Community Seeds

High school students learn about sustainable agriculture

Dustin Eirdosh's passion for farming is equaled only by his belief in community. He combined these two fervors in his senior project, a Sustainable Agriculture Project at the local high school, working with students to grow food that they might consume in the school cafeteria. Dustin bit off a lot for this project. What he achieved went beyond even his dreams, for his project has not yet ended. Potentially, it can alter the way a community understands and acquires its very nutrition.

Dustin began his project, "Community Seeds" quite modestly. He went to a local community organization, Mount Desert Island Tomorrow, to talk with them about sustainable agriculture. He kept returning, until this coalition of community leaders working to identify and address crucial questions on the future of this region, invited him to work with several classes within the school system in a Sustainable Agricultural Project. According to an MDI Tomorrow report, "During brainstorming sessions, many participants saw integrating farming and gardening into our schools as a solution that could help address multiple areas of concern from community health to sprawl on the island. Through subsequent meetings involving school administration, teachers, parents, local growers, students, and community members, the SAP became a school-community project focused on using Service-Learning to create opportunities for our students to learn skills in Community Development and Sustainable Agriculture Leadership."

As a student at College of the Atlantic, Dustin understood that the students would learn best if they were doing their own thinking, so he asked them to consider how to best begin to grow their own food at their school. After Dustin led students in assessing their eating habits and the possibilities of developing a community kitchen using locally-grown foods, many ideas came forward, which Dustin answered a few weeks later with a specific proposal, involving creating a garden in racks of PVC pipes.

During the winter, students built their new-fangled "beds," lines of PVC tubes placed near a window. Five weeks later, continues the report, "Students have built 'Grow Tubes' and are growing organic salad mix in their science classroom. These tubes have been filled with organic soil mix and are now producing a bounty of healthy delicious mesclun mix, right in the classroom!"