Week 1 on the Farm 2015: Caring for Soil

Weather forecast: Tuesday, 50 degrees F, partly sunny. Wednesday, 60 degrees F, partly cloudy.

We'll be starting at "ground" level this week and talking about the most important component of organic farming--soil. For background information on what we'll be doing/discussing, check out this video "Soil not Dirt" by Dr. Elain Ingham.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtl09VZiSU

Blog Assignment + Amy's Post

In revising the syllabus for this course this past winter, I consulted several students who’ve spent significant time and energy engaged with agriculture and food systems issues. Each offered insights into the type of course they felt would be most valuable to K seniors. Two elements came across as especially important in our conversations. First, that the course focus on solutions to agriculture/food systems problems, and second, that each student bring their own experiences and knowledge to bear on our exploration of these solutions.

In order to facilitate this, each week during this course, two students will each individually choose an issue to present to the class for exploration and discussion. Each of these students will write a blog post detailing the problem they would like us to consider, including links to reference material that will help us understand the depth and complexity of the problem. They will also include information about or links to material that describes attempts to solve this problem. Though these blog posts will contain lots of factual information (and please make sure that this factual material is coming from sources you deem reputable!), they should also be written from a personal perspective. Why are you concerned about this problem? When did you first learn of it? How does it affect you personally and how might you personally engage in solving it?

Your blog posts should end with a question or two that you’d like the class to respond to. Each student who is not facilitating that week will respond to your post with a comment that addresses the question(s) you’ve posed (and please spend a little time composing thoughtful comments—probably a good length to shoot for is 200+ words). Then you will have fifty minutes of our Thursday morning meeting to facilitate a discussion or activity that further explores the issues and solutions you’ve raised.

Blog posts will be due Wednesday evening the week prior to the week you will be facilitating discussion. Comments will be due prior to our Thursday class meeting time.

With those logistics out of the way, I’d like to start us off with my own post on the state of our agricultural systems and my relationship to them:

My first friends were farm animals. Cows, mostly, because my parents were dairy farmers and so I was surrounded by them. We had chickens too, but they pecked me when I tried to collect their eggs and the roosters flew at my head with their dusty wings and sharp talons whenever I entered the chicken yard. I preferred the cows. I remember one old cow who always chose the same stall in the middle of the barn. I liked to sit next to her and stroke the soft underside of her neck as she calmly chewed her cud and waited her turn to be milked. I was pretty young then, too young to be of much help in the barn, but I loved being around the cows, touching them and smelling their sweet breath.

As soon as I was tall and strong enough, I was given chores. My first responsibilities were feeding the cows and young calves, then cleaning stalls and milking. In the summer there was field work as we grew and harvested the crops that would feed the cows through the winter. It was hard, physical work but I enjoyed it. I loved being outside, working with my family. We were a team, working together to take care of the cows, who in turn took care of us by giving us milk, meat, and money. Neither of my parents had off-farm jobs, so everything we had came from those cows. If they flourished, we flourished.

No childhood is perfect, but my first ten years were pretty satisfying. I determined that I wanted to live on a farm forever and planned to marry a farmer when I grew up. (That it didn’t occur to me that I could be a farmer myself should give you an indication of the gender dynamics in my family.) It was when I was about twelve that I started to realize that something was amiss in the world of agriculture.

In the mid-80s, a decade after former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (read about his legacy here: http://grist.org/article/the-butz-stops-here/)extorted farmers to “get big or get out,” the dairy industry hit a crisis. Production, bolstered in part by government price-supports and buy-ups of surplus product, rose to unsustainable levels. As part of an attempt to reduce the surplus milk flooding the market, the federal Dairy Termination Program offered a buyout option which paid farmers to stop milk production.

I imagine that a conversation similar to the one my family had one February evening took place across many farmhouse kitchen tables that year. My father explained the terms of program. We’d have to sell the cows and agree not to produce milk for a certain number of years, which meant we’d be done dairying, since it wasn’t feasible to get back into the business after being out for several years.

“Well, family, what do you think?” my father asked, looking from my mother to my brother to me. “Should we take it?”

