Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Education and Agriculture

for The Natural Farmer, March, 1995
© 1995, Bill Duesing, Solar Farm Education, Box 135, Stevenson, CT 06491

1903.  How to Make School Gardens: A Manual for Teachers and Pupils  by  H.D.
Hemenway
"The idea of having a garden connected with the school is a very old one."
"The school garden tends to develop the best traits in the children, and to
create in them a love for the beautiful."

1916. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
"Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of preparing
future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time.  It affords an
avenue of approach to knowledge..."

1994.  Plain : The Magazine  of Life, Land and Spirit, Fall. "What Really
Matters," by  John Gatto. Mr. Gatto taught in New York city public schools 
for 26
years and was named New York State "Teacher of the Year."
"We live in history’s wealthiest political State, which has been locked in a
consumption trance for a hundred years, devouring its children, its families,
its hills, sky and water in order to buy machinery to talk to.  The government
schools have been the church where such training in continuous consumption
occurs.  It’s time to change that and begin to teach what really matters."

1995. Mother Jones,  Interview with Alice Waters, chef at Chez Panisse,
Berkeley, CA.
"Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community
responsibly is the center of an education."

In talking about agricultural education we can mean education about
agriculture or education in the skills needed to produce food.  If we are 
teaching the
skills to grow food, is it with shovels and compost using an ecological model
or with tractors and farm chemicals using an industrial/mechanical model?

The Poetry and the Reality

Recently I had to drop some papers off at the Bridgeport, Connecticut
elementary school where Suzanne teaches fifth grade.  It was before school 
and some
of her students were in the cafeteria having breakfast.  I ventured into an
atmosphere thick with the odor of sausage, pancakes and syrup to say hello to
them and to check out their breakfast and our tax dollars at work.

Each four-ounce soft pak of 100%-pure pineapple juice from concentrate had
poems such as this on the side.  Take the Pledge / The earth is our home / and
we will join forces / To guard against waste / and protect its resources.
The juice concentrate came from Thailand and the Philippines.  Other days,
the kids are served apple juice from Austria and Argentina, or orange juice 
from
Florida and Brazil.

The sausage and pancakes were served from a warming oven in single-serve
two-compartment aluminum trays covered with a piece of aluminum foil.  Each 
child
also received a carton of milk (BST contaminated?), a plastic fork and knife
and a one-ounce plastic package of syrup with a large KRAFT logo.  (Kraft is
owned by Philip Morris.  This is just one example of how food entitlement
programs use the poor to transfer money from taxpayers to giant 
corporations.) The
children seemed to be eating the breakfast, although there were pancakes and
sausage in the trash cans mixed with aluminum trays, plastic utensils and milk
and juice cartons.

The hot breakfast is a special event.  Usually each child gets a disposable
plastic bowl with less than one ounce of cereal sealed inside by a brightly
colored label.   "Lucky Charms," ‘Trix" and "Honey Nut Cheerios" are 
popular and
served often.  "Total" is sometimes served, but is frequently thrown away by
the children. (Too many vitamins?)

The clash between the sentiments of the poem on the side of the juice box,
and the reality of this waste and energy-intensive feeding program makes it
obvious that a radical change is needed.  This costly system malnourishes our
children while it connects them to widespread social abuses and ecological
disasters.  And, if all the food were organically grown, it would make little
difference.  The "Contract With America" aspires to eliminate the school 
breakfast
and lunch programs.  In many parts of the country,  bringing in Taco Bell or
Pizza Hut has been the response.

Unfortunately the dysfunctional hypocrisy that the U. S. feeding system
presents to these children before school even starts, is endemic in the 
public, and
especially urban, schools.  We know that the well-being of the "whole child"
is important for learning, yet these children suffer from an incredible range
of family, health, social and legal problems.  Administrators stress the
importance of standardized tests and increasing test scores while allowing
overcrowded classes, lack of books, materials, personnel and services to be 
the norm.

We would like to inspire these children with visions of the future, yet our
society has almost no role for these children other than as consumers of junk
food, clothing and video entertainment. The television tells them to "grab it
now!" and to "have it your way."  This makes it more challenging to do 
hands-on
activities.  Many children spend more time watching television than they do
in school. Student attendance however, is very good.  The school is safe, 
warm,
and filled with caring adults and friends.

