organic farming

September 12, 2017 by Kimberly Kneeland

Farm Education for All

September 2017
Written by Education Director, Rebekah Carter

Fall after school harvest (Rebekah Carter 2016)

I’ve spent the past five years of my life serving as Education Director for Wright-Locke Farm, and the experience has been nothing short of incredible. But even now, five years into this journey, I am often asked, “What exactly do you do? What is farm education?” I think many who are not familiar with farm-based programs may assume that “farm ed” only relates to training programs for new or beginning farmers. Though this is certainly one form of it, farm education programs at Wright-Locke and many other small farms are typically geared towards the non-farming population of children, teens, and adults that make up a farm’s community. We may not all be farmers, but we’re all eaters, and the majority of us could use a little guidance when it comes to eating more locally and seasonally. Farm education gives farms a means to communicate to their customers both the knowledge and skills necessary to make better food and lifestyle choices, especially when it comes to growing or incorporating more fresh fruits, veggies, herbs, and other local foods into your diet.

Ideally, one’s participation in farm education will start as soon as possible during childhood, when our brains are absorbing all sorts of new information and we’re starting to develop skill sets, opinions, and habits- some of which may last a lifetime. While the desire to eat more healthfully can occur at any time in one’s life, it is evermore apparent how critical it is to develop these goals and habits when we’re young. Childhood and adult overweight and obesity rates are at an all time high in America and many other countries around the world, and their effects are not limited to clothing size; many chronic conditions and diseases are directly linked to maintaining an unhealthy weight or eating an unhealthy diet, and the ability to reverse or lessen these negative effects is often much more difficult than our ability to prevent them through diet and lifestyle choices. Children who start eating fruits and vegetables at a younger age are more likely to continue to do so throughout their childhood, into their teens, and then during adulthood. Farm education programs serve a crucial link between consumers of all ages, producers of farm products like fresh produce, eggs, dairy, and meats, and the food-consciousness and health of our society.

Wright-Locke Farm’s youth education programs offer children a unique hands-on experience learning about growing food, cooking, and the natural world on a historic working farm. All of our programs include lessons and activities related to agriculture, healthy eating, the environment, or natural science while utilizing the fields, pastures, barns, and wooded trails as our living classroom. Though we spend plenty of time focusing on subjects such as soil, compost, worms, plants, honeybees, Wright-Locke Farm’s domesticated animals (sheep, goats, chickens), land conservation, farm history, and local wildlife, we always include a healthy farm or season-inspired dish during our youth programs. Some days, this might mean simply going to one of our two organically-grown youth gardens to pick and snack on some of the harvest, be it Sungold cherry tomatoes, Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers, or purple, yellow, and green bush beans; other days, it means following a recipe to prepare a healthy dish together, using fresh foods from the garden, our farm fields, or the local farmers market.

Harvesting red lettuce for spring salads (Rebekah Carter 2016)

Whether it’s dehydrated kale chips, raw fruit and greens smoothies, overnight refrigerator pickles, salsa fresca, raw strawberry-rhubarb fruit leather, plant parts salad, or another of our favorite seasonal recipes, I’m always impressed by how much our youngest audience seems to enjoy picking, preparing, and eating these creations or sharing them with their parents (if there’s any leftover, of course). Time after time, I hear parents saying, “they would NEVER eat that at home!” or “I can’t believe my son/daughter ate that.” Even more exciting is when we hear about our youth participants cooking up veggies they harvested at the farm, or cooking up a farm recipe at home to share with their family. They may not realize it, but these kids are developing a taste for health-promoting foods, an opportunity that too few children seem to have but desperately need. In a world riddled with cheap unhealthy foods marketed directly to impressionable youths, it’s our responsibility to teach kids about the many nutrient-rich foods that local farms provide us throughout the seasons and how to include them in our daily meals.

