Features
Growing Organic Produce and Organic Farmers
New organic farming centre on campus will give students of all ages hands-on learning
BY ANDREW VOWLES
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| Sharron McGinn, assistant cook with the U of G Child-Care and Learning Centre, hands out a snack to children from the centre at the site of a new organic farm plot in the Arboretum. The CCLC will have its own vegetable patch on the site. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
“It's meant to prepare younger generations for a different kind of future.” That's how Prof. Ann Clark, Plant Agriculture, describes a new organic farm plot being prepared on campus. She's talking not just about undergraduates in Guelph's organic agriculture major but also about those preschoolers from the U of G Child-Care and Learning Centre (CCLC) helping on a recent morning to mark off their new vegetable patch in the Arboretum.
Beginning this spring, a one-hectare spread near the northwestern corner of the Arboretum will return to cultivation as the new Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. The project unites the University with a number of organizations focused on organic production — and returns a portion of the campus to its roots in field husbandry.
The site will allow undergrads to learn about year-round local organic food production, food security and resource conservation, says Clark.
“The overall context would be not simply operating a market garden but also anticipating resource-based challenges and preparing society for greater self-sufficiency in healthy and nutritious food, with less dependence on fossil fuel energy.”
She teaches courses in U of G's organic agriculture major, introduced in 2002 as the first program of its kind in North America.
It's still the only such academic major offered in Canada, says Prof. Rene Van Acker, chair of the Department of Plant Agriculture. He hopes to boost program enrolment by providing hands-on production to complement classroom learning. Offering the major without providing access to a field husbandry site is “like having an astronomy program and not having a telescope,” he says.
Clark plans to involve students as volunteers or interns to help run the centre. She says other instructors and students from U of G's campuses might tie the site into various courses, not just in the Ontario Agricultural College but also across other colleges.
For example, students might monitor trends in vitamin content in produce, determine food pathogen risks on fresh vegetables, come up with garden plans to feed a family year-round or design plantings and garden layouts.
The Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics might focus on the economics of market gardening.
Students in several departments might team up to look at ways to improve soil and water use efficiency.
Engineers could design structures and processes such as drip irrigation to study water and energy conservation; organizers already plan to involve the School of Engineering to build a passive solar greenhouse on the site.
In the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, students plan to use produce from the plot to prepare meals.
The child-care centre itself will buy organic produce for meals and snacks for the 110 preschoolers in its program, says CCLC cook Joan Knox. That would complement plans for the children's vegetable garden, which will occupy a corner of the plot.
The entire site is located south of College Avenue and just east of the East Residences parking lot. (Clark points out that students in the early years of OAC regularly tended fields and orchards here as part of their diploma studies.)
Knox was eager to involve the child-care centre and her kitchen in the project.
“We have looked for a place where the children could have a garden,” says Knox, who this year began buying produce from an organic grower in Baden. “I believe they are losing sight of where their food comes from."
Early last month, organizers visited the site with about 15 children to stake out their vegetable patch. Squatting to preschooler height, Van Acker asks the children: “What do we grow in a garden?”
“Flowers,” says one youngster before others chime in with their favourites: corn, potatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots.
Knox has a question: “What does Joan need to make her spaghetti sauce?” Several kids chorus: “Tomatoes.”
Mom Libby Matthews smiles as her son, Finnegan, and his classmates enjoy a snack in their future garden plot. She expects the lessons he learns here will echo the organic methods she uses in the family's Guelph garden. “It's the safest way of farming, trying to do things from scratch,” she says.
The organic farming centre will involve off-campus partners, including Canadian Organic Growers (COG), the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario and FarmStart.
One key connection will be site co-ordinator Martha Gay Scroggins, an organic market gardener and supporter of the COG Growing Up Organic program, which connects market gardeners with local partners and customers in child-care centres and schools. She says the U of G program will enable students to “learn from seed to seed. This is practical experiential learning.”
Scroggins adds that she hopes to grow not just produce but also future organic farmers.
This year, organizers will plant cover crops, including barley and sorghum, to help prepare for next year's production of fruits and vegetables. An opening ceremony will be held at the site early this fall.