An Active Classroom, an Ecological Approach

Upstairs in the fifth grade classrooms in Bridgeport, beans and corn are
growing in milk cartons filled with compost from classroom worm farms and the
school compost system.  Students record observations and make labeled 
drawings in
their plant journals.  They are learning the differences between monocots and
dicots and about the symbiotic relationships between the grains and legumes
which fed most of our ancestors.  This lesson especially connects with their
social studies of the Native Americans and writing and literature based on The
Sign of the Beaver, the story of a young settler and an Indian boy sharing an
unlikely friendship in the Maine woods just before the American Revolution.

The fifth grade teachers encourage healthy snacks, discourage junk food and
sodas.  (Yes, some fifth graders think a caffeinated soda and a bag of chips
make a complete breakfast and, that’s what they eat.)  The students have
finished off most of the sunflowers seeds from last year’s garden, made 
cookies from
a pumpkin they grew in the school garden, and will make potato chips in the
next few weeks from the potatoes they harvested.

Last fall, the students built a fence and two cold frames.  Later in the
winter, they will use drop spindles and cardboard looms to turn fleece into 
cloth.

These children, like most of the rest of us, would rather be doing something
real with their hands and minds than just be sitting at a desk.  A situation
where one adult must deal with 30 or more children in a small room for six
hours a day promotes the most rigid kinds of structure and requires nearly
constant crowd control. To release the children and the teachers from this 
structure
and tap into the powerful potential for learning (when the body and the mind
work together) requires more supervision. Even one more person cuts the
student-teacher ratio in half and that makes a significant difference. 
Fortunately,
since these kids are so much fun to be around, many people like to come in to
work with them.

Outdoor Learning and Real Work

Just bring out a shovel, a bow saw or a hammer and show the children what to
do. Their energy and enthusiasm seem limitless.  There are never enough tools.
 Their eagerness to do this real work teaches us the value of having real
work to do.  As they work, they find sensory delights and things to ask 
questions
about: the smell of a freshly sawn cedar post, a sprouted acorn in the
compost, a grub or a worm in the soil.   In the land of asphalt, 
plastic-wrapped
food and televised entertainment, these real things have great appeal. 
We’ve also
found that the lessons these children learn in the 1000-square-foot garden
surrounded by asphalt are carried with them.  During a tour of a suburban 
Nature
Center, Suzanne’s 5th graders knew more about the natural processes in the
forest than their adult guide.  Many of them come back a year or two later and
talk about their home gardens.

Educating Consumers

These participatory methods, and the implication that gardens might be an
important part of these children’s futures, are in stark contrast with the 
most
well-funded agricultural education.  Large farm organizations and agencies are
ready to "educate children about the role of the farm in providing food and
products for the city." (National Farm-City Council, Inc.)  Ag in the 
Classroom
is sponsored by the USDA "to help students understand the important role of
agriculture in the United States economy."  I imagine that they believe that
few, if any, of these children will be involved in food production.

It also seems that every large commodity group wants to educate young
consumers.  An article in the October, 1994, Produce Business titled "Goodbye
Memorization.  Hello Multi-Media." surveys the field.

"There simply is not enough money to do something for every age group, so you
earmark your most receptive ages," says Barbara Robison, manager of consumer
affairs for Sunkist Growers.  Maggie André, vice president of communications
for the Oregon-Washington-California Pear Bureau echoes this and adds, "We 
must
get to children while they are young and are developing food preferences that
will stay with them for a lifetime," she explains.  "We know that taste
preferences are set very early in life, so we created a program for 
pre-schoolers
to introduce them to the taste of onions, and we link the farm to the family,"
explained the program director for the National Onion Commission.

The California Artichoke Advisory Board, the Washington Apple Commission, the
Leafy Greens Council and the California Carrot Advisory Board all distribute
educational materials which target young consumers.  Pork producers, cereal
makers and fast-food restaurants feel the same imperative to target children 
as
consumers of their products. Dr. Helen Caldicott, founder of Physicians for
Social Responsibility, says that McDonald’s uses advanced equipment to 
monitor
the brain waves of children watching sample commercials until it finds one 
that
makes them go ga-ga.  If you ever ride past a McDonalds in a bus with thirty
children, you can see the effects of some very powerful brainwashing.
The Potash and Phosphate Institute has a coloring book for young students,
Fun with the Plant Nutrient Team.  Its characters - Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and
Potassium with N, P and K on their hats - make plants grow.  (Should NOFA
produce a comic book with the organic matter team, OM, OM, and OM?)

