A young Pie Farm gardener learns about food production — from the ground up.
May 2006 | Naturally Tasty
Second Helping
Kids Discover the True Roots of Food at Pie Ranch
By Andrea Blum
Rockesha Norris is an inquisitive 16-year-old senior at Mission High School in San Francisco. Her hair is black and braided and worn pulled behind her ears. Her large smile reveals her silver braces. She wears an oversized white sweatshirt over her jeans and her nails are perfectly painted with the white swoosh of a French manicure. In conventional classroom circumstances, she’s part of a special education class. In this case, on an educational farm called Pie Ranch an hour south of San Francisco, that label disappears and she shines as a leader and the most outspoken and articulate of her peers.
I met her on a cool Spring day near Año Nuevo State Park in San Mateo County after my car hobbled up a twisted lane of slippery muck and rested near a yurt on a 14-acre parcel of land shaped like a piece of pie. Not knowing if I had actually arrived at my destination, I walked toward the circular tent passing rows of chard, kale and furrows of dark earth soaked from winter rains. There were a few fenced-in goats and a handful of chickens that scratched the ground and jerked their heads to look as I passed. Then clues emerged — blackberry bushes and strawberry plants — the future makings of a good pie. When I peered inside the tent, the sweet smell of corn bread filled the room and a small band of farmers and cooks welcomed me inside.
The yurt is home to Pie Ranch’s farmer and co-director, Jered Lawson and his wife Nancy Vail, a couple in their 30s who share their small home with their one-year-old son, Lucas and, at certain times of the month, a dozen or so teenagers. The home doubles as an unconventional classroom for SF high school students who venture south once a month to learn about ecology, farming, food, and cooking. It’s a seed-to-plate curriculum where students plant, cultivate and harvest their food for the school year and learn about nutrition by cooking what they reap. Three years ago, co-directors Karen Heisler and Lawson bought the property with the idea of transforming it into an educational farm. Heisler, a self-described “city person” who works tirelessly for the EPA, labored for years to promote sustainable agriculture and creative ways to link urban dwellers with local food producers. Last May, she finally completed the city-to-county bridge, joining students from SF’s Mission High School and Urban High School with a new type of classroom — a farm. “We want to cultivate food and agriculture activists,” Heisler told me. “We want these students, who by their own enthusiasm, make a change in their communities. We want to have food system activists in the cities.”
And that’s when Rockesha and eleven other Mission High students arrived en masse (some dressed in oversized jeans and shoes untied) with their environmental science and English teachers. They were armed with journals, questions and some complaints. Most of the kids live in low-income areas of the city, and none of them had been on a farm before their experience at Pie Ranch. Rockesha started peppering her teachers with questions: Why are chickens and ducks living together? How come the goats don’t eat them? Can you drink milk straight from a cow or does it have to be pasteurized? She told me she had never seen a live chicken before. “I thought we were just going on a field trip,” she said of the first class. “They put us to work. I never planted anything. I never knew about healthy foods.” Now, she said, from what she learned on the farm, she’s teaching other people. “I’m teaching my mom about reading the labels,” she said referring to high fructose corn syrups and other additives found in processed food.
Farming Redefined
Educational farms like Pie Ranch are part of a growing national trend to redefine the role of the farmer and the relationship between the consumer and the land. Farming, in this context, is no longer a solitary trade of a man on tractor toiling to make ends meet. It’s now a collective event that partners with the urban and rural communities. “When there is a lack of support from the community, farming is not a viable occupation,” said Lawson. “So we have to reinvent the occupation.” That could come in the form of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) where customers buy shares of the farm’s bounty directly from the farmer each week to the buttress farm’s survival.
The green shoots of this budding New Farm movement can be seen in farmers markets, school lunches and educational programs.
Pie Ranch combines most of these ideas. In addition to their mini high school, a bean-and-grain CSA is in the works. Back in the city, Heisler sold her home to buy a Mission District Victorian to house a bakery linking Pie Ranch produce to a one-of-a-kind Pie shop. In February, Pie Ranch teamed up with Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and created the Green Oaks Agricultural Land Trust (GOAT) to acquire and restore a 13-acre neighboring wedge-shaped parcel — an historic farmstead with a Greek Revival farmhouse and other buildings — that will house a roadside pie stand and an educational center run by the farm’s alumni.
The Future of Farms
Heisler, whose wire-rimmed glasses frame her angular face, is in a constant state of reflection on food issues. She recalls a United Nations prediction that half the world’s population would live in cities by 2007. Already 80 percent of the US population lives in urban landscapes. With increased urbanization, it becomes harder to appreciate how food is produced. “As the world becomes urbanized,” she said,” if we don’t educate [our children], who’s going to grow the food?” We have all heard stories about children not knowing that hamburger meat comes from a cow. Robert Dyson, a 16-year-old student told me, “I didn’t know there was even a choice to eat other food. I didn’t know what organic was or healthy food. Now I drink organic milk, and I got my mom to drink organic milk, too.” Heisler, a mother herself, knew she wanted to work with teenagers. Watching students flourish at the ranch has convinced her that “the conventional classroom is a very limited environment,” she said.
Back in the yurt after a field trip to witness 1,800 elephant seals on the beaches of Año Nuevo State Park, the students made a meal together. It was like an extended family at a holiday party minus the family dynamics. The mood was focused and relaxed. Everyone had chore and everyone cooked under the smooth direction of two chefs, Megan Hanson and Rania Long, who work for the SF nonprofit, Nextcourse.
Some students ground last season’s jewel-like corn, one picked greens and braised them, and others worked on a kiwi pie — the in-season fruit du jour. Every class makes a pie. Everything on the menu is grown on the farm. After a lunch of bean cassoulet and corn bread, the students find their journaling spot. Each group reflects on changes they see in what they call their “piece of the pie.” When I asked Miguel, a student from the Mission District, how it feels to be on a farm, he said: “It feels free. It’s quiet. You feel proud to eat what you have grown.” For Rockesha, who helped pick 230 kiwis the week before, “Here we see things how they really are. It’s like a flash on life. And you don’t have to watch your back.”
Andrea Blum is CG’s food columnist.
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