Student Farm grows crops of student skills

There are more than fruits and vegetables growing at the UC Davis Student Farm.

Students manage the 20-acre farm on the west side of campus in a way that maintains the ecosystem. Among the vegetables and flowering plants, butterflies flitter, bees pollinate and worms dig.

But as these students tend to the gardens or lead tours for schoolchildren, they’re also cultivating skills and nurturing knowledge about organic farming.

The farm, which focuses on education, research and outreach, has been around since 1977. What’s new is the increasing interest in its approach, said Mark Van Horn, an organic crop production instructor who is director of the Student Farm.

“There’s more concern for organics and knowing where their food comes from,” he said as he walked next to rows of lettuce and peas.

In 2008-09, there were about 1,400 students in the 12 majors of the agricultural science division of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. A new major in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems has been proposed, and some courses for the major are already being offered.

Cultivating different interests

This quarter alone, about 150 students are involved in field-based learning programs, Project Compost or lab-related activities at the farm.

Because most of today’s UC Davis students come from an urban setting, this may be their first time on a farm. “Sixty or 70 years ago, more students grew up on a farm,” he said.

The farm attracts students for different reasons. Some are studying biology, entomology, plant science or soils. Others interested in child development or agricultural and environmental education lead tours for elementary school students.

Junior Jeff Mailes, 22, grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. “It is not a place where farming takes place beyond people’s backyards,” he said.

The farm has evolved to suit those students. Today, “it’s more of an interdisciplinary thing,” Van Horn said. What students learn in the classroom and practice in the field helps them understand the whole picture.

Focus is sustainable agriculture

The focus is on sustainable agriculture principles and practices, with an emphasis on experiential learning. The program encourages student initiative, creativity and exploration through internships, classes and research projects.

Mailes works as an intern on the farm and earns credit toward his major, environmental science and management. He said he enjoys working with others who are passionate about plants and sustainable agriculture.

In the classes, students learn theory and get to apply it immediately. In the Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture course, for example, students transplant baby lettuce from the greenhouse to ground fortified with various soil amendments and then observe differences in how the plants grow.

Jasmine Nazari, 21, is an international agricultural development major from San Francisco. She called the Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture class life-changing. “It opened my eyes to the biological and environmental cycles around us,” she said. “It made me aware of the way we can work with our natural systems, rather than against them.”

On the farm, students work in groups of three to five as volunteers, interns or part of a class held in the Bowley Center, to help maintain three garden programs:

• The Ecological Garden, a half-acre of flowers, herbs, fruit trees, vines and insect-attracting plants where ecological horticulture and garden-based learning are put into practice. “We look at the garden as a diverse ecosystem with a lot of different types of plants and insects, and how they work together,” Van Horn said.
• The Market Garden, a four-acre section dedicated to hands-on learning about small-scale, organic vegetable production and marketing. Students sell the produce to the ASUCD Coffee House, the campus farmers’ market and to about 60 subscribers to Student Harvests, its community-supported agriculture service.
• The Kids in the Garden program, where interns lead tours for elementary school students four or five times a week, teaching thousands of youngsters each year about gardens, insects and nutrition. “If you take kids over there and get them to pick lettuce and wash it, they get excited about eating it,” Van Horn said.

There’s also Project Compost, where some campus and farm waste is converted into a rich soil amendment, along with a garden section of native plants to attract native pollinators. For larger research projects, there’s the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility, a 100-acre plot west of campus that’s part of the Agriculture Sustainability Institute.

Nazari concluded: “The Student Farm teaches us about abundance, compromises, patience, diversity, integration and discipline. In fact I would argue that it manifests the physical discipline that the academic institution of Davis tries to instill.”

For more information on the Student Farm, go to http://studentfarm.ucdavis.edu/.