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Keeping it Growing |
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Keep it Growing: Why we grow food hereby Jesse Dutton Miller Another spring has sprung and another group of students has begun learning how to grow food at the Evergreen Organic Farm. The Practice of Sustainable Agriculture program is an Evergreen tradition; this is approximately the 31st year that students have grown food here.
It's a shame that Evergreen couldn't hold onto John, an expert seed-saver who is known and respected around the world. It's hard to blame him for leaving a temporary, half-time position when he got offered something better, even though it meant leaving Cascadia, one of the best regions in the world for growing food. The lesson is that Evergreen needs to support the Sustainable Agriculture Program, a pillar of the college that draws students from around the country, by providing funding for a full-time, permanent faculty member. It turns out that things are working out well for us this quarter. After a chorus of student protest of the cancelation announcement, the college hired Gaililee Carlisle, an experienced farmer and Evergreen alumn, to teach the academic portion of our program. Melissa Barker, the farm manager who facilitates the internship portion of our class, has been bumped up to full-time to help out with the transition. Since a lot of Greeners aren't even aware that the organic farm exists, though we're just a short walk through the Douglas-firs from upper campus, I'll tell you a little more about why I think growing food here matters. Within our lifetimes we will experience major chanes in the economic structures that shape our lives. As oil supplies diminish and transportation costs increase dramatically in the next decades, the systems that curently supply us with staple foods will incur radical changes. Distant monoculture agriculture currently supplies food for most Americans; it is for example the principle landscape of my home state of Kansas. Monoculture agriculture relies too heavily on oil and its derivitive chemicals while failing to adapt to local ecologies or enrich local economies, thus limiting its efficiency. In the future, locally-grown food will be at a premium, and it will be to our collective advantage to have many people who are knowledgeble in the art and science of agriculture. Another term for this concept is "food security." Beside the aforemetioned approaching paradigm shift / global freak-out, it just makes sense to grow food because local food provides better nutrition and taste than food that has been trucked in from California. Despite the hard work, many of us find the work fun and rewarding. In Los Angeles, for example, rich people pay serious money to do “horticultural therapy.” The outspoken agricultural vocalist and philosopher Wendell Berry has pointed out that our culture currently disregards agriculture as a proletarian occupation unsuitable for upstanding citizens. This subtle classim helps exlain why so few of us hungry Americans choose to grow our food, and why those of us who do are often disgregarded as stupid rednecks, or conversely as stupid hippies who have choosen to throw off our privilages and get dirty. The truth of the matter is that agriculture is an incredibly complex science; it is a life's work. In the season that my classmates and I will study agricluture at Evergreen we will not become masters of it. Annual cropping is a practice plagued by crop diseases, pests, soil mineral imbalances, inflated real estate prices, and other political and environmental challenges. Some of us look to perrenial polyculture systems for solutions to some of the problems endemic to annual agriculture, but the design of such systems also entails a sublime understanding of local ecology and politics. I'm just getting started. The rest will have to wait for future issues; I'll be writing an agriculture-related article in the CPJ every week to help bridge the gap between upper campus and the farm. In the mean time, come on down to visit the farm, volunteer, or grow your own plot at the community garden. You can find the trail to the farm off the service road behind Lab 2. Come on down and say hi. We'll be here. Jesse Emerson Sequoia Sempervirens Dutton Miller is a senior enrolled on PSA. Please send feedback to zapatilla@riseup.net.
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The Center for Ecological Learning and Living Evergreen Organic FarmLocation:2712 Lewis Rd, Olympia, WA 98505 Phone: (360) 867-6160 Organic Farm Manager: Melissa Barker Academic Faculty Contact: Martha Rosemeyer Farm Caretakers: Community Gardens Coordinator:
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Last Updated: May 27, 2008 All content and images on this site are copyrighted by The Evergreen State
College. © 2008 |
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Our quarter got off to a dramatic start when an Evergreen academic dean emailed students five days before classes started to tell us that PSA was going to be canceled this year because no faculty was available to teach. John Navazio, last year's PSA faculty, backed out of plans to teach this year's class three weeks before the quarter began when he was offered a job managing the farm at Prescott College in Arizona.