By Lara Nagle, Penn State MLA candidate
With hazy blue skies stretching out around us, and sloping tree-covered ridges breaking up the horizon in the distance, a tour of Penn State students, faculty, and staff followed alongside farm director Jenn Halpin as she described and discussed the infrastructure and organization of the Dickinson College Farm in Boiling Springs, PA. A vivacious, speckled farm dog named Bella (pronounced “BAY-ah”) accompanied us, though eventually she took off to hunt rabbits in the vegetable rows, her svelte form leaping as if on a trampoline as she hopped between the plants.
Bella the Dickinson College Farm dog
As we passed a fenced parcel where cattle grazed on grass, Jenn told us the story of a particularly affectionate steer that was so loved during his life, farm staff named him and questioned whether to send him to the butcher when the time came.
“Let’s keep him as a mascot,” Jenn had argued, not wanting to kill what felt like a pet, much like Bella. But to do so would counter the farm’s mission, to teach sustainable agricultural practices from start to finish, and if animals would be part of that equation, sending them to slaughter would be a regular event worth getting used to. The student interns who worked with this particular steer accompanied him to the butcher, to send him off with the same care and concern they’d demonstrated when raising him.
Jenn Halpin discussing cultivation practices with the group
Our group soon also met Matt Steiman, an experienced organic farmer who worked at Wilson College before settling in at Dickinson in 2007 to farm full-time with Jenn. Matt’s particular focus on renewable energy led to the installation of three solar arrays on the Dickinson farm, providing 50% of its energy needs, and also multiple bio-digester designs that use a slurry of food and animal wastes, plus glycerin from a biodiesel extraction process, to produce methane and a fertilizer effluent. Some of us accompanied Matt on a side tour to watch as methane from the “biogas burrito,” a large, heavy-duty bag of the slurry, fed into a gas stove that Matt fired up to heat popcorn for our group. There’s nothing quite like fresh popcorn made possible by a “poop-eating, fire-breathing dragon,” as it is humorously named for school groups who visit the farm.
Matt Steiman making popcorn from biogas
So it seemed with all of the farm’s operations, from vegetable harvesting, biogas production, composting, and raising chicken, sheep, and cows, that the educational and holistic value of agriculture trumped the oftentimes anonymous, industrialized nature of our food and fuel systems. What’s more, the ever-growing, ever-changing acreage and activity of the Dickinson farm imparts a sense that agroecology, in practice, is driven by a practical curiosity to constantly modify the system for different results; sometimes improved, sometimes not. But you never know until you try!
For instance, no-till cover crops crimped flat as ground cover have led to a vole and rabbit infestation that affects yields. This cover, while improving soil fertility and controlling weeds and erosion also provides habitat for small rodents. A believer in agroecosystems, Jenn and her team of student workers will attempt in upcoming seasons to find a strategy for pest control in order to keep a no-till system viable.
From its inception as a 100 square foot garden plot, to two of these, to a half acre mini-farm, to the current goal of working 30 to 50 acres of a 180 acre parcel jointly leased with a small family dairy operation, the farm began due to a student initiative called “Students Interested in Sustainable Agriculture,” (SISA), which still exists on campus and actively engages Dickinson College with its food system. By providing fresh produce or value-added products on campus in the dining halls and campus café, with signage and information connecting these foods to the people and mission of the farm, SISA and the Dickinson farm are keeping students happy, healthy, and better-informed about where food comes from and how it can be sustainably grown by their own peers!
In addition to touring the farm, our group visited the main dining hall, where we saw signage in action at the salad bar and a fruit stand proffering local apples – the new director of Dining Services, Errol Huffman, described the College’s efforts to source 25-30% of dairy and meat locally, as well as produce from farms like Dickinson farm. A piece of the puzzle involves educating diners about seasonal trends in the food system, so that students don’t clamor for fresh strawberries at every meal, all year round, for example. Huffman and staff also coordinate menu planning with campus chefs engaged in the process, to emphasize the significance of seasonal menus.
Errol Huffman describing how dining services purchases and displays farm products
The farm engages with the Dickinson College community in several other ways: by offering a Campus Supported Agriculture (CSA) share-program to faculty, students, and staff who work at Dickinson; by collecting food waste from the dining halls for a large scale composting system capable of breaking down corn-resin “plastic” ware; by playing an integral organizational role for the farmers’ market in town; and by hosting numerous student and faculty research projects on the farm for courses ranging from the arts and humanities to earth science, to environmental studies and first-year seminars.
A series of ponds, bird boxes, and test plots have inspired study of American toad migration, local bird populations, or the growth of medicinal herbs to make tinctures for sheep ailments. The current challenge is how to make this type of information available publicly, to link it back to operations on the farm, or forward, to projects in the future. When our tour paused for lunch, computer science professor Tim Wahls showed us software developed at Dickinson that student farmers use to log a variety of data regarding activity on the farm. Such efforts have led to a system much improved from recording data in paper notebooks that get disorganized and neglected as the season accelerates each year. Collaboration between college and farm will likely lead to other improvements as partnerships continue to form and develop.
As Penn State plans ahead for its own campus farm, it can learn from Dickinson that a diversity of projects, growth through trial and error, and engaging the entire college community in some way will generate a beautiful farm, lush with stories and educational opportunities for student volunteers, apprentices, and work-study employees, as well as faculty and staff.
More information about the Dickinson College Farm available here.