“No!” I yelled, shaking my head vigorously, eyes wide, shocked that we would even consider such a thing. I couldn’t imagine life without the cows, without the farm. What would we do?

I don’t know how much my reaction actually figured into my father’s decision not to take the buyout. Many of the small dairies in our county did. And though my parents didn’t stop farming when I was a kid, they determined that they would be the last generation of my family to farm. “Go to college,” they told my brother and me. “Get a good job off the farm. You can’t make a living doing this on a small scale—it’s too hard.”

The agricultural policies promoted by Butz and others who shared his interests (and the fallout from these policies) have changed the landscape and ecosystem in which I live. Once my township and those surrounding it were dotted with small, diverse farms. My father remembers the days when every family had a garden, a pig, a cow, and some chickens. Now a few large farms dominate the area with corn, soybeans, and dairy herds which contain thousands of cattle (at its biggest, my parents’ herd was a couple of hundred).

“Plant fencerow to fencerow,” Butz said. Today, even the fencerows have been cut and plowed, destroying precious buffer zones and ecologically diverse habitats. In the effort to get maximum yields per acre, erodible land is tilled and soil washes into our rivers and streams. Chemical fertilizers and herbicides have destroyed the life in our soil and they also wash into our watershed, wreaking havoc in our aquatic ecosystems. Livestock, also, are pushed to the limits of production through breeding, feeding, and confinement practices that leave them with shortened and unpleasant lives. And farm workers share that same fate as they put in exhausting workdays which frequently include dangerous working conditions and exposures to toxic substances.

If asked what I think the biggest problem in our current food system is, I’d answer that it resides within our relationships—our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the non-human beings who sustain our lives. We have, in this country, a system of relationships based on exploitation in the name of maximum production and profit. For the most part, we accept this as the normal state of things. We accept that shoppers are going to try to get the most/best goods they can for their shopping dollar, that employers are going to try to get the most work out of their employees for the least compensation, and that farmers will try to get the most production out of their soil with the least amount of care expressed as labor and expense. It doesn’t matter so much to us that our shopping dollars support employers who force workers to labor in unsafe conditions for poverty wages and we have entirely forgotten that the health of the soil has anything to do with us. We have forgotten that our health and our fates are intertwined with both our human and our biotic communities.

When we are enmeshed in dysfunction, it can be difficult to envision what true health might look like. I think it’s worth remembering that there are cultures that have lived and continue to live with very different types of relationships to land, community, and food. Here are two TED talks by Anishinaabe women who describe their cultural relationship to the food species that sustain their people. Listen and let me know what you think. What would our agricultural system look like if it were based on the ethical principles described by LaDuke & Kimmerer rather than those proposed by Earl Butz? What steps are you taking or could you take to strengthen the health of your relationships to the beings (human and non-human) that provide your food?

Winona LaDuke, “Seeds of our Ancestors, Seeds of Life”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNlel72eQc

Robin Kimmerer, “Reclaiming the Honorable Harvest”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz1vgfZ3etE

Also, I would like to learn from each of you when and how you became aware that things are amiss within our agricultural systems. In your comments, please also describe your first memory of learning about a problem within our food & farming systems. How did you react?

Introducing: Slow Farming 2015!!

The Kalamazoo College CSA Course is back for a third year with a new name and a revised syllabus:

Slow Farming:  Resilient, Just, and Joyful Agriculture

Course Description

In this senior capstone course, students will explore solutions to problems created by our current food systems. We will critically examine recent movements in organic, local, and sustainable agriculture and discuss how we might each personally engage in transforming our individual, institutional, community, and political relationships with food and farming. This course includes a practicum in “slow farming” at Harvest of Joy Farm LLC. Students should attend an informational meeting or speak individually with Professor Amy Newday prior to enrolling in this course.

Senior Capstone Programmatic Components

·    draw students from various majors together through collaborative engagement with critical issues facing the world today. 

·    encourage cross-disciplinary thinking and problem solving.

·    maximize student control of content, process, and knowledge generation.

·    encourage students to explore connections (and disconnections) among components of their K-Plan.

·    invite students to articulate a narrative of their education in anticipation of their lives after graduation.   

