600 Pages of Good Stuff
The new training manual from the Center for Agroecology and Sustain- able Food Systems, Teaching Organic Gardening and Farming, is a major, probably unparalleled resource for teaching sustainable agricultural skills and concepts to students. It represents a milestone in the development of instructional materials in this area, and will stimulate anyone who has worked in this field to reflect on our own lessons taught and learned.
Over the past 35 years, the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden Apprenticeship has trained over a thousand apprentices, including many of the farmers and gardeners I know (and including me, in 1986), in an intensive six-month residential program which combines classroom instruction, small group field classes, hands-on training, and student-directed reading and projects. Drawing on this wealth of practical instructional experience, and following closely the curriculum of the Apprenticeship, the 600+ photocopyable, three-hole-punched pages in this manual amass a rather incredible amount of information, teaching tools, and resources, organized into sensibly sequenced, manageable units.
Each of the three major sections--Organic Farming and Gardening Skills and Practices, Applied Soil Science, and Social and Environmental Issues in Agriculture--is broken down into discrete units, focusing on topics such as Managing Soil Fertility, Transplanting and Direct Seeding, Selecting and Using Cover Crops, Soil Biology and Ecology, and The Development of US Agriculture. The eighteen units are comprised of multiple components, including introductory overviews, abbreviated lecture outlines for instructors, more detailed lecture outlines for students, practical-demonstration outlines, step-by-step sheets, hands-on exercises, assessment question sheets, answer keys, suggested readings, resources sections, appendices, and glossaries.
This is a manual for instructors, not a gardening manual for the general public. While the detailed lecture outlines and many of the other sheets are appropriate for students, they, in and of themselves, would not constitute an easily absorbable, comprehensive course for a beginner. Amazing amounts of material are laid out in a compact form, but, as is well-understood by the editors, most of the information, concepts, and skills presented here require discussion and practical implementation in order to be fully incorporated into a budding gardener or farmer's understanding.
Nor is this a manual intended to teach the subject itself to instructors; it is a tool to help those already familiar with most of the material to present it in a way that those unfamiliar with it can understand. As I reviewed several of the specific lecture outlines, I was impressed by how they covered virtually all the major points that I myself would want to present in those areas (although, of course, there is always more to talk about related to any agricultural topic). Choices facing the farmer involving such things as tillage, compost-making, and propagation techniques are presented in their full complexity, including both advantages and disadvantages of each choice.
No resource can be comprehensive or present the subject from all angles, and certainly every agricultural training program has its own set of biases. The UCSC Farm and Garden Apprenticeship (now officially a project of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems) grew out of the work of Alan Chadwick, a strong proponent of the French-intensive method of cultivation. The material here is still inspired by that general approach. Now, however, much more than when I was an apprentice nearly eighteen years ago, a broader perspective seems to be included in the curriculum. The balanced presentation of both benefits and drawbacks of even the most cherished French-intensive methods is a welcome alternative to the suggestion that "this is the one and only right way to do things," which, intentionally or not, was one of the implied messages I sometimes took in as a young, impressionable apprentice. A dedication to certain gardening fundamentals remains, but it is joined by a greater flexibility and a more realistic assessment of the tradeoffs that many organic farmers and gardeners must choose among as they attempt to survive in the modern world.
This welcome flexibility also opens the door to other approaches not specifically covered here--such as more permacultural methods of food growing, "wild gardening," and the like--that may be oriented more to local food self-reliance and a new economy rather than to survival as a conventional organic producer in today's dominant economy. Instructional materials in Permaculture, for one, are already well-developed, and can easily be used to supplement the intensive gardening and farming focus offered here.
Developed to accompany the CASFS's own program, these materials are also designed to be adaptable to a variety of settings, including other college and university courses, community garden and farm training programs, farms with internships or apprenticeships, school gardening programs, international training programs, and master gardener programs. The manual is available free online in PDF format (www.ucsc.edu/casfs); ordering the entire manual in printed form is also well worth the investment (see end of article for details).
