E-mail this storyTuesday, August 24, 2010
Students imagine new possibilities in intensive summer agroecology program
Point of View – Orion Nightwalker Yazzie
Orion Nightwalker Yazzie is a student from Aztec, N.M. He has also studied agroecology at Prescott (Ariz.) College.
I come from a community that is based on traditional agriculture: raising corn and sheep. This is still an important part of my Navajo culture and I grew up seeing the value of it. Farming enables us to stay on our land and not rely on the outside world.
I came to Merry Lea's agroecology program because deserts and mountains are all I know. I wanted to see agriculture in a different setting. I was also curious about Mennonites and what their culture's relationship to the land might be like.
One thing that struck me during my time in the Midwest was the way food is grown as a commodity. How odd it is to produce food for others but not for yourself! Around here, farmers grow thousands of acres of corn and none of it is edible for them. Navajos grow small patches of corn to feed their families. To us, corn is sacred. In our creation story, people are made from corn. During prayer, corn pollen and cornmeal are scattered in four directions. One of my clans is called the corn clan.
After my education, I plan to return to my home community and practice agroecology. I really respect my elders and parents and relatives. I have a place in my family and my community. I don't want to move to a place where I have no relationship with the people or the place. Our homeland is considered very sacred. You can't just go somewhere else and be a Navajo; it is place-based.
In my area of New Mexico, there is a lot of energy development: uranium, gas and coal. People feel pressure to abandon agriculture and work for these companies, participating in the pollution of land and water, even though they may not have electricity themselves. Navajos have a weird relationship with the dominant culture; wanting what it has and yet not wanting it. We have a culture that is thousands of years old, with a sophisticated religion and practices, but we are up against modern culture that sees itself as the apex of civilization. I want to help young people understand that our traditional agriculture is still important and still a way to maintain sovereignty and independence.
Point of View – Angela Herrmann
People of all ages who want to learn to grow food are welcome to earn a certificate instead of college credit. Angela Herrmann, of Indianapolis, Ind., is the program's first certificate student.
In 2006, I earned a master's degree in earth literacy through St. Mary-of-the-Woods College, Terre Haute, Ind. I had already been involved in a community garden for about 10 years, so I recognized the value of "community" in its broadest sense: human and non-human. When I wrote my master's thesis, I learned about the food insecurity that plagues so many communities and the connection between hunger and poverty. Complicating the issue is the practice of grocery stores abandoning neighborhoods for greener (as in wealthier) parts of town, leaving behind food deserts. I then began to wonder how community gardens might contribute to food security. It seemed to me that they could provide access to quality food – which all people deserve. The gardens could build community and relationships of trust, reuse abandoned land, and coax children outside. I wanted to help make that happen, so I began promoting community gardening in Indianapolis and nationally.
What I was missing however, was in-depth study coupled with hands-on, in-the-dirt experience ... something that Merry Lea's Agroecology Summer Intensive could provide. The deeper my understanding is of the systems upon which we depend, the better I am able to share and model what's possible. This is why I wanted to study agroecology. I remember gardening once with an elderly African American woman a few years ago. She definitely knew far more about growing food than I did. All she needed was a place to do that. Maybe I can help make that possible for others like her. At the end of the day, our communities and cities are only as rich and healthy as the poorest and the sickest among us. I welcome the opportunity to work to increase people's access to healthy food and hopefully in the process, help improve my city's urban environment.
This fall, I plan to volunteer with Felege Hiywot, an Indianapolis organization that works with urban youth. Aster Bekele, a retiree from Ethiopia whom I consider to be a friend and mentor, started the center. There I'll help teach kids how to garden because they deserve to understand where their food comes from. I'd love to show them the soil arthropods and other soil creatures that we saw through a microscope during the Agroecology Summer Intensive. They'll never see soil the same way again when they see that soil is alive!
"Now I know that there are ways to survive as a small farmer," said Emma Regier, a biology major at Bethel College (North Newton, Kan).
"This is an exciting time to study sustainable agriculture," added Dale Hess, director of the program. "There are indications that the Obama administration has recognized the connections between the way we grow food and eat, and the health-care crisis on one hand and the climate-change and energy crisis on the other."
Students study four courses during the nine-week agroecology intensive: Soils, Vegetable Crops, Agroecology and Small Farm Management. The biology of growing food is only one area of emphasis. Politics, economics and environmental justice are all part of the web of connections that students delve into. Living together on site and sharing a kitchen adds yet another layer of understanding of the process that brings food from the ground to the table.
During the nine-week program, students encounter a wide range of alternatives to industrial agriculture. The group visited a conventional thousand-cow dairy farm, a grass-fed meat farm with its own kill floor and an organic Amish farm, among others. They also had the chance to plow with oxen at Tillers International, a farm that preserves and studies low-capital technologies, and to meet a couple who just began their own Community Supported Agriculture two years ago.
"It's been neat seeing what people can do with a limited amount of land, especially if they are growing vegetables," said Anthony Imhoff, an environmental science major from Goshen College.
Serena Townsend, also an environmental science major at Goshen College, was especially impressed with White Yarrow Farm in Marcellus, Mich. "They had a really wide variety of products, including cut flowers, cows, broilers and laying hens. That is the kind of thing I'd like to do someday," she said.
One of the many guest lecturers in the ASI who help students envision possibilities is Melissa Kinsey. Kinsey is a former business teacher who now offers consulting services to Amish small businesses in the Nappanee area. "Whatever you learn, it's important to incorporate a little business training into it," Kinsey insisted during her lecture titled, "The Farming of Business/the Business of Farming."
Earlier, she had given the students an assignment to imagine a farm of their own in a particular locale. They were to describe the business, research the cost of the land and consider current events that would affect their farm.
Lisle Bertsche, an environmental science major at Eastern Mennonite University whose grandparents own a farm in Illinois, expects to inherit a tract of land where she could raise steers, cows, chickens and four or five acres of vegetables. She would also like to try prairie restoration.
Imhoff described 90 acres of pasture in northern Indiana where he would graze cattle and goats. He would like to rent out the goats as hired grazers to control noxious weeds.
Kinsey related her own experience working for a parks and recreation department in Colorado where goats were routinely used to control vegetation. She is sorry the idea hasn't caught on in Indiana yet, but thinks rising fuel prices and awareness may bring it to the area. "You may be in good time for your grazing idea," she encouraged.
"I was really excited when we were asked to design a business plan," commented Angela Herrmann, a student from Indianapolis. "Mine described scattered-site community gardens created on brown fields. When I put the idea down on paper, it looked like a model that could actually work!"
According to Kinsey, a student idea from this assignment two years ago is now in action on the Goshen College campus, generating vegetables for the campus dining service.
– By Jennifer Schrock, Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center Coordinator of Public Programs
Editors: For more information about this release, to arrange an interview or request a photo, contact Goshen College News Bureau Director Jodi H. Beyeler at (574) 535-7572 or jodihb@goshen.edu.
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Goshen College, established in 1894, is a residential Christian liberal arts college rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. The college's Christ-centered core values – passionate learning, global citizenship, compassionate peacemaking and servant-leadership – prepare students as leaders for the church and world. Recognized for its unique Study-Service Term program, Goshen has earned citations of excellence in Barron's Best Buys in Education, "Colleges of Distinction," "Making a Difference College Guide" and U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges" edition, which named Goshen a "least debt college." Visit www.goshen.edu.
