From managing pests to building soil health to dealing with changes to tax laws, small, sustainable farms like Gaining Ground face myriad challenges. Late last year, we welcomed students from the New England Innovation Academy (NEIA) to the farm, where they learned about farm challenges and developed solutions for them as part of their 10th-grade curriculum.

“It’s such a great place to take the students. We get out in the community, and they learn about sustainability,” says science teacher Anna Schonwald.

Based in Marlborough, the day and boarding school for 7th through 12th-grade students uses an integrated and experiential curriculum that connects different subject areas, emphasizing hands-on projects and real-world problem-solving skills. In the 10th grade, the science curriculum focuses on sustainability and climate change. Anna incorporated a field trip to Gaining Ground and follow-up poster presentations to help the students think about climate change, agricultural technology, and sustainability.

The bright students spent a day at Gaining Ground learning about food systems and the challenges and opportunities in agriculture, including the solutions needed to navigate climate change from Director of Agriculture Mark Congdon and Assistant Grower Maddie Weikel. After spending the day on the farm, Anna asked each of the 23 students to develop a solution to a farm challenge that the students presented at school.

“Talking with folks who are interested in our farming systems is a treat for the farmers, both because we love sharing about what we do here, and because this type of engagement helps us step outside of our everyday routine and think about our work from a different perspective,” says Maddie. “The work of building a more just food system requires such a wide range of skill sets and areas of interest, and it was special to see that diversity come through as students and teachers asked different types of questions.” 

One of the students created an app to help farmers find and communicate with volunteers. Several students focused on pest management, including a presentation around whether having cats on the farm could help control pests, another on whether a noise that wasn’t audible to humans but is to animals could drive pests away, and another on a mesh underground wire system with a bad taste. Another student looked at tax laws, while another looked at forest farming and soil health.

“I let them choose the problem, so it’s a really wide variety of solutions,” Anna says. “It really lets the students focus on problem-solving while bridging their climate change and agriculture knowledge.”

Featured top photo courtesy of NEIA