Further Thoughts: Getting Down and Dirty
For the benefit of those who have never taught this subject, and believe that this training manual should make the job easy, I feel impelled to add some additional observations. The existence of a well-presented, meticulously organized resource like this, sponsored by a university and funded by multiple foundations, may give the impression that, hands-on exercises notwithstanding, "Organic Farming and Gardening" is a subject that can actually be conveyed effectively in a conventional academic setting, in much the same way as Geometry, Physics, or English Grammar.
I believe that it cannot--not to any significant depth, at least--and I think the manual's editors would agree. Farming can indeed be studied, in the abstract, by students of agriculture, in the same way that various cultures can be studied by students of anthropology. However, actually learning how to be a gardener or farmer is considerably more complex than simply assembling mental information about gardening and farming. This training manual is fully intended to facilitate teaching of people who want to actually do, not just know about, food growing, but there are many realities that its uniformly sized, three-hole-punched, black-and-white sheets cannot address.
To illustrate some of the challenges here, I'll use my own experience as a gardening student-become-gardening teacher.
In 1986, before the start of my UCSC Farm and Garden apprenticeship session, I received two thick volumes of photocopied articles and information, of roughly the same total thickness as this new manual. I read virtually all the material in those readers, plus two other recommended books, before I arrived at the program. And I retained almost none of it, since it can be learned effectively only in context.
Then, during my six months at UCSC, I took notes furiously on the information we were given, but as a beginning gardener, I often felt overwhelmed with new information. I had thought somehow that food-growing would be simple--as simple as planting corn, beans, and squash seeds in the ground, as I imagined our Native American forebears did. Instead, I learned that, in this day and age at least, our exotic tastes and the extensive changes we settlers have wrought on the landscape make food-growing far from that simple. And there was much more to learn than simply information: there was a whole new way of being, of perceiving, of using one's body, of assessing and responding to one's environment. There were new ways of relating to people, since the thirty apprentices were working, living, eating, and learning together in a setting that required much different forms of cooperation than what many of us were used to. At the end of six months, I knew that I had entered a new world, one that I wanted to explore much further, but I was still quite a newcomer and stranger to it.
It took repetition and experience over the course of a number of gardening seasons for me to feel that I had fully absorbed and understood most of the information I'd first been exposed to that summer. And it also took years for that new way of being, of relating to the environment, to others, and to myself, to begin to feel like "second nature," to be in my blood.
I learned by doing, and I also learned to help train others by doing. I worked in educational, community, and farm settings where I often became a de facto teacher or guide because I had the most experience (although, at first, that experience was still pitifully small compared to that of anyone who'd grown up in an agricultural society). Ten years ago, I started teaching more formally, in one-to-three-month gardening apprenticeship programs. I've used many different teaching resources, and tried many different approaches, from presenting lots of information to emphasizing basic experience with gardening (noticing that, for many students, information cannot be absorbed until genuine interest has been established, and then can be easily obtained, as needed, from many sources). I've come to the conclusion that, while teaching resources like the CASFS training manual can be extremely helpful, they are only one part of the puzzle of how to create a successful experience for participants.
A Different Kind of Beast
Organic farming and gardening differ in fundamental ways from many other subjects of study. Imagine, for example, trying to teach multiplication using multiplication tables that could wither or inexplicably disappear overnight unless properly cared for (and that caring for them involved ongoing, successful multiplication, not always easy for those who haven't yet learned multiplication). Or imagine teaching writing to students who were using computers that, every day, scrambled, deleted, and inserted words into the students' essays. If these things are difficult to imagine, imagine teaching gardening, with the plants as your finicky multiplication tables, and with the garden as a whole, and every project undertaken in it, as essays that are constantly scrambled and changed by the mischievous forces of co-creative life.