Farm-based education provides the perfect outlet for this type of teaching, learning and habit-forming, since program participants get to either directly witness or actively participate in the growing, harvesting, and preparation of seasonal fruits, vegetables, and herbs into a delicious meal, side dish or snack. But this type of education is not limited to youth audiences only. As the saying goes, it’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks. Teens and adults often need just as much guidance as our youngest students when it comes to improving their diets with the inclusion of more fresh foods and healthy cooking techniques. Wright-Locke’s educational workshops for teens and adults are a great way to learn practical skills related to healthy living, small-scale “backyard” agriculture, and the wonders of nature. Though we host a number of programs featuring subjects like yoga, herbalism, home composting, bouquet and wreath making, stargazing and more, the majority of our workshops are directly related to growing, foraging or cooking up local and seasonal foods. Whether it’s fermenting your own sour dill cucumber pickles, kraut or kombucha, cooking and canning some homemade jam or apple butter sweetened to your taste, making nutrient-rich stocks and soups from scratch, raising backyard hens for eggs or bees for raw honey, growing your own gourmet mushrooms, or creating delicious dishes featuring just-picked veggies and herbs… our workshops strive to connect people not only to our farm and its landscape, but to local and seasonal foods of all kinds- from the farmers market, your own home garden, or even the wild forageable areas of your community and beyond.

We have experienced amazing growth in our educational program offerings and audience over the past five years, and we are passionate about our desire to continue growing so that we can offer an even larger variety of programs and reach even more audiences. But the farm’s existing infrastructure is extremely limiting in terms of what we are able to offer in our short but very busy seven-month program season, currently running from April through October (truth be told- we’re so busy, we’re starting to book some programs and events in early November). Between our organic agriculture, education programs, special events, fundraising, and farm stand, we have all functional farm buildings and fields in full use; due to our many activities and increasing number of staff and volunteers, we often have to share workspaces, tools, and supplies. The only sheltered space available for programs and events, named the 1827 Barn after the year it was built, is spacious and gorgeous no matter the time of day, but it’s not heated and does not have a certified kitchen for the many food-based workshops and activities we do. Our current business model has worked to get us where we are today, but cannot sustain the growth we seek. The only reasonable solution to our roadblock is the creation of a year-round program and event facility. A climate-controlled building with a certified kitchen would not only give us more dedicated spaces to utilize for our current activities; more importantly, it would grant us the ability to offer a wider variety of programs for a more diverse range of audiences, all year long.

Wright-Locke Farm Conservancy has received an incredible amount of support from the community over its almost ten years of existence. Contributions of all kinds- be they monetary, material, or good ol’ “sweat equity”- have been critical in our transformation from a simple pick-your-own raspberry plot to a bustling non-profit community farm with activities for everyone to enjoy. We hope that this amazing farm community, which has already done so much to help us achieve successes both small and large, will continue to work with us towards our goal of establishing a year-round facility to enable further growth of this extraordinary institution. You can learn more about our farm’s vision and how you can help us “Cultivate our Future,” here.

July 7, 2017 by Kimberly Kneeland

Dietetics Meets Farming

July 2017

Guest post written by: Brianna Trainor, MPH coordinated dietetics student at UMass Lowell

For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Brianna and I am in my third and final year at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell for my masters of public health with a concentration in dietetics. As we enter the month of July, my community nutrition rotation at Wright-Locke Farm is coming to an end. I had the pleasure of working with some great people and had the opportunity to learn so much about the farm and agriculture.

Here is some insight as to what my community nutrition rotation encompassed at Wright-Locke Farm. My days at the farm consisted of a variety of the following activities : farm work, after-school child education programs, assisting with adult education workshops, youth summer education programs, the Jenk’s Center Gardening Club, involvement in the first speaker series, visiting the farm animals, and working at farmers’ markets.

The most valuable lesson that I am leaving Wright-Locke Farm with is the relationship between nutrition education and preparing foods specifically with children. When children are involved in the planting, harvesting, and cooking processes, children retain more nutrition knowledge than they would without being involved in the processes. Children retain nutrition knowledge while they are performing tasks. One of the days at the youth ed program, the kids made a berry kale smoothie. The children groomed the garden, harvested the kale, and put all the ingredients in the blender. We talked about the health benefits of the smoothie and the children happily (!) enjoyed their healthy snack.

