The Student Farm: Sustainable Agriculture at its Roots

by Jennifer Wolf

Thirty baskets all in a row sit on a table in a greenhouse. Out of each is a bag, camouflaged in condensation, full of chard, collard greens and red Russian kale. Next to it is a second smaller bag protecting lettuce and leeks. Asparagus artfully sits inside the basket alone, and other freestanding vegetables are carrots, beets, parsnips, and fennel. Brussels sprouts and sun-dried tomatoes are the only other two vegetables to be in bags within the basket. These organic vegetables are what CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscribers can expect to receive each week.

At 9:27 on a Thursday morning, birds can be heard chirping above the din of the nearby highways and roads as Lori Sievers breaks broccoli side shoots on the very edge of the Student Farm fields and places them into a wooden box. The beeping and roaring of a tractor backing up and the conversation of crows provide a background of sound to Lori’s passionate dialogue.

Lori is a member of Agrarian Effort Co-op, which means she never shops at Wal-Mart or buys individually wrapped items, makes her own clothes (which are finely made because sustainable sewing is one of her greatest passions), pees outside often, composts religiously, and eats vegan and wheat-free 5 nights out of the week with 11 other co-opers, each radically different and wholly individual like herself. And the main reason that Lori works at the Student Farm is the people who work alongside her out in the rows of vegetables, she said.

All of the people who work at the Student Farm are brought there by the common interest of agriculture. Most are either International Agriculture Development or Agriculture Systems and Environmental majors. Conversation during harvesting, transplanting or planting seeds is almost like another ingredient to the CSA basket. The sense of community and enjoyment of each other’s company is as tangible and matter-of-fact as the earth under their boots.

On the other side of the field, among rows of dark leafy greens Annie Silvers stands harvesting. She has worked at the student farm since April 2005, and recently received her bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Systems and Environment. Annie, after graduating from high school in Oakland, became interested in agriculture when she lived in an Israeli kibbutz. She worked as a gardener during her year off and had yet to learn about agriculture. At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she worked in a community garden plot, but eventually, Annie came to finish her undergraduate degree at UC Davis and so found herself at the Student Farm.

In the future, Annie plans to farm vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs in either California or Maine. But for the present, she is a paid employee at the Market Garden of the Student Farm where she bundles Red Russian kale into bunches of ten to bulk up the amount that each person will get in the CSA basket.

Her view is that “sustainable agriculture is what every farmer needs to do,” she said. I live out in the country where every breath is full of pesticides and now I’m getting asthma, it’s disgusting. If farming is making everyone sick, it is not sustainable.”

Sustainable Agriculture Looking for a Home

Lori finds the Student Farm isn’t quite run how she would like it to be, “It’s not the type of agriculture that I would see myself doing. I’d like to see some more permaculture involved, you know: more fruit trees and intercropping and that kind of stuff because it is still one row of the same crop.” Even though organic, the Student Farm practices techniques that aren’t quite sustainable: such as packaging its produce in plastic and using plastic covers to protect recently planted areas. However, it does have tractors that run on biodiesel, a less polluting form of hydrocarbon fuel made from vegetable oil.

Sustainable agriculture is a movement in response to the many problems of modern farming, such as topsoil loss, leaching of chemical fertilizers into groundwater, poor living conditions for farm workers and farming communities, the decline of family farms and increasing costs of production. Being sustainable means looking at the effect of choices made now on future generations and considering the farm as a system.

The Market Garden Coordinator of the Student Farm, Raoul Adamchak, is working with others to create a Sustainable Agriculture major. Currently, UC Davis offers only one class specifically dealing with organic farming, AMR 49, while all the rest of the classes are conventional farming. Raoul, a Zen Buddhist, has farmed at a farm in the Capay Valley northwest of Sacramento called Full Belly Farms, and earned his masters degree in International Agriculture Development from UC Davis, and has worked at the student farm as an employee.

The general trends for farming during the last 50 years are that the number of farm workers has decreased by 90%, the amount of farmland has decreased by 78 million acres, and the population of the United States has doubled to 300 million. Raoul proposes that one of the reasons the number of farmers has gone down is that there are many more well-paid jobs out there and “if you are isolated somewhere without a community and you’re selling to a corporation, it’s not much fun and it’s not much money.” One of his aims is to, “find people that are interested in, in a funny way, not making as much money but having a lifestyle that keeps them outdoors, that keeps them in touch with people” and he feels that organic farming offers enough benefits to attract people back into becoming farmers.

“One of the things that I see, is that organic farmers, at least in this area, and I know its true for other parts of the country, they do a lot of direct marketing. They go to farmer’s markets and they have CSAs. They’re in direct contact with the people that eat their food and psychologically, that’s very supportive. If you were a farmer that grows something and sticks in a box and ships it off to Safeway, and you never meet the person eating your food, you know, you don’t get much feedback and so its all about money. Whereas if you are part of a community and you’re supported by the community, its not all about money. Its about respect and its about esteem and it’s about being an integral part of things. And so I think that a lot of people have become organic farmers in a direct market because they feel good about it.”

Each week, produce from the Student Farm is distributed to the ASUCD Coffee House and through its 60 CSA baskets full of ripe vegetables and fruits. Raoul’s hope of, “Supporting local farmers as much as you can” is achieved one basket at a time at the Student Farm.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 12:19 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.