Or imagine teaching in a classroom whose furniture grows, crumbles, and rearranges itself around you in unpredictable ways, whose roof springs unpatchable leaks, whose heating system regularly goes haywire, and which, on top of all that, is being counted upon to supply much of the rest of the school with furniture--or even with food! Imagine that this classroom requires hard physical labor in order to exist in any recognizable form at all. And imagine trying to introduce your students to the concept that this strange, constantly changing, sometimes uncomfortable classroom, not the temperature-controlled, physically undemanding classrooms they have been used to, actually represents "real life," and is the only appropriate place to learn about farming and gardening as a serious pursuit rather than just as a casual interest.
This is all a way of saying that, in real-life teaching of farming and gardening, multiple challenges arise. For example, in addition to those I've suggested above, teachers are quickly confronted with the fact that, although every textbook or teaching manual has a "beginning," there are actually no clear beginnings or endings in any gardening process. "Which came first, the metaphorical chicken or the metaphorical egg?" is an unending, unanswerable question when dealing with the seed-to-seed cycles of vegetable crops, or with the coalescence of soil, water, air, and sunlight into plant material and then back again into compost, moisture, vapor, and energy. Every beginning (such as planting a seed) is also tied to an ending (the previous saving of that seed), and every ending (such as pulling a weed) also involves a beginning (for example, of a compost pile). Teaching about one part of these cycles without bringing in the others is almost impossible. A math teacher can teach addition without ever bringing up calculus, but separating subjects in gardening is not so easy. Ultimately, the gardening instructor has to start somewhere, but will also find that everything is related to everything else.
This interconnectedness is one of the joys of gardening, but for students who are more accustomed to learning in distinct units, it can be a challenge. No matter where they start in the gardening cycle, it is already "in motion." The inevitability of this is actually fortuitous, since most gardening apprenticeships take place in existing gardens that need to be maintained regardless of where they are in their cycles, and the student gets beginnings, endings, and everything in between no matter what. However, for those who are most comfortable with a Step A-Step B-Step C-you're done progression, or who prefer areas of study that seem less totally interconnected (not to mention virtually limitless in scope), organic gardening and farming can be incredibly frustrating subjects.
Making Peace with the Elephant in the Vegetable Garden
However, the biggest challenge of farming and gardening education, already hinted at, is the one perhaps least amenable to coverage in a training manual: the "people" factor.
Model, idealized students, who set aside everything else in their lives in order to learn all they can about food growing, are rarities--as are farmers and gardeners with perfectly-honed teaching skills and an easy fit between temperament and the teaching role. Nor will enrollees in working-learning apprenticeships necessarily all have the same needs, be adept at communication, have dealt with all their personal issues, or be fully functioning, cooperatively oriented, empowered individuals. Rather, teachers and students alike will be diverse, flawed, fallible human beings with a lot to learn about how to live on the earth, with themselves, and with one another harmoniously.
Furthermore, the cultural context within which these educational programs occur is quite likely to be not fully supportive or understanding of the endeavor--often the opposite. For example, the CASFS program itself has had numerous struggles with the administration of its parent institution--after a number of "honeymoon years," the relationship had become seriously strained by the mid-1980s, when we apprentices were instructed to assemble the ugliest bouquets we could for the chancellor's weekly staff meetings (an "in" joke that likely passed right over the head of the aesthetically-challenged chancellor).
The "people" factor may not loom as large in less intensive, non-residential programs, such as master gardener courses, where the bulk of instruction takes place in the classroom and the hands-on aspect is left up to the individual students. However, on a farm or in any other residential, working-learning setting, individual, interpersonal, and group dynamics may play a larger role in the educational experience than any other single factor. At Lost Valley, we've designed all of our programs with this human dimension in mind, consciously placing attention on personal and group well-being (with regular, at-least-weekly check-ins) and communication skills (the model of nonviolent or compassionate communication has proved particularly helpful). We try to incorporate the lessons learned in intentional community living and in personal growth workshops such as Naka-Ima into our on-the-ground sustainability work, including gardening and permaculture internships and apprenticeships. And even so, we run into challenges.
I believe these challenges are inherent in this kind of endeavor, and can be managed but never entirely eliminated. They can, in fact, serve to enhance the learning experience. In no real-life situation will students be able to garden or farm without dealing with the same kinds of human factors that they encounter in these training settings.
