All posts by food4allamherst

Education

FARMING REMOTELY?!

4 Comments
Amanda Brown, Stockbridge faculty & Director of the UMass Student Farm

In this time of global crises, many universities including UMass Amherst have transitioned to online learning. Making a transition like this is surely difficult for any discipline…but farming remotely?! How does that work? Sustainable Food & Farming also includes a depth of study of theory, plant science, and social dimensions of food systems which our instructors have been hard at work to continue teaching using online Zoom sessions, using forums on course pages like Moodle & Blackboard and designing a blend of live and pre-recorded lectures so that students can keep learning.

UMass Student Farmers working with faculty Amanda Brown to continue their farm planning efforts via Zoom!

Many students have shared that they look forward to our weekly Zoom sessions and we are continuing to learn and have fun together as best we can in these times. To be a farmer, one must be resilient and able to adapt to challenge and change (the weather is constantly surprising us!). What is also becoming more clear in this emerging pandemic is the need for SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE and healthy resilient systems.

Farmers across the globe are responding and organizing efforts to continue to expand and provide community access to local produce. Here in the Pioneer Valley, the newly formed Sunderland Farm Collaborative is providing a delivery service so Western MA residence can get local produce delivered to their homes safely and still support local businesses. Our local paper did a story on this collaborative which employs several alumni from our program. Neighboring Simple Gifts Farm has been offering an online ordering & curbside pickup for our local community. Current SFF students & alumni are working hard and with caution on the frontlines to make our food system more resilient during these times.

  • Sunderland Farm Collaborative 3/31
  • Simple Gifts Farm 4/7
  • Delivery of local produce

We are continuing to advise students remotely and designing our schedules for the fall semester. At a time where so much is uncertain, in many conversations we all seem to agree connecting with nature by going on daily walks, growing seedlings (from just a few in a windowsill or a large backyard garden) helps keep hope alive. Few things offer such simple wonder and awe and remind us that what we’re doing here is important and essential. Now more than ever we must learn to grow food, to organize, to collaborate, to be resilient and adapt. To do what farmers, Indigenous communities, and grassroots organizers have been doing for centuries. Wishing good health and happy spring to all!

Sarah Berquist’s Agricultural Leadership & Community Education meet and share laughs over Zoom

-Sarah Berquist, Program Coordinator, Lecturer, & Advisor

UMass Sustainable Food & Farming

 

Business, Education, Farming, Food Policy and Advocacy

For Young Farmers, Hemp Is a ‘Gateway Crop’

11 Comments

Repost from Civil Eats (great resource!) : Original HERE

After the recent legalization of hemp production, new and beginning farmers are following the green rush, though obstacles abound.

Asaud Frazier enrolled in Tuskegee University with plans to study medicine, but by the time graduation rolled around in 2016, he’d already switched gears. Instead of becoming a physician, Frazier decided to farm hemp.

“I was always interested in cannabis because it had so many different uses,” he said. “It’s a cash crop, so there’s no sense in growing anything else. Cannabis is about to totally take over an array of industries.”

Frazier doesn’t come from an agricultural background, but while he was growing up in Ohio, he watched his father become a master gardener. He also made frequent trips to visit relatives in Alabama, where his family owns a five acres farm. Today, he’s growing hemp on that land as part of a two-year pilot program for small farmers in the state.

“I love getting an opportunity to grow such a beneficial plant,” Frazier said.

A graduate of a historically Black college known for empowering African-American farmers, Frazier said he’s received the training necessary to thrive in agriculture. He has Continue reading For Young Farmers, Hemp Is a ‘Gateway Crop’ →

Education, Farming, UMass SFF News

LISA DEPIANO, UMASS SFF Faculty featured on cover of local story about silvopasture

1 Comment
Lisa DePiano, a lecturer in the Sustainable Food and Farming Program at the University of Massachusetts, reseats a netting support around a young chestnut tree in the silvopasture demo lot of the UMass Agricultural Learning Center in Amherst on Wednesday, May 15, 2019.

Original Gazette article can be found here by Rema Boscov

It doesn’t look like it could save the planet — long grass dotted with 4-foot high chestnut trees, inch-thick trunks with a few broad leaves on short, thin branches, surrounded by plastic mesh tubes to protect them from the sheep not yet here. But it’s what you don’t see on Lisa DePiano’s research plot that gives hope. There’s carbon, lots of it, pulled from CO2 in the atmosphere, now sequestered in the soil — with more to come, explains DePiano, a Sustainable Food and Farming lecturer at the University of Massachusetts’s Stockbridge School of Agriculture.

This farming method, called silvopasture, is an adaptation of a very old agricultural Continue reading LISA DEPIANO, UMASS SFF Faculty featured on cover of local story about silvopasture →

Education, Food Policy and Advocacy, Stockbridge, UMass SFF News

UMass students and faculty engage in farm to institution conference

Leave a comment
  • Leila Tunnell: Amherst School Garden Educator, Jordan Lake & Merav Dale: UMass SFF Students and Sarah Berquist: Sustainable Food & Farming Faculty before their presentation

On April 2-4, University of Massachusetts Amherst was the host of the Farm to Institution New England (FINE) Summit. The themes for the summit were “Celebrate, Mobilize, Transform” and the program included field trips to local farms, food processing facilities and, of course, the UMass Agricultural Learning Center. Presenters and attendees gathered from a breadth of sectors: education, culinary, farmers, policy/advocacy, county jails, and government.

  • UMass Faculty Amanda Brown, Nicole Burton & Lisa DePiano give a tour of the UMass Agricultural Learning Center with help of SFF students

Each day, in the presentations and audience, there was a strong presence of UMass Continue reading UMass students and faculty engage in farm to institution conference →