The Farm
The Yale Farm is a 1-acre (4,000 m2) plot located on Edwards Street between Prospect Street and Whitney Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut.
At the Yale Farm, students, faculty, staff and community members come together to learn about the connection between land and food. The Farm, a 15-minute walk north of the Old Campus, hosts workshops, seminars, volunteer workdays, and tours for local school children. Working in this four-season market garden teaches the principles of sustainability and the practices of sustainable agriculture.
Throughout the school year, the Farm hosts weekly volunteer workdays from 1-5 on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, sharing pizza from the hearth oven with volunteers after Friday workdays. Yale Professors from several departments use the Farm as a resource in their coursework, and teachers from New Haven schools bring their classes to the farm for lessons in ecology, science, and food production. Each summer, six undergraduate interns spend their summer working the land and learning deeply about sustainability, food and agriculture. And each spring and autumn, new students gather around the hearth oven to share pizza during Bulldog Days and before leaving on pre-orientation trips in the fall.
Crops are raised throughout the year, with hardy greens spending the winter months in unheated greenhouses. The harvest is given to volunteers or sold at CitySeed’s Wooster Square Farmers’ Market. The Union League, one of New Haven’s most highly regarded restaurants, regularly features produce from the Farm. In an urban area like New Haven, that’s as locally grown as it gets.
The Farm was established in May 2003, when the Project’s first group of student interns cleared dying hemlock trees, poison ivy, shrubs, and weeds from a forgotten corner of Farnam Gardens. Today, it is a lush, productive, organic farm that produces hundreds of varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers. In growing, distributing, and eating this bounty, volunteers learn about sustainability first hand. The Yale Farm seeks to model focused, efficient, and sustainable practices that are economically viable and ecologically sound. It produces beautiful, abundant, and delicious food while engaging in agricultural practices that can be continued indefinitely without causing degradation to the biological systems on which they rely.
Read more about this topic: Yale Sustainable Food Project
Famous quotes containing the word farm:
“On the farm I had learned how to meet realities without suffering either mentally or physically. My initiative had never been blunted. I had freedom to succeed—freedom to fail. Life on the farm produces a kind of toughness.”
—Bertha Van Hoosen (1863–1952)
“Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)