I am leaving this internship with more knowledge and experience than I could have asked for and I am very grateful for everyone at Wright-Locke Farm for giving me this opportunity.

Postscript by Wright-Locke Farm Staff: Thank you Brianna for your energy, hard work, and willingness to learn from what we do at the farm. Like you, we believe that good, fresh food, cooking, nutrition, farming, and animal management are all important puzzle pieces in being a heathly individual. We know that you’ll do good things for your community whereever you go!

If you’d like to hear more of Brianna’s thoughts, she was also part of this interview with Renee Barrile.

April 18, 2017 by Kimberly Kneeland

From Field to Vase

~April 2017~

Written by Ruth Trimarchi, Manager of Flower Operations

We Start Anew

As a nor’easter bears down on our small greenhouse, it is hard to imagine that these dozens of trays of inch-high flowers will soon fill those snow-covered fields outside. But this is how flower season at Wright-Locke Farm starts. In February the first seeds of eucalyptus, straw flowers, delphinium, celosia and others are carefully started in our tiny incubator, nurtured through dozens of labor-intensive ‘bottom-watering’ cycles so that light-sensitive seeds are not disturbed, graduated to our gently-heated greenhouse, and then finally transferred outside for a week of hardening off before being planted into solid earth starting in May.

Poor Man’s Fertilizer

Meanwhile in the fields outside, these late spring snows truly are a “poor man’s fertilizer” as my grandparents farming in Vermont were fond of saying. Only recently did I learn that not only does snow serve as a source of water and insulation, but it also captures nitrogen when snowflakes crystallize in the atmosphere, and brings this important nutrient back down into the soil. Exploring this passion for growing flowers is made so much easier today than farming was for them, in no small part due to the ability to investigate information like nitrogen-capturing snowflakes online. My grandparents would have been astounded at how much you can learn about farming with the click of a button!

Teeny Packets of DNA

Fortunately for all of us, I have real-people resources in addition to the internet. Adrienne Altstatt, our Farm Manager gave us “A Glimpse of the Life of a Farmer” in her terrific blog last month. Though I’ve been gardening for decades, last year was my first season growing flowers at Wright-Locke Farm, and Adrienne’s matter-of-fact “It’ll all be fine” was a welcome response to my frequent “oops”! Flowers have their own rhythm and are more fragile than many veggies, but they are subject to fewer pests – and like veggies, growing flowers also takes faith and a great deal of patience. Planting thousands of near-microscopic dark colored seeds into black potting soil requires focus, deep breathing and frequently, tweezers. It never fails to amaze me that these teeny packets of DNA and requisite foodstuffs respond to our gentle nurturing, some air, some water and a little organic fertilizer, and transform themselves into colorful plants as tall as ten feet within a few months.

Gosh this is hard work!

It is a challenge bringing an interesting selection of fresh flowers to market each week, and requires successional plantings of many of our dozens of flower species. Trying to keep a changing array of colors, textures and blossom sizes that work well together in bouquets, all blooming throughout each week of the season, requires pouring over multiple spreadsheets during the winter months. Strategizing how to rotate beds so that recurring pests like cut worms and powdery mildew are minimized leaves me cross-eyed. As does clustering species with similar netting needs, maximizing sun placement within our small field and creating shade and moisture microenvironments that hopefully provide ideal conditions for each species. Balancing these factors with the field life of each species, vase life, irrigation options, harvesting time, and cost often leaves me feeling like a pretzel!

WebImage_Volunteers

Thank Goodness for Volunteers!

Fortunately I don’t do all of this alone. In addition to our Farm Manager, the flower operations are blessed with an amazing team of volunteers. Last year dozens of volunteers, from pre-teens to folks with decades of life experience, showed up to seed, weed, water, plant, harvest and generally help out in myriad ways. The Farm is especially lucky to have a loyal team of highly talented floral designers who help us bring those beautiful flowers directly from our fields to vases for you.

