 Okay, our next presentation is by Rachel Levy. It involves organic food to the classroom and involving youngsters and that always good idea to involve youngsters in growing their own food or learning how to grow food. Rachel? Thank you. Thank you for having me at the Farmers Forum. Let me see if I can figure out how to get into the full page view of this. Can you? Oh, thank you. So I am talking about Camp Earthance. This was my organization's Farmed Table Summer Camp for middle school students for which we received a SAIR Youth Educators Grant. And I apologize, the formatting is a little bit different. It went from platform to platform from the Mac version of PowerPoint to PowerPoint and it seems to have changed the formatting a little bit, but we'll get through that. Earthance is a teaching farm in a near northern suburb of St. Louis. Our flagship project is a nine month long part-time apprenticeship program generally for adults, although teenagers have participated in it as well. We teach everything from starting seeds in a greenhouse, tending the crops all the way through the season, to marketing at two local farmers' markets. Earthance's director, Molly Rockman, had always had a goal that there would be youth programming on the farm, but we didn't know when that would come about. We had the opportunity in 2011 to start a camp because of one of the Earthance Apprenticeships graduates, Nancy Schnell, seen here on the left in the straw hat, was a retired middle school teacher, 37 years of teaching middle school science, and she did the apprenticeship program and was really affected by it. She loved the land, she loved participating in the growing of food, and she really felt that she would have been a better teacher if she had been on the farm earlier in her teaching career, and it inspired her to do something that would get youth involved with farming. So with her help, Camp Earthance was born in 2011. The goals of it were two fold, one to instill an appreciation of organic farming in youth, and two to inspire students to adopt healthy, active habits. So all of this comes about in the context of, so I'm actually a former high school teacher myself, and I saw plenty of kids who perceived lunch as a bag of hot cheetos and a cola. So we really did have a goal of inspiring students to perceive food that grew from the ground as something that they want to eat, and preparing food as a healthy, delicious option that they can engage in, and to understand organic farming and have an appreciation for it. So Camp Earthance 2011, it was the pilot year for the program. The budget was $1,000. We came about this through a partnership with the Ferguson Fluorescent School District. They allotted 10 scholarships toward the program of $100 each. It was one week long. We had 10 campers. It was staffed by three full-time volunteers, including Nancy Schnell, three part-time volunteers, two paid staff members. The paid staff members were teachers from the school district. They were a home economics instructor and an art teacher, and Earthance staff helped out as well. Each day of the program consisted of time spent on the farm. At the time, we kind of really hit the ground running with this camp, so we didn't plan on a lot of activities. We included the students in the same things that the adults doing our apprenticeship program would have been working on at the time. This took place in mid-June of 2011, so there was a lot of weeding to do. Students spent a lot of time working with hula-hoes. Our pea crop, our snap pea crop, was flourishing. We were fortunate still at the time that the heat hadn't struck, so we still had excellent snap peas. Students really enjoyed working with those. Seeding, a lot of that, weeding and harvesting. And then each day we would head to Ferguson Middle School's home economics lab, where the students learned how to prepare a meal using some of the ingredients that they had harvested. In 2011, we did it all from scratch. The students would come there hungry, and two hours later they'd be even hungrier, and we would finally sit down to eat. But they did learn how to make complete meals from things like a beet with its leaves still on, lots of kale, things like that. And generally these were students who are not used to being on a farm or not used to cooking with fresh ingredients, and they really did take to it. We were very impressed by how proud they were of being able to prepare their own food, and the fact that they were willing to eat things that probably if they had just been presented with the same plate prepared for them, that they hadn't had any experience within the fields, they would have turned their nose up. We would end each day with some type of fitness activity, swimming. I taught yoga. I'm a yoga teacher as well. We were fortunate to have a partnership with the city of Flores and recreation department. They let our students get into the pool for reduced admission. And then the reviews of camp earth ants, our feedback, was that it had been a real success. The students said that it was so fun, that it was the best camp ever, and that it had been yummy. So we knew that we were really on to something, and we were excited to do it the next year. Oh, really messed up. Sorry about that, guys. The next year, 2012, we got our ducks in order a lot sooner, and we were able to apply for the Sare Youth Educators Grant, which you received. That was $2,000 of our budget. We also received a matching grant from the Missouri Department of Agriculture that provided $5,000 toward the camp. We also got some in-kind donations from Chipotle Mexican Grill. I'd say the big difference that that bigger budget made was that we could put a lot more time into planning activities and into recruiting a somewhat larger volunteer staff to help out with some of the things that we'd been doing on a very ad hoc basis before. So the time that we spent on the farm and the time that we spent in the kitchen were a lot more organized and flowed a lot more smoothly, I would say. This year, we had 17 campers. We had hoped to be able to do two week-long sessions. Only one ended up taking place. We found out, found there to be less demand than we had expected for the camp, and I'll return to that issue a