LFS:UBC Farm Audio Tour 5b Practicum
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Hi, my name is DeLisa Lewis, and I am one of the field instructors for the Sowing Seeds for the Future Practicum program at the UBC Farm. We are entering our fourth year of new beginnings with the program. Since 2008, we have had ___ graduates of our eight-month experiential learning, field and practical training course for new farmers. Five of our graduates have started their own farming enterprises, and four have gone on to pursue additional apprenticeship training.
A testimony to the strong team-building and cohesion the UBC Farm extended family can foster, three of the five Sowing Seeds graduates who have started new farm businesses, are working together on a farm start-up they call, Rootdown in the Pemberton Valley. We’ve added a weekend visit to this farm as part of the popular farm-field trips that are central to the learning opportunities of the practicum course.
Nestled between the buzzing bee hives, a lovely stand of poplars, and the main cultivated production fields, are the practicum students’ field plots. This is the place each student can sow and harvest their learning for their growing season in the practicum program. Each student has a twenty-meter square row in the practicum plots, where they plan their crops and rotations, care for, and finally harvest their own vegetables, flowers, and cover crops. Just to the east of the individual plots, there’s another block of shared practicum plots, where students work together in teams, plan and harvest some crops for our community supported agriculture program, and enjoy some crops for sharing and distributing as they choose.
That’s just one of the places the practicum students can gather, grow, and share during the spring, summer, and fall at the UBC Farm. We move around the greenhouses, production fields, tool sheds, harvest hut, and farm centre throughout the season, asking questions, digging deeper, lending hands to get a sense of the way that soil, seeds, plants, climate, nutrient cycles, markets, people and other living systems interact to form the whole farm system.
From here, I’ll leave you with this bit of inspiration shared by Wendell Berry we welcomed the practicum students with this season:
"So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.... Practice resurrection." (Not part of the script: Wendell Berry, 1973. The Country of Marriage. Harcourt: New York.)