The work and care of the farm is the mainstay of the program. The farm itself is 130 acres, with about 40 acres of open land and 90 acres of woods. It is an incredibly productive place, with large vegetable gardens designed to help feed all that come, young orchards, a maple sugaring operation, a dairy with up to 6 cows milking, pigs, beef cows, goats, chickens, oxen, a woodlot that keeps us busy producing firewood and lumber and lovely pastures and fields for the kids and animals to roam. Students are fully integrated into the farm operations, rising early for milking, tending to the garden, fields and forests, and helping to cook meals with the food they have harvested. By the time they leave, the farm is theirs.

The Farm School is reframing its commercially-scaled meat, milk and vegetable operations – which in the past served as a training ground for the adult Learn to Farm Program while supplying a 200-member vegetable CSA and a 50 member meat CSA – in order to more deeply impact the children that the school serves and the communities from which they come.

Going forward, food production will be centered at Sentinel Elm Farm, with participants in the Program for Visiting Schools, the Summer Program and the Chicken Coop School more completely ingrained in the operation. Distribution will be shifted from a pay-for-CSA structure to a donation model focused on distribution to food-insecure members of the communities from which the children come, including the communities that surround the farm.

Over the past couple of summers, The Farm School has partnered with the Quabbin Harvest senior share program to serve families facing food insecurity in our local Athol/Orange area. Upon the onset of the pandemic this past spring, we quickly mobilized and leaned into our deeply held relationships with visiting school teachers in a new way in order to identify families that were facing increased food insecurity amid COVID-19 and get the food we produce to them. By continuing and expanding these efforts going forward, more direct and lasting connections will be made between the larger communities that the children are coming from and the farm itself, and the children will be able to experience in an ever-more visceral and understandable way the beauty of caring for others by growing food for them.

This year’s scaled-down vegetable production operation will be based in the Flat Field at Sentinel Elm Farm. Milk production will continue to take place at Sentinel Elm, with the addition of bottling capability to our pasteurization room so that we can include milk in our offerings to families. The scaled-down beef operation will be based at Waslaske’s, a short walk from everywhere.

The Farm School redirects the bulk of its vegetable production towards helping address food insecurity in the communities they are coming from, including our local Orange/Athol community.

We will have a limited amount of pork and beef available for sale this summer for fall / early winter pick up by the half/whole animal as part of our strategy to help nourish our connected communities – more info coming soon here!

Farm School meat and vegetables will continue to be available at Quabbin Harvest (variety and quantities based on our availability and their need.)

Our current practices have evolved thoughtfully over the 30-year history of The Farm School. The increasingly urgent climate emergency requires us to evaluate even more deeply how The Farm School farming and land use practices, upon which all of the school’s educational programming is based, can best meet this challenge. A comprehensive plan can bring together and synergize all of our methods and operations and present multiple pathways for connection to the land for our program participants. In the process of developing a plan, deep reflection on how the use of land has been a form of oppression for some communities is needed in order for our farming and land use practices to become a source of empowerment and agency for participants and staff and help move the needle on our relationships, repairing the harms of systemic racism and decolonizing our food systems. Mindful animal production, crop selection and input choices, appropriately scaled production and range of distribution, careful attention to soil health, erosion mitigation and forest management, and exploration of carbon sequestering, local energy production options and regenerative practices are among the topics to consider. Starting this year, expertise from within the Farm School community as well as from outside will begin this process.

After 16 incredible years building and running the Learn to Farm Program, we’re beginning a new journey!

Our new programming at The Farm School leverages our resources to strengthen and deepen our mission’s work of connecting people to the land, centered on a commitment to advancing racial and human equity.

We will:

1) Work to build a relationship with the Nipmuc People, whose members are descendants of some of the original people of the land on which the farm rests. This work hopes to lift up methods they identify that will enable their community to authentically reconnect with the land at Maggie’s Farm.

2) Center the production of food more deeply at the heart of the Program for Visiting Schools, and share the fruits of our cultivation with food-insecure members of our local and partner-school communities.

3) Create new year-long apprenticeships for up to two vegetable growers, drawing forward key elements of the agricultural training from the Learn to Farm Program for them and their fellow farmer/teachers.

4) Create a farm-wide agricultural plan to meet our educational and production needs, while implementing the highest ecological standards in order to meet the pressing challenge of the climate emergency.