Brookside Farm is a new project at an elementary school in Willits, CA. The greater Willits area has a population of 13,500 people in a rural setting about 150 miles north of San Francisco, CA.

A collapse of the logging industry and the closing of manufacturing plants have depressed the local economy. Most students at the Brookside Elementary School are on free and reduced lunch programs. Brookside Farm offers the radical notion that a school can provide fresh, organic produce to its students and the wider community at no cost to the school district.

The school district approved setting aside about 1 acre of the school property to develop a mini-farm that would grow organic food and serve as an educational center. Soil and solar exposure at the site are ideal and the water table is high enough for efficient summer irrigation. Brookside Farm aims to be a demonstration site for how to integrate renewable energy into food production, storage, processing, distribution and preparation.

The Need for School Farming

Purpose: Student Health Crisis and Educational Opportunity
Educators are increasingly aware of how nutrition and physical activity influence the learning process. Students fed a balanced diet of high quality foods are more likely to be able to pay attention, cause fewer disruptions to others, and be ready to learn. Opportunities to develop sturdy bones, strong muscles, efficient hearts, balance and coordination also positively impact academic achievement. The common sense wisdom comes down to this: a healthy body is better able to support the development of a good mind.

Because of long-term structural changes in U.S. society, including the rise of the fast food industry, the health of many children is at risk.¹ These health risks threaten the ability of schools to maintain standards of excellence. However, the crisis also presents schools with an opportunity. Responding to difficult social conditions by embracing novel solutions can lead to positive transformation within schools and their associated communities.²

School Role: Creative Educational Opportunity
More than just food is involved. School farms are platforms for creating positive, systemic improvement in the total school environment, including feedbacks among physical health, culture, and academic performance.

Directly related to education is the fact that children are very tactile beings who learn faster and retain knowledge better when they are physically and emotionally engaged in the subject. A school farm provides a dynamic, living laboratory of objects and processes that lend purpose to the abstractions of the classroom.

The Vision

School Farming: Background and Benefits
American culture sprung out of Western European agrarian traditions and our current diets reflect this -- being dominated by grains such as wheat and corn. However, industrialization of agriculture and the automobile infrastructure have combined to make highly processed, high calorie foods overly available to a basically sedentary population.

The solution offered here is to work within the framework of the agrarian tradition, but "relocalize" the means of production. Many people appreciate the quality and diversity offered by farmers markets and homegrown vegetables. This appreciation extends beyond nutritional values to include recognition of the beauty of farms and the personal relationships among farmers, the land, and the community fed.

Because of this ingrained interest, many schools with adequate land now produce some of their own food and receive tremendous support from the community. Experience elsewhere has shown that students will accept unfamiliar food when they are part of the cultivation and food preparation processes.³

In other localities, the clear benefits to students are:

1. High quality, healthy food
2. Knowledge about the local environment and their place in it
3. Physical activity assisting in aspects of production, processing and preparation
4. Pride from accomplishment
5. Less disruptive behavior and better concentration
6. Improved learning in the classroom

Brookside Farm Vision: Three Years from Today
Brookside School Farm has become a source of healthy food and pride for the students, staff, district and community. The farm has improved the school's organization and infrastructure, resulting in positive changes in the culture and climate, and academic achievement.

Students are healthier because they are eating better, they are more physically active, and they simply enjoy the beauty and wonder of the farm environment. This has improved their attitudes about school, and life in general, and this shift enhances their ability to learn. Students are continuing to improve academically and the teachers are finding more creative ways to enrich their curriculum by using the farm as a living classroom. Students practice their spelling by making labels and signs. They practice their math by counting the harvest and selling produce at their farm stand. Just about any discussion in science is made tangible by going to the farm. The crops planted provide a window into geography and history, e.g., potatoes originate from the Andes of South America, sunflowers are from North America, corn is from Mexico, sorghum is from North Africa, and wheat is from the Middle East. Kids are eager to gain practical life skills, and they now learn how to produce their own food, how to store it, and prepare it for meals while reinforcing their basic academics. Some are more drawn to the biology of the farm, such as the worms in the dirt, while others like the mechanical aspects, such as how the water pump works.

