Episode 1.3 Transcript
Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. Today we have an opportunity to sit down with Sara Churgin, District Manager of the Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District, and Margie Brennan, the K-8 Science Coach for Portsmouth School Department to learn about the Portsmouth Ag Innovation Farm, a student-driven community farm education program that fosters student problem solving, authentic learning and community collaboration. Welcome!
Sara and Margie: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Dinah: Can you each introduce yourself to the listeners and in particular share how your work and interests are connected to the topic of farm to school?
Sara: I am Sarah Churgin, as you said. I’m the district manager for Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District, and we are an organization that works with landowners combating natural resource concerns, so water quality, soil quality, air quality. So we work with a lot of farmers, which brought us to the property that we are on at the moment. It’s five acres of farmland and it was fallow and we had the opportunity to create anything there. And I met Margie and we came up with this fabulous idea of what we were going to create.
Margie: My name’s Margie Brennan. I have been with the Portsmouth School Department for six years. This is my 22nd year of teaching, and I moved into the role of instructional coach and curriculum coordinator for kindergarten through grade eight. How this connected is we’ve always had school gardens at each of the three districts that I have worked at, and when Sarah contacted the principal, the principal made sure that I was connected to the meeting and that’s when the magic happened. Sarah and I met, and we’ll tell you our story in a little bit, but once we connected, I don’t think we’ve ever disconnected.
Dinah: Sara, you said you came into five acres of fallow farmland. Can you share the backstory of this farm project? When and how did it become what it is?
Sara: So I can tell you it was December of 2019 and there is a gentleman who’s a farmer, his name is Martin Beck, and he has a livestock business, and we had worked with him for best management practices on his property, providing financial and technical assistance on that. Property is a large piece of property. Part of it was fallow and the landowner didn’t want it to be fallow. So Martin spoke to me about it and said, do you think Eastern District would want to do something with it? And I was like, sure. Having really no idea what we would do with it. The middle school, Portsmouth Middle School is right is a half a mile if even down the street from the farm. So I met with Joáo Arruda who was the fabulous principal at the time, to talk about something like what can we do here?
And remember again, December, 2019. So Margie came to the meeting and we were like, wow, we could have some sort of farm program there. Then we hit into 2020 and Covid, but it didn’t stop us. Margie was a fabulous virtual teacher because everybody had to be at home and she did afterschool classes. Which kids–I always say this voluntarily–well, maybe then some parents were pushing, but voluntarily signed up to do something having to do with an ag program, really not having any backstory to it. Margie hadn’t met these kids before. 25 kids virtually created what is now for the most part at the farm. So I’ll turn it to Margie.
Margie: So at the time the Portsmouth school department was going into a building plan, the state had offered incentives for us to either rebuild or reconstruct our schools. And Sarah had previously done a great project with one of our elementary schools doing an outdoor learning zone. We call it the olas. It’s got a rain garden and it’s just amazing. It’s outdoor learning for the kids. It’s a nice space. So when she had approached the principal, and I, the big worry was that we were going to build and there was going to be construction. And having had done two school gardens at two districts prior to, I was a little apprehensive. However, when Sarah came in and said, Hey, there’s this great space. I went down and I took a picture of it and how I presented it in December, January, was I went to each of the grades classes during their science classes, and I presented this picture and I’m a huge project-based learning person, and I said, here’s this blank canvas.
I’m looking for students to come up with an idea. And I left it at that covid shut us down, and about three weeks in I was restless, and I knew my own kids were restless. So I proposed doing a virtuals club and like Sarah said, 25 kids signed up and for eight weeks, two days a week for an hour, hour and a half, we met. And what they ended up doing was they broke into groups where they talked about high tunnel, gardening, solar power, irrigation, and of course regular gardening. And we had some kids in there that weren’t so much about the agriculture, they were artistic. And so those kids put together the vision, drew a picture of this map and said, this is what we want, this is where we want it. And by the end of the eight weeks we had this beautiful plan put in place.