little bit later. But Camp Earth Dance 2012, two full-time and five part-time volunteers, two paid staff members. Again, they were our home economics teacher and an art teacher, and Earth Dance staff helping out myself. I myself served as the camp director this year to just have where Nancy Schnell, our inspiration for the camp, had done it the year before just to have a better integration between what was happening with Earth Dance, the organization, and the camp. So some of our partners and funders, I discussed. The City of Ferguson again and Ferguson-Floreson School District were incredibly supportive and helpful. Some of the ways that the City of Ferguson helped us this year included allowing us to use their Jolly Trolley, which is a bus that they generally have for elderly residents to get around and get to activities. They donated that to the camp so that every day that students could meet at the middle school be taken to the farm, which is only about a mile away, and then returned to the school for lunch each day. Again, they let us into the pool at a discount, and the facilities at the school were all a donation as well. Here's our whole group in 2012, gathered in front of the Jolly Trolley. Some of the activities that we did on the farm included a scavenger hunt, which was designed to demonstrate to students how much of an ecosystem, how much of a really interactive ecosystem an organic farm is. So the students were looking for things like pollinators, things that would be pollinated by pollinators, crop damage from insects, also looking for beneficial insects, looking for items that could be used as soil builders, such as branches and twigs to add to a compost pile, things like that. This tagline here says, this is a picture of nutrient cycle freeze tag, which was an activity to educate students about the nutrient cycle on a farm, about the ways in which living things die. So that was being tagged, death. And then having a decomposer tag you again, brought you back to life. So this young lady here is being a dinosaur. She's frozen because she's been tagged by death, but she's about to get tagged by a decomposer who's going to bring her nutrients back into the cycle of life so she'll be able to run around again. So 2012, a big innovation of the program was that we realized that it was better to have the students helping prepare lunch rather than starting from scratch. This is definitely something that I would endorse if you're having a similar program to teach students about healthy eating, healthy cooking. It's more the inspiration to do this. We don't assume that students are going to go home and cook a gourmet meal from scratch most of the time. It was more like family style inspiring students to do something that they might encourage their parents to work with them on. So a lot of the food prep was done ahead of time by some of our volunteers to graduates from a dietetics program at the local community college. By the way, I'd say that your local university is an excellent place to look for volunteers if you're hoping to do something like this on your farm. We got a lot of response volunteers who were really eager to work with youth and really skilled as well. So in 2012, our program, the lunch totally ran on time because most of the food prep had been done ahead of time but the students were kind of helping out with you know making the salad dressing or cutting up the salad instead of you know just starting from scratch. And we still found that the students were still really satisfied by this but they ate lunch a lot sooner and were happier with that part. One of the things that this freed up time to do was to have healthy eating discussions and we found that really powerful as much as you know we were concerned that student there would be a lot of rolling eyes because we were working with middle school students here. That was really not the case. The students were very respectful and interested in what our dietetics program volunteers had to say and they participate in the conversations. One girl shared about the fact that she had a cousin who had suffered with anorexia and she encouraged all of her other campers to be very mindful about the fact that healthy eating still definitely means eating and it still means enjoying lunch. So I thought that that was a powerful message to come out from you know youth to youth about healthy habits, healthy eating. And we still made time for the afternoon sessions of doing things like yoga. We did hula hooping class this year as an experiment and the pool was a big favorite. So the future of Camp Earth Dance. I mentioned earlier that we found that there was less demand for this camp than we had expected. We did a lot of promotion. We were on local media. We were on the radio and a local TV spot. We had been getting poster or postcards out in the community since April through mid June about the camp and the cost full cost for non-residents was 150, residents of Ferguson was 125 but ultimately about half of the 17 students who did attend the camp were there on scholarship. We're not completely sure whether the issue was that it's an age demographic that people don't need camps for as much. People perceive middle school students as kind of having aged out of camp maybe or if people who were interested in camps for this age were simply being served by other programs. So because we had such a positive response from the students who did participate we really want to be able to continue offering this program in some form but we're thinking that we're just going to do something that's a little bit less time intensive because we did put a huge amount of time into volunteer recruitment into lesson planning and just into executing the camp. So we're planning to partner with existing summer camps next year to bring their students to the farm for field trips so a little mini versions of the camp. We've also been doing field trips with various different schools in the area and having a lot of success with that. So I want to say that if you guys are considering some type of program that would bring school groups or scouts something like that to your farm the field trips I find are generally like a very low hanging fruit and kids really enjoy