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:
“I farm a pasture where the boulders lie
As touching as a basketful of eggs....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)