So we did, on Father’s Day during June, before our state governor shut down any afterschool programming, we actually met with 20, I had say about 25 people, and that was families. So parents and siblings came out and we just did a strip of land for the summer. And when you talk about project-based learning, this was it in a nutshell. I mean, our water source was about two football fields away. And we put out, we need hoses, and the hoses came and we threw ’em down and I said, now what? How are we going to get the water there? And that’s how this beautiful program started. It really was throwing it back at the kids and saying, what do you want to do and how do we solve this problem?
Dinah: So if we were walking on this five acres of farmland today, what would we see? What would we notice?
Sara: You would notice that the drawing that was made in the winter of 2020 is exactly, except for what they’ve added since, what is the footprint that is on the farm. So there’s the high tunnel. We have deer fencing, we have the school garden, we have irrigation, we have composting. We are working towards solar. We haven’t had electricity. So this is our fourth growing season. And we’ve done, the kids have done all of this with no electricity actually right now, it’s gorgeous. It’s absolutely breathtaking– to look at it and to remember what it was like when nothing was there. And it’s the kids.
Margie: Yeah. So if you pull into the farm area, there’s this little classroom up on a hill and it looks tiny, but we can fit about 20 kids in there. We often break into small groups. So there’s about six to 10 kids in there with an educator. It overlooks this square deer fencing area that you can imagine in the middle has this shade pavilion that when it’s really hot and we take breaks, we meet out there, and then it’s a quad. So we have some really cool, we have our chicken coop and garden, we have a community garden, we have a pumpkin patch, and then we have this cool micro clover. We’re trying new, no-till methods. Further down we have this beautiful 75 foot high tunnel that is loaded with produce and flowers and sunflowers and our equipment. We have a 30 by 30 tractor shed.
We have several smaller sheds with our equipment. In the back you’ll see arborvitae. And in between the tube arbor vines, we are starting a food forest there. Beyond that is a beautiful reservoir called Sisson Pond, and it’s a dirt road that goes past Sisson Pond or through Sisson Pond I should say. And when you drive past it, you’re actually going to Farmer Beck’s, new England grass fed beef, 20 acres. So he’s got his heads down there on the other side of the pond, and we utilize the pond as well. So you’ll see on a camp day, we have a fishing instructor down there teaching the kids not only how to tie a fishing lure, but different types of lures for different types of fish. So if you were there on a given day, you would see kids just milling around and if you watched them, they all had their own individual tasks. Everybody’s doing something, nobody’s sitting around. It’s a very, very, very cool place to be.
Dinah: So with this farm having, and I think I read this, that the learning on the farm is student driven. Could you share more detail about how students lead the activities and learning how they, I guess, pick a focus on a project?
Sara: So this was when we first got the chickens and we had the deer fencing up and the door to the deer fencing didn’t go all the way down to the dirt. So the chickens, those rascals, were getting out under the door and they were like, Ms. Brennan-the chickens! And she said, well, what do you think? What are we going to do? And so there was chicken wire fencing and they measured, measured, cut and put down on the bottom so it then took up the difference so the chickens couldn’t get out and the whole thing was videoed. The kids were laughing, they were having a great time with one another, but they were doing this project. And when it was all done and it didn’t take that long, Margie said, so what did we use today to talk about what sort of experiential, what from steam were we using? And they didn’t know they were leading something, but it was just, okay, we have a problem. How are we going to solve it? And they did it.
Margie: Yeah, that’s always Sara’s favorite. And it’s true. I mean, that’s what we do. We throw down garden hoses and say, how do we figure this out? And we let them lead, you know? It’s taken a long time for some non-educators and some educators to even step back and allow the kids to fail because that’s what we do. We’re not a mass produced farm. We are an educational facility. So one, after I think our first successful summer during the winter, I ran a soil science club, and I really didn’t think I was going to get a lot of interest because it was an extra science class after school. And I got 25 kids and we learned about regenerative soil, we learned about sequestering carbon and what we can do to help climate change. And we watched Kiss the Earth, I think it was called, and the kids really saw the danger of our soil with farming. Our fifth grade students had just learned about the Dust Bowl. So we applied a lot of our science standards to that class, and the kids realized that in order to help, we have to stop tilling. So from there, they started doing a lot of research on different types of tilling methods or no tilling methods. And if you look at our farm right now, there’s different strips. So we have a traditional garden, we have a Holger culture, which is a German method, it’s like a mound. We have the composting type garden. We have the micro-clover garden where you’re literally just growing on micro-clover and you make strips for just the plants that you want to grow. In our high tunnel, we have raised beds, we have hydroponics, we have in-ground planting. So the kids have all done that. And through Sarah’s organization, we’ve hooked up to the soil. Sarah, help me remember the no undies soil,
Sara: Soil Your undies!
Margie: Soil, your undies. Yes. And where we take men’s briefs, Fruit of the Loom underwear, and we plant ’em in the ground, we dig a hole and we put ’em in these different places and after 60 days, we dig ’em back up. And the more that is gone, the healthier your garden is or your soil is. So the kids have really gotten a kick out of that. We do the traditional testing for soil, but that is a really good visual for the kids to understand what is happening underground. We talk to them about microorganisms all the time, and that I believe is a really good visualization for some of our diverse needs of kids.
Dinah: What an engaging fun activity, especially as a middle school teacher, I would say that’s the perfect target. So what grade– who gets to do this? What students and what grades and how do they get involved?
Margie: The afterschool program right now is for our middle school kids, grade five through eight, not only Portsmouth. Sarah has an educational coordinator for our Middletown, so Rhode Island where we live on Aquidneck Island, we’re on an island within Rhode Island. So our island makes up of Portsmouth, Middletown and Newport. So now we have the Middletown kids coming a couple days after school, Portsmouth kids coming a couple days after school. And then we have homeschool, we have military kids during the summer, we have the Newport kids come out for summer camps along with our own summer camp programs. And during the school year, we’ve had grades 3, 4, 6, and 7 come out. Grade five will be coming out this year. So this coming year we’ve tied it into all of our curriculum and the kids will be coming out, and what they do is when they come out at the younger grades, we break them into stations and we have them do something that’s very relevant to their science standards at the time. So as the curriculum coordinator, I’m able to see the scope and sequence of kindergarten through eight, and it’s very helpful so that we can build on it. So even if they come out year after year, they’re starting to see the build of what they’ve learned the years prior to.
Sara: And we also are working towards, because we started this, and so we had eighth graders who then went into high school and we are trying to incorporate, we are writing grants, so that because we have found that the kids who go to high school, they have to have jobs after school or they get involved with sports. So we’ve been applying for some grants that have externships. So it would be able to pay for the kids who really do enjoy the program and really want to continue to be able to continue coming to the farm and be able to pay them for that.
Margie: And during the summer, a lot of the high school kids that have really passionately been part of our program have been coming out and actually helping us almost as leaders in training where they grab a group and work with our kids. We constantly try and keep it from third grade to high school.
Dinah: Why do you feel it’s so important for students to learn about sustainable agriculture?
Sara: They’re our future. I mean we unfortunately, well Margie’s younger than I am, generations, my generation, generations before, we’ve done everything to destroy in my opinion, and the kids are our future. And it’s crucial for them to know how to save what has been happening. One of the things that, another thing that I’m now trying to do is, one of my staff members and I went through a gap certification program so general agricultural practices, because we would like to be able to actually, we are part farm to school because we are doing the education part and everything. We donate to food pantries, but we want to be able to have the kids not only plant weed and harvest, but also get their food into the cafeteria. So that’s like the last piece that’s really farm to table and being able to expose even more kids at the school and what pride will the students have being able to say, wow, these are the green beans that we planted, or whatever it is. And yeah, they are our future, I don’t know how else to say it.