The influence of Brookside Farm goes beyond the campus. The healthy habits students learn go home with them. Parents meeting their children after school are often led to the farm stand and shown the vegetables and fruits their own kids have harvested that day. The kids are eager to share this food with their families. Many families begin their own gardens and new patterns of eating take hold.

Viability

Small Farms: A Growing Business
American farms are often on the order of 100s or 1000s of acres, but most farmers in the U.S., and certainly worldwide, work on small farms. Commercially viable farms of less than one to several acres are becoming more common recently -- even in the U.S.⁴ Nearly all of these new small farms employ "organic" methods.

Mendocino County agriculture has shifted from a diverse food system to specialization in the areas of animal husbandry, viticulture and fruit trees. However, within Mendocino County there are a number of small farms that grow a wide variety of food crops. Live Power Community Farm in Round Valley, for example, uses 5 of its 40 acres each year for seasonal vegetable cultivation and yields enough to support the produce needs of 160 families for about 6 months.⁵ The Oz Farm outside of Manchester has about 7 acres in production, half in orchards and half in seasonal cultivation.⁶ Ecology Action has "mini farms" of about an acre on both Pine Mountain and Ridgewood Ranch.⁷ These contemporary examples plus historic records show that much more agricultural diversity is possible in Mendocino County than most people alive today realize.

Small farms employ full-time, professional farmers and are proven economically viable. With their high quality labor, small farms are able to manage crop diversity, adapt to change rapidly, and be delightfully creative. While more and more large farms are going out of business, every year more small farms are born.

Small farm success relies on direct relationships to consumers, thereby bypassing commodity brokers, shipping agents, food processors and the overhead of supermarkets. For fresh foods in the U.S., a typical farm receives only about 20 cents from a dollar spent at a retail store, and this percentage has been steadily declining for decades.⁸ As energy and fertilizer costs have risen within the past few years, on-farm costs have climbed at the same time distribution and marketing costs have, causing many farmers to ask if they can afford to grow food.⁹ By contrast, farms able to short-circuit the larger food system have remained economically viable.

Farm Development and Management: Establishing Partnerships
Brookside Farm is being established as an economically viable enterprise to free it from fluctuations in school budgets and grant dependency, and to serve as a model for local agriculture. North Coast Opportunities (an existing 501c3 corporation) is the fiscal agent of Brookside Farm, and oversees the farm's Advisory Team. The Advisory Team is composed of representatives from NCO, Brookside staff, Brookside parents, and community members.

The school has allocated a significant area, nearly 1-acre, for the farm. An economic analysis suggests that the 1-acre scale is sufficient to support a full-time farmer through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and educational opportunities agreed upon by Mendocino College.

Future Goals: Local Food System

The long-term goal is to develop a diverse array of products from a polyculture system that will demonstrate how a local food system is possible, and creates many interesting vocational opportunities. Farmers are just the beginning of a system that includes trades related to energy, storage, transportation, processing, food preparation, and recycling. Our overall budget goals, therefore, go beyond what is needed for growing vegetables.

By being in the town, associated with the education of elementary, high school and college students, and selling produce through a CSA and market stand, Brookside Farm will charm and inspire the community. This kind of project gives hope to those familiar with the liabilities of our global, industrialized food system as it creates a tangible alternative.

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¹ Kim et al. "Incidence and Remission Rates of Overweight Among Children Aged 5 to 13 Years in a District-Wide School Surveillance System." American Journal of Public Health 95(9): 1588-1594 http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/95/9/1588
² http://www.naturalovens.com/Better_Health/Schools/index.php; http://www.feedmebetter.com; http://www.schoollunchinitiative.org
³ http://www.edibleschoolyard.org; http://www.newfarm.org/features/2005/0905/food_project/index.shtml; http://www.thefoodproject.org; http://www.soilassociation.org/foodforlife
⁴ Barbara Berst Adams. 2004. Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage In Partnership with the Earth. New World Publishing, Auburn, California. http://www.microecofarming.com
⁵ http://www.covelo.net/agriculture/farm/pages/farms_lpf.shtml
⁶ http://www.oz-farm.com
⁷ http://www.growbiointensive.org
⁸ http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodPriceSpreads/spreads/table1.htm; http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodPriceSpreads/bill/
⁹ http://www.txfb.org/TexasAgriculture/2005/102105/102105opinions.htm; http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/state/13257576.htm