When the Farm Becomes a Classroom
By Esther James
Some farmers host school field trips as a way to stay economically viable. For the kids, farm trips can teach them to better appreciate fresh wholesome foods.
“For two hours every weekday morning in October, the vegetable farm is part theater, part zoo, part nature center. At 9 a.m. we get ready to greet our visitors—we open the stand, bring the tractors and trailers down the hill, pick greens, stock the pumpkin piles. At 10 they arrive. The quiet parking lot fills with mini-vans and station wagons, school buses line the road, and bouncing, cheerful preschoolers swarm all over the pumpkins. The volunteer tour guides wait for their assignments. The first hayride gets loaded. The chickens greet the groups of schoolchildren. The beet patch gets stomped. By noon, the parking lot is empty again. And the farm goes back to its normal, quiet, vegetable-producing ways.” Hana Newcomb, farmer, Potomac Vegetable Farms
Every fall, Potomac Vegetable Farms, a Northern Virginia farm devoted to sustainable agriculture for almost 50 years, hosts hundreds of school children. I worked at the farm during summers between college, and it gave me a start down the path of helping to keep farmers on their land by working at American Farmland Trust. I still volunteer at Potomac Vegetable Farms whenever I can, and those fall mornings are some of my favorite times to be here. Last year, while leading a tour for four-year-olds, I recognized their teacher as my own preschool teacher, and she reminded me that she’d taken me on this same tour 25 years ago.
The farm tours are a good way to give kids a much-needed taste of agriculture, while adding a new revenue source for the farm. With only two percent of the U.S. population in agriculture, too few children know anyone who happens to have a peach orchard, an asparagus bed or a milking parlor. To visit this farm and leave with a little pumpkin, each child pays only a few dollars—but for the farm, the dollars add up. Hosting tours is not for every farmer, though—it takes flexibility and an effusive personality to be comfortable with 500 kids traipsing through your farm in one morning.
Potomac Vegetable Farms has been doing these tours for years, and they run like clockwork. Kids go on the wagons, with teachers and parents on hand to keep them safe. We give a short, slow drive around a few fields of the farm, and then the kids pile out for a walking tour. They always love animals the best, and fortunately there are some placid resident horses as well as a henhouse to show off. The family sometimes borrows pigs, goats and a cow for the fall to add extra animal excitement.
The host farmers will tell you, without any hesitation, that their true audience is the adults in the crowd. The adults need these experiences too, because they are the shoppers and the cooks in their households. The farmers have a mission to teach everyone about the importance of eating local foods and supporting local farmers. On most mornings, the chaperones of the school groups learn as much as the preschool children—and many get to taste a beet just pulled from the ground for the first time in their lives.
The Farm Bill Impacts Our Food Choices
The 2007 Farm Bill has a major influence on what our nation’s farms produce, and how easy it is for consumers to access fresh, healthy foods. Currently, U.S. farm policy provides little support for the farms that produce our fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts—even though only 14 percent of our nation’s children consume at least two servings of fruit per day, and only 20 percent consume three or more servings of vegetables.
Most of the farm bill programs that help Americans add more fresh, healthy foods to their diets are under-funded. The following programs, in total, receive less than one-fifth of one percent of the billions of subsidy dollars that go to wheat, corn soy and other commodity producers:
- The Farmers’ Market Promotion Program, which supports the creation of farmers’ markets in new areas, receives only $1 million per year.
- The Community Food Projects Program, which supports projects that increase the availability of nutritious fresh food to low-income communities, is funded at just $5 million per year.
- The Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program, which provides free fruit and vegetables to schools, reaches only a few hundred schools nationwide with its $9 million per year funding.
- The Farm to Cafeteria Program, created to incorporate locally grown foods into school lunches, install school gardens and expand school nutrition education, currently receives no funding.
This fall, ask your members of Congress to support a farm and food bill that allows schools, low-income communities and all Americans to eat healthier foods. Learn more!
