Dates
Summer Term: May 20 – August 16, 2013
Mid-Term Break: July 4-7
Program Staff
Faculty: Kristen Andrews, Kenneth Mulder and Eleanor Tison
Assistant Farm Manager: Baylee Drown
Farm Researcher and Teamster: Ben Dube
On-The-Ground Instructors:Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire farmers!
Program Overview
Cerridwen Farm at Green Mountain College is a highly-diverse, ecologically-intensive, agricultural training center and demonstration farm. It provides training to students in developing and managing integrated farm systems that rely for production on human and animal power as well as highly efficient agroecosystems in place of high energy and capital inputs.
Components of the farm include a 1.5 acre human-powered intensive vegetable operation, a 1.5 acre oxen-powered vegetable production system, a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, a rotational pasture system, a 16-acre hayfield managed by the farm’s oxen, a solar- and wind-powered greenhouse, three high tunnels, one with solar in-ground heating, two hoop houses, pastured pigs and poultry, a pair of milking Devon oxen, and a pair of milking shorthorn dairy cows. The farm's newest building is a solar garage for charging electric vehicles. The farm also has ongoing research in the use of human-, animal-, and renewable-energy in agricultural production.
The summer intensive program will directly involve students in managing all elements of the farm’s operations while simultaneously providing them with a strong curricular foundation in sustainable agriculture focused on three core areas: the fundamentals of organic crop and animal management; efficient integration and management of highly-diverse farm systems; and intensive development of food production management skills.
Additionally, students will be able to experience, investigate, and evaluate first-hand the alternative and sustainable local food system (also known as the “foodshed”) of the Rutland County VT during the peak agricultural production and marketing season. This will occur through qualitative research (including interviews with guest food system participants such as farmers, chefs/cooks, food distibutors, farmers’ market coordinators) and field site visits to other local farms, markets, restaurants, value-added processors.
Students will be able to study, literally hands-on, their food supply from field to fork. This will entail cultivation, selection, harvest, and preparation of seasonal produce; dairy animal care, hand-milking and cheese making; and even poultry processing from living animal to stewpot. They will design and prepare menus and meals that they will be eating each week, using their own farm’s produce and sourcing non-Cerridwen Farm ingredients. The skills and knowledge students acquire will enable them, either as practitioners or advocates, to wrestle with the problems of modern agriculture and to be part of the growing food revolution that seeks to address these problems.
PHOTO SLIDESHOW