Adolescents Mentor Younger Children

Farm School students mentor younger children during community work. 

The pigs helped out too.

Abundance of Eggs in Winter!

While we are bundling up against the cold, our chickens don't seem to know it is winter. They haven't slowed egg production one bit.

We are enjoying the wide range of egg sizes and colors, as you'll see here in these photos. Many of our brown eggs are so large we can't close the cartons!

Students hold a silkie (our smallest breed) and a Jersey Giant (our largest breed)

Students sell the eggs at local Farmer's Markets as part of the Microconomy curriculum. They learn to track revenue and expenses, and make decisions about running the farm based on these numbers.

The students learn about economics through hands-on, experiential learning every day at the Farm School.

This Little Piggie Went to the Farm School...

We have new pigs!!

We have recently been joined by 3 young Tamworth pigs. Tamworth is a heritage breed that originated in the United Kingdom (notice the Irish red hair) and is now listed as "Threatened" in the United States.

It is fun to watch them interact and to check out their freshly painted home. They are playful and inquisitive.

We will raise the male for meat, and breed the two females in the Spring.

No school today? No way!

Friday was technically a holiday. Students and teachers did not have to go to school. So what did we do? We went to school anyway! Students, younger siblings, teachers, and parents gathered at the Farm School to do community work.

In the morning, we built greenhouses to cover the raised beds, worked on the portable chicken house ("chicken tractor"), dug the hole and began to build the walls for the primitive pit fire (in which we will fire our clay pots), unloaded hay, and reorganized the Farmer's Market materials. In the afternoon, we ate lunch and played soccer.

It was a wonderful day. I was touched by the willingness of so many in the school community to volunteer their time and talents when they could have been sleeping in. The students have such ownership of the Farm School that they love to be there working together to get things done. It is a joy to work with these young people.

-Susan, Farm School Director

Work Made Noble Through Integrity and Passion

Ninth grade students have the opportunity to apply to be managers of one area of the farm. Here is a manager report from Rory Grambo, Animals Manager, Fall 2008

In the animal chore group we take care of the pigs and the chickens. They all seem to be doing well, and we are saving a lot of money on feed by feeding the pigs the food scraps from school. We are studying both the pigs and chickens in Occupations projects, and have various plans for them. We hope to breed the pigs this fall. However, if that doesn't work out, each of the pigs easily weighs 300 pounds and they will provide meat for the community. We have 16 chickens, of which 6 are new hens. However, not all of our hens are laying eggs at this point; we are trying to figure out which ones are laying and which are not. We also got new nesting boxes for the chickens. They started to use them immediately and this makes it much easier for us to collect eggs. Overall, the animals are doing very well and we hope to add more to our menagerie in the future.