Margie: So I just remember, I think it was about 15 years ago, my first school garden, we were able to produce enough in a sustainable garden that our principal was so excited, that she had our whole elementary school– I was a fourth grade teacher at the time– go up to the high school and she purchased turkeys for Thanksgiving and all the fixings, or I should say the gravy and the mashed potatoes, but the rest of the table fixings were from our garden. And it was an amazing thing for me to see the kids that had worked with me in that garden, sit at a table and look at an entire kindergarten through fourth grade and look around and say, I grew that. We donate most of our produce to the food banks on the islands. We do St. John’s in Portsmouth, and then we’re starting MLK in Middletown. But a lot of the foods we have been taking, and I have some wonderful teammates who can cook, and they take the food and they cook it either at the farm or at home, and they bring it back so the kids can see what healthy food looks like and how to prepare it so that it’s delicious. You know, it sparks some excitement that we are doing this. But I think more importantly, I think in the long run, our kids and their families as they grow and have their families, their understanding how to bring back our global importance of not only eating but sustaining our environment.
Dinah: So if people want to get involved in this, if someone’s hearing this and their student lives in your district or anyone wants to support this, how can they learn more about how to get involved?
Sara: They can go to Eastern District’s website, easternriconservation.org, and under programs there is all how you can get involved with the farm.
Margie: And we have Facebook and Instagram pages as well that people can follow along.
Dinah:Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you want to share?
Sara: Margie is the most amazing teacher I’ve ever seen in all of my years honestly, just the experience that she gives the kids, it really is incredible.
Margie: Thanks Sara. Well, it’s easy when I have a partner like you who just supports me all the time. It’s funny, I was just recently coming back from Ohio with my husband, but he said to me, he said, wow, he said, I know you have your plan for the fall. He said, but what other things do you have planned? What’s the new thing? And I said, you know I actually paused for quite a bit of time. And he’s like, it’s okay if you don’t. You have a lot going on. And I said, well, I think of things, but it’s not what I think of, it’s what the kids are going to come up with. So even if I have these ideas, it doesn’t really matter because unless the kids come up with it, we really try not to pursue it too much. Right now, we’re very happy with our kids. We have over 70 in Portsmouth that are participating, over 25 in Middletown, about 20 in Newport. And then of course within the school department, we have about 400 that are exposed to the farm throughout the year. So I feel like we’ve got a good start, year technically, year four hands-on.
And I do want to add, we have the secret to our success has also been connections with a lot of other nonprofits and universities. We have the University of Rhode Island comes and uses our land for the bee study that they’ve done for the past two years. And when they come out, they work with our kids, they show our kids what they’re doing, and it gets the kids excited like, Oh, I can do this as a job, this is field work? We just recently partnered with Rhode Island Wild Plant Society where they’re setting up a high tunnel right on property so that our kids will be able to understand how to propagate, how to find the native. They’re very good at working with invasive. They do tons of projects on it, but to understand it with a native wild plant society right there on the property is pretty amazing. We’ve worked with the composting program. Sara, what else am I missing? We’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits. We work with a lot of local farmers that come and help us and give us their take on problems that we have. Why isn’t this growing? What can we do better? URI Master Gardener program. Our other school is Salve Regina, and they’re talking about agro-culture, the study of soil. And then Roger Williams is working with our biotech and they’re interested in coming out and seeing what kind of projects they can do with our high school kids. So collaboration is key. We’re not a standalone organization. Sara, myself as Portsmouth Ag Innovation, we know the beauty of bringing in expertise from elsewhere and having them talk to our kids. So it’s been enlightening. I’ve learned so much from the kids as well and these organizations. So it’s been great. It’s been a great experience,
Dinah: What an incredible program. I hope I can come visit and hearing you speak, I just wish all students had access to this from across the northeast and across the nation. But it will be really an incredible thing if all students had access to this really dynamic way to learn and to care for the climate and to understand where food comes from and to see the benefits and the outcome of their actions.
Margie: Well, anytime you want to come down, if you want to bring some kids or teachers down, we’d love to have you.
Dinah: Thank you so much, and thank you so much for giving me your time today to share this.
Sara and Margie: Thank you for reaching out. Really. Thank you for having us. Yes.
Dinah: This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or farm to school in the northeast, go to northeastfarmtoschool.org
Phone: (413) 253-3844
Email: info@massfarmtoschool.org
