rosemina Nazarali
Foodista
August 25, 2011

Jake Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Chef Alice Waters to teach Bay Area inner-city youth about sustainable farming and eating healthier.

“I grew up around gardens and growing my own food, my family did that a lot and that was real source of community,” the Source Code actor said. “Growing up, more than anything, I got to know my mother and father and my sister and they got to know me at the dinner table.”

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See the film here.

The Mother of the Locavore Movement Serves Up Her Gastronomic Curriculum

A short film by Lisa Eisner
Nowness
Aug 24, 2011

Restaurateur Alice Waters expounds on the inspiration guiding The Edible Schoolyard in today’s short film by Lisa Eisner. Waters’ pioneering project at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, California, has transformed a vacant lot into flourishing community farmland, combining horticulture, gastronomy and education. Visit any of the myriad farm-to-table restaurants defining the modern culinary scene, from Dan Barber’s Blue Hill to Suzanne Goin’s Lucques, and you’ll trace the chefs’ collective methodology back to Waters.

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Urban Farming Food Chain Edible Wall

The Urban Farming™ Food Chain Edible Wall project was originally launched in 2008 at four downtown and Skid Row locations in Los Angeles. These are vertical farming gardens – from 24 to 30 feet long x 6 feet high – growing fresh, healthy produce at locations in the Skid Row and downtown areas. We need to replace the existing wall panel system that’s deteriorating at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex (high school) with the new, improved more durable system we’re now using, ASAP!!

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The Perennial Plate Episode 67: Kids at a Farm from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

By Daniel Klein
The Perennial Plate Episode 67: Kids at a Farm
Aug 23, 2011

Excerpt from Serious Eats:

Janus Youth Programs has operated community-based programs for children, youth, and families in Oregon and Washington since 1972. They have a network of over 20 programs includes, including Janus Food Works, which employs 14 to 21 year-olds from Portland. The youth get involved in the planning, growing, selling, and donating of over 4,000 pounds of organic produce each year from the one-acre organic farm on Sauvie Island.

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A Manual For Teachers, Parents And Communities

Kraisid Tontisirin, Director,
Food and Nutrition Division
Mahmoud Solh, Director,
Plant Production and Protection Division
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Rome © FAO 2005
198 pages

Foreword

The keys to the development of children and their future livelihoods are adequate nutrition and education. These priorities are reflected in the first and second Millennium Development Goals. The reality facing millions of children, however, is that these goals are far from being met.

Children who go to school hungry cannot learn well. They have decreased physical activity, diminished cognitive abilities, and reduced resistance to infections. Their school performance is often poor and they may drop out of school early. In the long term, chronic malnutrition decreases individual potential and has adverse affects on productivity, incomes and national development. Thus, a country’s future hinges on its children and youth.

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Photo by Michael Abelman, Foxglove Farm.

At Michael Abelman’s farm – Salt Spring Island, BC. Canada

Tuesday, September 27th, 7:00pm – Friday, September 30th, 2011
instructor: Michael Ableman and Josh Volk
cost: $285 plus HST (lunches and dinners included)

Urban agriculture as a movement has come into its own, with a dramatic increase in individuals wanting to create agricultural enterprises on small plots in the city. While enthusiasm is high, the skill level required to make these enterprises financially viable is often lacking. This workshop, taught by two veteran farmers, will provide the nuts and bolts for starting an urban agricultural enterprise from site selection and soil remediation, to developing a business and crop plan, to propagation,

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