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Cultivating change
story Karen Nagy | photo Katie Onheiber
Today, the average American farmer is fifty-five years old. Farmers make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, but an agricultural revival is on the horizon. Students are playing an important role in today’s food revolution as they begin to understand the importance of communal farming and the joys of freshly grown food.
“There’s been a paradigm shift in consciousness,” says Harper Keeler, director of the University of Oregon’s Urban Farm. “The whole idea of knowing where your food comes from is huge.” Urban farmer and UO philosophy student Laura Beko agrees. “To not know where your food comes from is kind of scary,” she says. “Eating what you produce is a cool thing.”
The Rodale Institute’s Farming for Credit Directory lists seventy-seven colleges and universities nationwide that offer classes or hands-on work in campus gardens to lure young people back to the land. “When everything you do in college is in the classroom, it’s fun to get outside,” says senior UO political science major Jaime Symons.
The UO’s Urban Farm — a thriving 1.5- acre outdoor classroom — is one of many sites nationwide where the student farm movement has taken root. The farm, now in its twenty-sixth year, has created a growing network of young farmers throughout the Willamette Valley. These students, newly educated about the basics of soil composition, crop rotation, and composting, are eager to turn their knowledge into food in their own homes or community gardens.
Jen Surdyk, a third-year Urban Farm team leader and garden coordinator at the Laurel Valley Educational Farm at the Northwest Youth Corps, takes pleasure in working with soil and with people in the various green spaces. “Bonds are created by growing food and eating food,” she says. “On any day there’s no place I’d rather be than farming.”