The teacher in an intensive farming or gardening program will dependably encounter every one of the following phenomena:
1. Students have quite different learning styles: some are oral learners, some visual learners, some tactile learners; some like to be sociable, some like to work in silence; some want lots of information, some prefer much less; some like to ask questions, some want to be told what they "should" know. Using a mixture of instructional approaches will help to address, but never entirely eliminate, the fact that at any one time, some students will be getting their needs met, and others will be wanting something different.
As a result, each shift in one direction (e.g., "more formal instruction," "more organization") will likely produce requests for a shift in the other direction (e.g. "more hands-on," "a more organic flow"). Teachers need to realize that this is the nature of the beast, and attempt to be flexible while avoiding running around in endless dizzying circles trying to please, or becoming dejected when all attempts to produce 100% satisfaction fall short. 100% satisfaction is as common as a weed-free garden. One day you may achieve it, but a few days later, weeds will spring up. This is the nature of gardening, and of gardening education.
2. Students will likely have varying levels of experience. In a society where agricultural education were much more valued and widespread, there would be plenty of students to go around, and students could select programs that corresponded to their levels of expertise. With many fewer opportunities to select from (and with a much smaller pool of learners for farms and other programs to choose from), most programs resemble more closely a K-through-12 one-room schoolhouse than a single-grade class. Attempting to tailor educational presentations and experiences to meet the needs of all of these different levels can be difficult, although the variety in skill and knowledge levels has the added benefit of much more inter-student teaching and learning.
3. Students often enroll for widely diverse reasons, and may have much different learning agendas. Some students want to start a farm after they complete the program; others just want to know how to grow a backyard vegetable garden; others may simply be curious about gardening or hungry for some sort of group experience. Again, it is important for the instructor to recognize that, no matter how many times a program is fine-tuned in an attempt to meet the needs of individual students, someone is probably not going to be 100% satisfied.
4. Students will enter the program with personal issues that will sometimes clash with those of other students or of the instructors. Authority issues are particularly prevalent in this setting, since the teacher is often the same person who guides students in the actual garden work, tells them what needs to be done, and can therefore be perceived as being "the boss." The communication and relationship skills necessary to work through these personal and interpersonal issues are frequently insufficiently developed within those involved. Programs and farms are often under-staffed, adding to the strain on both facilitators and students or apprentices. Placing deliberate attention on personal and communication issues will not entirely resolve them, but may help participants start to learn skills that will help them not only grow a better pumpkin patch, but also grow as human beings, developing healthier relationships within themselves and with others.
5. Even in programs that embrace personal and interpersonal work as part of the educational mission, students will have different skill levels, needs, and interests in this area. Balancing the technical, the spiritual, the emotional, the interpersonal, and all other aspects of a hands-on food-growing educational experience will always be a "work in progress," like the garden itself. The variety of different approaches, temperaments, and needs that predictably manifest among both plants and people in any garden or on any farm provide endless opportunities for learning among all involved.
For this reason, as anyone who has ever been involved in it can attest, those who choose to engage in sustainable food growing and/or teaching about it can look forward to a life of consistently interesting challenges--but dullness won't be among them.
RESOURCE
Teaching Organic Gardening and Farming: Resources for Instructors, edited by Albie Miles and Martha Brown, published in 2003, 600+ pages (2-inch, 3-ring binder also required, not included), is available for $45 (payable to UC Regents) from Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 1156 High St., UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, Attn: Publications Order; or contact [email protected]. The manual can also be downloaded in PDF format from www.ucsc.edu/casfs at no charge.
Chris Roth coordinates the organic vegetable gardens at Lost Valley Educational Center. In 2004 he plans to facilitate an ongoing internship (work-exchange) program, while Lost Valley will also offer a two-month Permaculture and Sustainable Community Design Course Apprenticeship from mid-June to mid-August. For further details contact LVEC, 81868 Lost Valley Lane, Dexter, OR 97431, www.lostvalley.org, [email protected][email protected], (541) 937-3351.
©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony