Traducido de  Inteligencia Rural, por Ana María Quispe, Febrero 15, 2010

“Parte del trabajo es comer ” dice Sam Levin, arrancando y entregándome una de sus hojas favoritas”, una poco conocida especie de color rojizo para asar, la cual en su forma original cruda tiene un gusto similar al wasabi. Los exámenes se acercan en la escuela de Great Barrington Monument Mountain, por lo que según Levin, solo él y su compañero de 2do año Dakota Malik (a la derecha de Levin en la foto) llega después de clase un Viernes por la tarde para trabajar en el Proyecto Sprout, un proyecto de siembra de vegetales. Normalmente, dice, habría más de una docena de estudiantes voluntarios de todos los niveles como también una gama de padres de familia y miembros de la facultad.

Aunque el jardín de vegetales en los 1,115 metros cuadrados del Proyecto Sprout está dentro de la propiedad de la escuela, esta no es una actividad extracurricular comparable digamos que al Club Francés, o al equipo de basquetbol. Hoy en su segundo año, la iniciativa fue fundada por estudiantes y solventada solamente a través de sus esfuerzos. Ya han acumulado $60,000 dólares, incluyendo $11,ooo de una Parrillada de Cerdo realizada este pasado fin de semana de Memorial Day en el Grill de la Ruta 7, y $7,000 de una beca “Héroes de Jennie”, gracias al show de Jennie Jones. Este último dinero les permitirá comprar unidades móviles, extendiendo su estación de siembra para poder proveer todo el año a la cafetería de vegetales frescos. Aunque el acreedor a la beca Héroes de Jenny es realmente el consejero de Levin y el principal jefe adulto del Proyecto Sprout, Mike Powell, la propuesta para ser acreedor a la beca fue escrita por el mismo Levin, aptitud que ha sabido cultivar.

En realidad fue Powell a quien Levin se dirigió con dos amigos al inicio de su primer año con una idea aún no bien formada acerca de crear un jardín manejado por los estudiantes para proveer vegetales a la cafetería, el esperaba inspirar a sus compañeros a compartir su pasión por la naturaleza. Otros tenían sus propios motivos. Sarah Steadman, en ese entonces ya era una entusiasta del jardín y Natalie Akers, entonces en su segundo año, había estado reclamando se sirva vegetales frescos en la cafetería de la escuela.

“Juntos empezamos a desarrollar la idea y ver los detalles” dice Levine. “Nos reunimos con agricultores locales, jardineros, diseñadores, profesores y guardianes. Tuvimos una gran ayuda del Proyecto Nativo, especialistas en plantas nativas en Housatonic. Nos reuníamos en medio de clases, durante el almuerzo, después de la escuela, antes de la escuela. En unas semanas teníamos ya un plan”

En el primer año, empezaron en un pequeño lote abandonado de futbol de 15 x 21 metros ubicado junto a la escuela elemental. El pasado otoño el proyecto fue capaz de proveer papas y ensaladas verdes a la cafetería de la escuela de manera que aún les sobró para obsequiar 454 kilos de vegetales a las familias de bajos ingresos del condado de Berkshire. Antes del Proyecto Sprout, la cafetería de la escuela donde 350 a 400 estudiantes compran almuerzo a diario, se vendía un patético número de apenas 6 ensaladas en un día. Cuando se ofrecen las ensaladas del Proyecto Sprout, el número crece a 70.

Asumiendo que el jardín continuará conquistando corazones, cerebros y apetitos, el Proyecto Sprout cuadruplicará sus vegetales este año, con la ayuda de Sean Stanton, un vecino agricultor y de su arado. Esta primavera el padre de Mike Powell edificará un par de hermosos cobertizos para almacenar el equipo.

Los chicos ahora han sembrado un huerto al lado de su parcela de vegetales. Escuelas vecinas del distrito han empezado a pedir consejo de cómo se hace. Cuando se le pregunta cuánto dinero el distrito escolar está ahorrando en compras de alimentos debido al Proyecto Sprout, Levin se encoje de hombros, “No recuerdo”, dice, como si esto no fuera nada importante. “Pero un alumno de la clase de matemáticas, ya hizo los cálculos”.

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Etiquetado como: Alimentos, la agricultura orgánica

by Sam Levin, one of three coordinators of Project Sprout. Project Sprout is a student led and inspired onsite garden that supplements food served in the Monument Mountain High School (in Great Barrington, MA).

The best part of the beginning of a new year is when everyone makes their resolution. Every New Year’s Eve, sitting around the table, my family and I set our goals for the coming year. Tasting roast leg of lamb and swallowing bites of chocolate cake, we throw out suggestions like trying to do something that scares us once a month or doing something special for one of our neighbors every two weeks. Most of the time one of my brothers suggests something that cripples us with laughter, and someone else tosses out a hallmark card suggestion that gets dismissed with a little disgust. Usually after dinner, in honor of an old Latin American tradition, each of us eats twelve grapes to bring good luck to every month of the coming year. However, it’s not just that I love setting goals for myself, or hearing Will tell me with a grin that his goal is to cover his clothes with duct tape every day. That piece of it is great, but this year, I discovered something even better. That piece of it is great, but this year, I discovered something even better.

This year Sarah, Natalie and I decided that we would resolve to get garden projects initiated in six other high schools. And as I thought about what that meant, I have to admit, I started to get a little excited. As I sat at the table listening to my family members laugh and eat and talk, I began to think about all of the other people in the world sitting at their own tables, counting down to 2009, and resolving to accomplish their own goals.

I thought of Will and Jake resolving to open an educational farm-to-table bed and breakfast, and my guidance counselor resolving to be in the garden almost every day after school in the spring. I thought of all of the new members of Slow Food beginning to plan their escapades into the world of good, clean, and fair food. And I thought of all of the veterans of the movement mapping out their ventures into new realms, and extensions of their previous “slow” work. Because, as I began to realize last night, New Year’s is about exactly that: everyone figuring out how they are going to change the world in the coming twelve months, in their own big or small way. It is about everyone figuring out their roles in the bigger picture; how their resolutions can affect their community’s resolutions, or the world’s resolutions.

Trying to think of our New Year’s Resolution, I imagined myself sitting at my table on the brink of the 2010. I asked myself what Sarah, Natalie and I want to be able to say we had accomplished in 2009. Sitting at our tables one year from now, looking back, what do we want to be able to say we accomplished?

Do we want to be able to say we extended to a new age group and brought the world of high school-ers into Slow Food? That we completely eliminated the image of Slow Food as being elitist? That we entered Barack Obama’s consciousness and put sustainable agriculture and pleasurable eating for everyone on the top of the nation’s agenda? That we brought paw-paws back from the dead, or saved the mulefoot hog?

So, as you think about what you want the slow food movement to be able to say on the edge of 2010, consider how your individual resolution will contribute to the collective goal. I hope that Slow Food will cross the last age frontier, and bring culinary and agricultural pleasure and sustainability to high schools. In order to aid that cooperative undertaking Sarah, Natalie and I plan to help develop student run gardens in at least six high schools in 2009. Those are our main collective and individual resolutions. What are yours?

Meet Mike Powell from Housatonic, Massachusetts

Mike Powell is a high school guidance counselor at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He requested $7,000 to purchase hoop houses, a type of greenhouse, for the school’s “Project Sprout,” a student-run project where they grow their own organic food to be served in the school lunchrooms while at the same time, educating students about farming, healthy eating, and sustainability.

In the fall of 2007, junior Sarah Steadman, sophomore Natalie Akers, and freshman Sam Levin had a vision to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for their school’s cafeteria. They recruited Mike to be their advisor and the team came up with a one, two, and five year plan for the garden. In January of 2008, Project Sprout was approved by the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee.

 

Their first season they made a 3,500 square foot garden filled with peas, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, basil, peppers, sunflowers, potatoes, melons, green beans, onions, leeks, parsley, rosemary and corn. They had several hundred volunteers (many of them students) who planted, watered, weeded, and harvested, and they provided produce to the cafeterias of all three district schools. “When we got those salads and mashed potatoes into the lunches last fall,” said Mike, “we took our first step to becoming the first public district in the country whose students grow the food for the lunches.”

The team has recently started tapping maple trees to make syrup, and begun to add nature trails around the student farm. Any teacher in the district can bring a classroom to the farm to study a certain aspect of agriculture or to volunteer to work. They recently put on a Pig Roast that brought together over 300 community members for a day of eating locally grown produce and listening to high school bands play. Over 1,000 pounds of produce were donated to needy families in the community.

Mike says that the hoop houses would allow them to grow fresh vegetables throughout the winter to supplement their school lunches and would bring this project to an entirely new level. “We could have student, teacher and community involvement all year long with a moving hoop house. This would include the 1,400 students in our district along with over 200 staff members. It would mean not only education and engagement in the natural world year round instead of only warm months, but it would also mean healthy food year round.”

A graduate of Monument Mountain High School himself, Mike has been married to his wife, June, for 15 years and they have four children, McKenna, Cam, and twins Mary and Noel.

September 3rd, 2009

Mike sent us an email and some pictures...

"Ninth grade students just started school today and all other students come in tomorrow. It was a great summer at Project Sprout. We had hundreds of volunteers, donated well over a thousand pounds of produce to local food pantries and churches, triple the size of our garden, built two new sheds, planted our orchard, and we have started storing food in our school's walk in cooler. At our faculty welcome back breakfast, the home fries were from our garden and eaten by over 200 staff members and they were delicious! Things are going great!

In terms of the movable hoop house, we have laid out the area we are putting it in and have made arrangements to have it plowed with horse or oxen, which is really cool. We tried in the spring as well but ended up using a tractor. Hopefully it will work out this time. We are looking to purchase this fall if all goes according to plan and with these students, it usually does. This is an amazing project, student initiated and run and we are all so grateful for your foundation choosing us to earn your support."

click the image to see a slideshow

May 20th, 2009

It was such a pleasure to call Mike today at the school. Fellow counselor Sean Flynn helped put together a "meeting" regarding Project Sprout but it was really so I could call and interrupt to give Mike the good news.

click the image to see a slideshow

He told me that 1,400 students and parents are benefiting from the program and that last year, they also donated over 1,000 pounds of food. The press was there and interviewed Mike for the local paper. It turns out they are doing a big fund raiser this weekend with a pig roast for the community. It's a day of eating locally grown produce and listening to high school bands play. Last year a similar event raised $9,000 and this year Mike hopes to raise even more. Sean told me that Mike is an "awesome human being and has done much to enhance the experience at the school and in the community." It's good to know we picked a worthy hero.

Exactly one year ago Monday, three students at MMHS had a similar idea. We had not one detail worked out, only that we wanted the students of our school and the people of our community to begin paying more attention to their food, and in turn the natural world around them. After talking to our guidance counselor, Mr. Powell, the three of us--essentially strangers before this and coincidentally connected only through Mr. P--came together and began refining the idea and figuring out the details of the project. Within weeks we had a plan.

The plan was simple. Create a student-run organic vegetable garden on school grounds, that would be used as an educational tool for students ages 2-18, provide delicious produce for the school lunches, and ultimately build connections with nature and food for the children of our district. And with that plan, along with some energy, excitement, and motivation, we began working towards our goal.

We met with local farmers and gardeners, landscapers and designers, teachers and groundskeepers. We worked with non-profit leaders and most importantly, we worked together. We couldn’t walk by Mr. Powell’s office without stopping in to talk to him. The three of us met in between classes and during lunch, after school and before school. Although we hadn’t even known each other before October, as time went on, our relationship became unbreakable. As we know, food brings people together. But as we have learned, working to save food creates unbelievably powerful bonds between people.

It’s amazing what an idea can become. But until you have witnessed that evolution, from thought to existence, you truly cannot trust that it will happen. So for the first three months, we worked almost nervously. We were preparing for the school committee meeting, where we had to present for approval of our project. We had been warned again and again to be prepared for rejection, that the School Committee was likely to turn us down, and we were still unsure what would happen. But quickly we replaced that fear with an immense excitement. We read book after book on gardening, and studied every project we could find that was somewhat related to what we were doing.

Meanwhile, something important happened. We found a potential location: an old soccer field across from the high school. Suddenly, our intangible idea gained some tangibility, and we began working at full speed. We took soil samples, and measured water tables and hours of sunlight. We plotted out potential locations for the first year’s garden. And by the time the School Committee meeting January came along, it felt like we had worked too hard, and too long to be told by a bunch of people sitting around a table that we couldn’t grow this garden, that we couldn’t make a difference. So we decided to simply blow them away. We realized we would have to be ready for every question they asked or challenge they posed with ten answers and a whole packet research to back us up. And on January 15th 2008, we were approved.

Afterwards, we realized that it was an important formality that needed to happen, but that we had actually been approved 3 months before when we decided we were going to do this.

We started working with Bridghe, our garden designer and professional gardener, to design yearly plans of the garden. We met with more and more farmers. We sold native plants as our first fundraiser, and sent hundreds of fundraising letters to businesses around the area. We planned our first benefit, a pig roast at a local farm to table restaurant, with all local food donated by local farmers, and live music from a student band. At the pig roast, we raised over nine thousand dollars and had over three hundred community members gathered together enjoying some local food and talking about gardening and farming.

And as time went on, there were more and more successes like that. We built a unique water catchment system that collected rainwater to water our crops. We have raised over thirty thousand dollars to date, and have implemented the first steps of our education program, by having a kindergarten class come every Monday to the garden to learn.

In August, we pledged on a tablecloth that within a year we would get something into the school lunches. One month later, we served lettuce with cherry tomatoes, carrots, and green beans in the high school and elementary school cafeterias.

And slowly, we have proven ourselves. We proved to the school committee that we were organized and dedicated, and that we had thought through the challenges we would face. We proved to our teachers that we weren’t just out to scatter some seeds across the earth. And most importantly, we proved to ourselves that youth can make a difference. We did it by doing big things and little things. We did it by donating over five hundred kilograms of produce to low income families around the region, and by putting a cherry tomato in the mailbox of every staff member and teacher at our school.

On Monday, exactly one year after walking into our school to talk to Mr. Powell about this idea of getting kids to think about food and the natural world more, we once again walked through those doors. This time, we had just come up from the garden, where we had been looking at the lines that had been drawn out for the expansion of the garden, and the area that had been marked for a fruit orchard. We were going into school to talk to Mr. Powell, but this time, we needed to make sure that that the head of the cafeteria had received our thirty kilograms of potatoes for the Project Sprout Mashed Potatoes. IWe also had to confirm the meeting with students from the nearby school who wanted a garden as well. We wondered in two Octobers from now, when we walk through the doors of the school, what we would be going to talk to him about. And we wondered who would be checking up on the garden before school in 20 years, when even Mr. Powell is gone. And we knew, that no matter who it was, someone would be there, and the garden would even more beautiful than it is today. 

This last year, has been the best year of our Project Sprout lives. We have had the most amazing moments working on Project Sprout. Moments like seeing a class of kindergarteners run into the garden, actually excited about pulling up weeds. One girl informed Sarah that “he hated sweet peas, but that the ones at Project Sprout were delicious.” Moments like, when students in detention started coming down to the garden, and they started asking for more jobs because they were having so much fun. One kid, who most of the time Sam was afraid was going to beat him, told him that Project Sprout kicked ass. Or moments like, one night after a follow up school committee meeting in September, when the whole team hung out in the parking lot of the school eating our fresh picked watermelon on the back of Mr. Powell’s truck.

But working on Project Sprout, we have also had some of the worst weeks and days of our high school lives. Like when it seemed our entire fundraising event would fall through after two months of planning. Or when we didn’t get the first grant we applied to, that we spent four weeks working on. At one point or another during Spring, all of us had missed somethng important to the other half of our lives, and the people we let down didn’t talk to us for months. There have been nights where we didn’t sleep at all, and we thought we would never recover. But we would take a thousand more of those nights, for just one of the amazing things that have happened over the last twelve months.

But it is not just what has happened in the past twelve months, although those things were incredible. It is about how it happened, and it is about what is going to happen. Because, the truth is, the three of us are not special. We don’t have some awesome gift or power. We just have two things. We have youth, which is found in every town in every part of the world, and we have motivation, which is out there. A lot of it is out there. Mount Everett, the school in the town south of us, has asked for help starting their own Project Sprout. So has the school in the town North of us. As well as Lincoln Academy in Maine, over five hundred kilometers away. Youth Radio in California, almost five thousand kilometers away wants a version of Project Sprout, and even a school in Kedougou, Senegal all the way across the Atlantic wants to become our sister project, in the development of a Project Sprout Kedegou. That’s the most exciting part that—that it is spreading. There are kids all over the world who want to make this happen, all they need is a little hope and inspiration.

What all of you (at Terra Madre) have started is an unbelievable beginning to a powerful revolution. But we know that all of you are wondering if our generation will be able to continue that revolution, and carry it to the extent of its mission.

We're here today because we want you to know, that we got it. We want you to know, that from know on, people can stop saying “Kids these days,” and start saying, “kids these days!”.

That’s why we're here today. Not because the story of Project Sprout is a success story. This project is still very young and we still have a long way to go. Who knows what challenges and obstacles lie ahead. It is not a success story. It is something else entirely. It is a window through which all of us can get a glimpse at the power of youth. It is a promise to our parents, to all of you, that we will continue what you started. The story of Project Sprout is a message from our generation to all those that came before us that says, “We will be the generation that reunites mankind with the earth.”