being outside. Their opportunities to do this in school right now are diminished. A lot of schools have almost eliminated recess for one reason or another. A lot of kids don't get to walk to school anymore for various different reasons. So opening your farm up to students I think it just benefits them and I would say that it benefits your farm in terms of real positive reaction from the community. People love the fact that students can have this experience of finding out where their food comes from. So questions. Oh great question. So the question was did the students stay overnight or shuttle back and forth. The students were all coming locally in the area. So yes their parents would pick them up at the end of each day. No one stays on our farm at this point. Yes. Our location Earth Dance is in Ferguson Missouri which is a near northern suburb of St. Louis. It's about 15 minutes north of the city of St. Louis. Yes. Well since Earth Dance is a teaching farm and already very public we do carry liability insurance through our partner organization the open space council at this point actually. I think that liability insurance for doing a nonprofit project like this like if you wanted to do something formal if you want to make this a regular occurrence on your farm liability insurance for nonprofits can be very inexpensive like $200 a year which you could easily make that up in the amount that you are charging for admission or you know like with your field trips. Another question. Yeah. Great question. How did we talk to the schools what was our approach. Well we did in this case have an amazing in our the organizer of the first year of Camp Earth Dance was Nancy Schnell who had not burned her bridges when she retired. She was still very connected to everyone in the Ferguson florist and school district after her 37 year career. And it so happened that the principal of Ferguson Middle School where we did a lot of the programming had grown up on a farm and she was very supportive of opportunities for youth to experience a farm. I would say though that if you don't have an in with a school yet finding a parent who is pretty active in their school district in or just you know with their own school community is a good place to start. Just someone that has their relationships established already you don't have to cold call schools. So start with start with someone who's passionate about the idea of youth on the farm and your connections are going to grow. Yeah. Nadia was wondering if any of our students are interested in continuing with farming. One of our activities this past year was to do a day related to the idea of farming as a career. So some of the activities that we did were a talk from our farm manager about like what it interested her about farming and what it's like as a career what skills you need what education you need etc. And we also did a mock farmers market to get into the idea that there's another side of farming that involves interacting with the public generally. I don't know that any of those students have decided that they're going to be farmers but some of them did say that it was something that you know like it was an idea that hadn't occurred to them before that that now that now you know like if they wanted to have a farm they feel like they've gotten a good introduction to it. And then a teenage high school student who did our apprenticeship program which is longer it's nine months long and most of most of the enrollees for that our adults has actually decided to go on and major in agriculture. So I don't know about the camp but our longer program has produced some graduates who are definitely going into farming. I would say that the kids doing this program were generally pretty good students. One of them has a real issue at school just of being kind of like all over the place like maybe a little ADD. We found that him getting to work out some of that energy on the farm was really helpful for him. But this program wasn't really targeted towards at risk students. It was very voluntary. So you know as opposed to something where kids are already in trouble and then they get the opportunity to go out to a farm. I think that's really where you would find that situation coming in. I did recently do some outreach to a juvenile detention facility. So if we can work out some kind of partnership with them where they're able to bring their kids out to field trips to the farm we would really like to explore that but it's not something that's happened yet. I would just say quickly Kathy may have been alluding to boys grow in Kansas City so they worked with that risk youth and I think they've been pretty successful. They even produce after growing value-added products with the kids grow tomatoes for ketchup and salsons and so forth. And I don't know how long they've been active. I think they've done pretty well there. Do you want to say the name of that again and I'll tell them? Boys grow and they work with Kansas City at-risk kids. They bring them out to a farm for candy work. So boys grow in Kansas City if you guys are interested in working with that risk youth population. Apparently a model to look at. Someone said we're 10 generations away from kids knowing how to survive and how to live on the farm and how to- we just this summer put up a high tunnel and we're growing a lot of vegetables in there versus just the open ground growth that we've had in the past and kids they hate to know how to grow vegetables and how to even just pick it off the vine and be able to eat it because it's not been sprayed with pesticides and that kind of thing so I can manage it. Oh thank you. I totally agree with you that it's a wonderful and fascinating thing what happens when you get kids on the farm and they have that experience of like you know the light bulb comes on and they're like food this is food growing on plants and you know that first time they pick something and you know you encourage them and say you can pick that right off of the you know you can pick a little leaf there and put it in your mouth and chew it up and things that I just you know like sorrow I'm really surprised that kids like that but they do because it's in this context that is really appealing and new and and exciting.