Why do local flowers matter?

I grow flowers because I love flowers. And because it is very satisfying to grow flowers for this beloved community Farm. Locally grown flowers offer community residents the opportunity to:

buy local
support sustainable agriculture
add variety to their flower species
purchase flowers that have longer shelf-life
purchase flowers that have a reduced carbon footprint
purchase flowers that are grown without herbicide or pesticide exposure for farm workers growing the flowers
provide biodiversity for bees, birds and other animals
provide beauty without endangering the environment

I never envisioned myself following in my grandparents’ footsteps, but I am so grateful for this amazing journey and opportunity to bring beauty to our community. Stop by and visit our ever-changing beautiful flower fields throughout the season!

March 23, 2017 by Kimberly Kneeland

A Glimpse of the Life of a Farmer

~March 2017~

Written by: Adrienne Altstatt, Farm Manager

As the first employee of the Wright-Locke Farm Conservancy, I came to the farm in April of 2011 thinking I would be here for just a year. But now, six years later and about to start my seventh growing season, one might say I’ve settled in. I grew up in Minnesota and, before Wright-Locke, I managed a farm in Maryland for six years, so acclimatizing to the culture of New England and becoming familiar with the local farm community has taken some time. Nonetheless, it has slowly grown on me.

Here’s a little insight as to what it’s like being the farmer at Wright-Locke Farm.

My work begins in March when I start seeding in the greenhouse, hiring staff and organizing our sales outlets (CSA and farmers markets). March is when I spend the most time at my desk. After that, I’m rarely here and my desk is more a repository for my papers and the occasional perch for the farm cat. As the weather changes and becomes more inviting to young plants, my crew and I begin the long process of transplanting and seeding the fields. We also prep our barn work space for efficiency and ease during the season and set the animals (goats, sheep and chickens) up in their warm season quarters. Especially in the early part of the season, farming is often a “watch-the-weather” game and patience is one of the most important virtues for a farmer to have.

The end of May is when the season truly kicks into high gear for us. On top of planting seeds and transplants, we begin harvesting three days a week for our markets and CSA and, now that the weeds have started to grow like…well…weeds, we also have to add weeding to our ever-growing “To-Do” list. With so much needing to get done, balancing the daily demands of the farm is key and knowing when to let something go from your list sometimes takes courage.

For the next five months (June—October), our days are fairly similar in terms of tasks, but as most farmers will tell you, there is always a monkey wrench in there. Tractors break, droughts or deluges happen, someone accidentally weeds the wrong plants out, animals or insects decimate a crop, someone finds a bug in their salad, four-foot-tall weeds take over, you twist your ankle playing soccer, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Farming is a test of flexibility and adaptability, and sometimes that can be trying. However, in the quiet evening hours when I have the farm to myself and the dog and I are wandering the fields, I can’t help but delight in the beauty and magnitude of this small farm.

All of that peak-season “go-go-go” can be exhausting, but sooner than you can say zucchini with an Italian accent, the season is wrapping up. However, just because the temperature drops and we stop harvesting veggies doesn’t mean the season is over—it is time to plan for next year. A great deal of a farm’s success comes from the pre-planning for the following year—cleaning, tallying, mapping, organizing—all so that you’re ready to hit the ground running when the next season starts. It can take years to understand trends and realize that nobody wants to buy your okra in New England (at least not enough people to make it worthwhile), or that your soil grows potatoes poorly, or that people are over kale. So, it’s important to take that accumulated knowledge and apply it to your plan for next season; because you can always make it better next season. But most excitingly, when seed catalogs come out in December, it’s time to dream again!

The take away? Farming is about patience, balance, letting go, a little bit of planning, and a lot of faith. I would say that farming is inherently about faith: faith that if you put a seed in the ground, it will grow; faith that people will buy your product; faith that the weather will be favorable; faith that you can continue to do this work and it will be appreciated and successful. Much like life one might say.

Be well and happy growing!