Course-Specific Objectives

•       To discuss our responsibilities and relationships to the human and non-human beings who provide our food
•       To envision practical solutions to current agricultural crises
•       To explore different approaches to manifesting the changes we desire, including (but not limited to) personal lifestyle and career choices, community advocacy, and political activism
•       To examine the implications of the individual and cultural narratives that frame our relationships to food, farming, and ecology; to re-envision these stories in ways that enable healthier, more resilient and satisfying systems to emerge
•       To practice “living in resistance” through the development of food production skills and knowledge at Harvest of Joy Farm LLC
•       To practice collaborative, community-based action through a student-generated class project centered in the Kalamazoo community 

Course Framework

Shared teaching & learning: This class will meet on (or near) campus once each week for a two-hour class period. Harvest of Joy Farm LLC farmers Amy Newday and John Edgerton will use some of this time to provide background information about their farming practices and visions. The bulk of these class, periods, however, will be led by students. Each student will be responsible for facilitating (or co-facilitating) at least one class period in which they will engage the class in a solutions-based exploration of an issue related to agriculture and/or food systems.

(These topics might include but are not limited to: food justice, access, and sovereignty; human health and nutrition; agro-ecology; genetics; climate change; farmworker justice; soil health; agricultural policy; agricultural economics; institutional food policies and purchasing; farming and law; animals and agriculture; agricultural technologies; fuel and energy; “conventional” vs “alternative” farming practices; culture and agriculture; agriculture and education; women and minorities in farming; indigenous agriculture; urban farming; community-based and/or cooperative farming; cooking and food preservation; and careers in farming and food systems.)

Students will provide the class with background information and multiple perspectives on the topic of their choice, present examples of attempts to solve problems related to that issue, and lead the class in an exploration of how we might personally engage with solutions to these problems. One week before the class period that they are to facilitate, they will post a reflection on our class blog that includes an exploration of their personal relationship with the issue they would like us to discuss, a list of materials they’d like the class to review (they should provide links to any of these that are online and hard copies of those that are not), and one or more questions that they would like the class to reflect upon prior to our next class meeting.

On-farm participation:  Students will spend three hours each week on the farm, participating in farm activities under the supervision of the farm’s owners. They will learn how these activities fit into the larger scope of the farm’s operations, how the farm fits in to the food-shed within which it operates, and how Amy & John address critical agricultural issues through their farming practices.

Student-generated project:  As a group, students will decide on a collaborative project they wish to undertake as a means of actively engaging in food systems transformation during the course of the quarter. This project will take place in the Kalamazoo community, on or near campus.

Reflections: Each week students will be asked to write a reflection on our class blog in response to the questions posed by the facilitator of our next on-campus meeting. At the end of the quarter, students will write a reflection and evaluation of their overall experience in the course. These will be used in planning future versions of this course.

Grading:  Since the success of this course depends on the efforts and investment of the students involved, this class will be graded on participation in each of the four activities listed above:

Class facilitation (providing matl. & reflection questions; leading discussion):  25%

On-farm participation (showing up on time each week prepared to dig in!):  25%

Class-generated project (active participation in project visioning and follow-through):  25%

Weekly blog posts, in-class participation, and course reflection (providing thoughtful, in-depth responses):  25%

Course Materials

We will read K alumnus Nicolette Hahn Niman’s Defending Beef. We will be meeting and having dinner with Nicolette between 4-6pm on Monday, April 27 prior to her on-campus reading. Please reserve this time on your calendar!

Other course materials will be determined primarily by the course participants. The facilitator of each class period will determine what information he or she would like the class to review prior to that class meeting. Amy and John may also provide informational materials to help the class better understand their farming practices. We may also decide to read books or watch films together.

For the on-farm classes, students should bring clothes, shoes, and gloves that can get wet, dirty, torn, and/or otherwise ruined. They should check the weather report prior to leaving campus and bring multiple layers of clothing in order to adapt to changing weather conditions. It is often much colder and windier on the farm than in town. Rain happens. This course offers students the opportunity to experience daily farm life, which includes working outdoors in less-than-wonderful weather.