These agricultural booster materials tell the kids that the farmer grows the
grain and ships it to the processor/packager who ships it to the market and
out it comes as, for example,"Lucky Charms".   Those boosters of the system 
are
less quick to point out that each bowl the students get for breakfast contains
only a half-cent worth of grain (its growing already subsidized) and a
half-cent worth of flavorings or vitamin spray.  This costs the taxpayers 
somewhere
between 30 and 50 cents per serving, including additional packaging,
transportation and administrative costs.  Then, the local taxpayers get to 
pay for the
bowl’s disposal, by burning it in an incinerator.

The much trumpeted abundant, low-cost food in America seems not to trickle
down into the urban areas.  The poor spend a third or more of their income on
food.  Fresh vegetables and whole grains are not readily available.  Based on
the abundant trash, these elementary students snack mostly on small bags of
chips at $4 to $6 per pound and little plastic containers of colored high 
fructose
corn syrup water priced at $4 per gallon.  The chips are loaded with fat and
salt and frequently artificial colors and flavors.  The drinks are
artificially flavored and colored.   It’s hard to imagine a more damaging 
diet,
especially for young African-Americans.  In the suburb nearby, where the 
schools are
better funded, the classes are smaller, the skins are whiter and the taxes are
lower, giant new (and large old) supermarkets advertise free food.

Although there are a lot of problems in the schools that aren’t related to
the food system, its negative effects extend into the lives of these children.
Many of them wouldn’t be in Bridgeport if large-scale, chemical agriculture,
and racially-biased government policies hadn’t pushed their parents and
grandparents out of rural areas of the south, the Caribbean Islands and 
Central
America.

Twelve years ago, I began working with high school teachers in New Haven on
the design and implimentation of a food and agriculture curriculum.   One of
the successful outcomes of this effort is the High School in the Community
ecology course which is conducted on a small organic farm created each spring 
in a
city park.  For about eight weeks, four hours each day, high school students
study ecology in a wood-stove heated shed, tend animals, raise vegetables, 
make
compost and explain various aspects of their farm to visiting elementary
school children.  We found that in many cases, this class really engaged 
students
in learning for the first time in their school careers.  The farm class
stimulated questions and encouraged the students to make connections.  Even 
if food
issues weren’t important, the educational results recommend this style of
learning.  The New Haven Ecology Project is working to create a school using 
this
model.

I started doing this work, in part, because there were issues that I felt
were important: organic vs chemical agriculture, energy use, and the loss of
genetic diversity, to name a few.  However, I soon learned that talking about
these issues with most urban students was sort of like planting seeds on 
asphalt.
Our culture doesn’t encourage thinking, much less critical thinking.  There
are high school students who can’t read, and whole classes filled with 
students
who have no idea of what a democracy is.

During the ecology course, however, on the farm with animals, plants and a
compost system, students are interested and excited.  The asphalt begins to
break up.  First hand knowledge provides a context for exploring more complex
issues.  In many cases, this knowledge is what their parents and grandparents 
grew
up with.

Working with high school and elementary students has strengthened my belief
in the necessity for very major changes in the current food system.  There is
no incentive in this system for anyone to provide these children now or as
adults with fresh healthy food.  The only jobs it provides are low-paying,
indoors, and an integral part of a system which pushes unhealthy food and 
causes
ecological damage.

The most likely path toward a socially-just, environmentally-sound and
democratic food system is for almost everyone to participate in growing, 
processing
and cooking some of his or her own food.

These students, although battered by  poverty, disease, abuse, and our
culture, are so excited by sawing a board, planting a seed, turning compost, 
cooking
and helping that I can imagine them creating a just and sustainable,
locally-sufficient society. They and the way nature responds to our care, are 
my
greatest sources of hope.

NOFA and its members play key roles in bringing this vision of the future to
reality.  Keep up the good work. There’s lots of it to do.