7 minute read
Farm Team
from Spring 2020
FARM-TO-TABLE DINING HALL
On the April afternoon I met Dr. Blaine Kopp, the Louis Munro Chair of Environmental Science at Kimball Union’s pig pen, three seasons passed. Kopp greeted me in the full sun of a promised summer. An enormous pig, basking in the sun, lifted her nose from a bucket of milk as if to say hello. When a light spring rain started, Kopp and I moved inside a work shed, a post-and-beam construction, repurposed from the discarded set of a school theater production. Soon we were shouting under a full-force gale. Kopp, an oceanographer by training, did not pull his jacket closer.
The pig hustled into her shelter, a spacious half-dome framed by metal poles that once fenced Carver Field and clad in sheathing discarded from construction of the Field House. “It’s these blizzard days,” he says, “when the kids are wheeling the garden cart uphill from the dining hall, that I wish I’d taken pictures—photos of them doing the work in every weather.”
While many students are catching extra sleep or serving up a bowl of piping-hot oatmeal in Doe Dining Hall, eight members of the KUA Farm Team are out in the elements, wheeling a cart across campus filled with the discarded produce scraps from their fellow students and delivering them to a hungry herd of pigs. This year is the 10-year anniversary of the Farm Team’s pig program—part experiential learning, part school activity, and part farm-to-table dining.
Farming and sustainability are not new to KUA, but when Kopp arrived in 2010 he looked at the campus with fresh eyes and honed in on the dining hall. The dining hall was producing 15 tons of food waste a year, which was trucked to the Lebanon landfill. For each load, the Academy paid fees for landfill, hauling, tipping, and fuel, and even 45 cents per heavy-duty trash bag. In return KUA received an empty dumpster to start the cycle again and the ecosystem absorbed the school’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Kopp began looking at how KUA could reduce its carbon footprint and saw promise in the pigs. Two former faculty members had introduced pigs to campus in an effort to connect students with their food source. “I saw an opportunity to divert waste from the kitchen and dining hall away from the landfill and recapture the energy in the form of our own pork,” says Kopp.
Ten years of bucket-carrying and slopping and mucking and catching the occasional loose piglet later, it’s clear that the benefits to students are wide- and long-ranging. Along the way, the initiative won the Best Waste Reduction Program in the Green Up New England Challenge, which recognizes schools for “developing the next generation of environmental leaders through hands-on, project-based, solutions-based learning, community service, and action.”
Farm Team responsibilities give shape to students’ days: chores in the morning before class, chores again after class. The pigs are wholly reliant on the students to thrive. Farm Team members make and execute the work schedule and solve problems as needed. And, as Rachel Xia ’20 says, “There were some days when the weather made the chores really difficult. But after I finish my chores, I feel even more accomplished.”
Some students make a connection between the simple and ancient tasks of raising animals to a larger purpose. “I saw how much it helps reduce our carbon footprint on the Hilltop, and anything that we could do as a team to help with the global warming crisis is essential to sustaining life,” says Andrew Jones ’21.
The program also teaches the entire campus community about sustainability. From their very first meal at KUA, students learn the Academy’s culture of scraping plates, placing appropriate scraps in the bin labeled “Pig Food” and understanding they are energy and not garbage.
Dr. Blaine Kopp
“The Farm Team is so important,” says former dining hall chef Daniel McCarthy. “It provides a piece of the puzzle of how kids learn. Animals add something nothing else can.”
Indeed, it seems “the piggies,” as so many students affectionately call them, have expanded the students’ practice of empathy and gratitude. “The Farm Team taught me how difficult it must be for farmers in America and around the world,” says Jones.
“I am forever grateful that I signed up for Farm Team because it has given me a new appreciation for the things we have,” adds Sophie Mitchell ’21. “Every Saturday on my rounds I am shocked at how much food we as a community didn’t consume and would otherwise go to waste. We have so much here at KUA, feeding the pigs is just a little way I can give back. I have gained a new appreciation for all that our dinning staff does for us!”
The pig pen is joined behind Miller Bicentennial Hall by a solar array and wind turbine, additional steps KUA has taken to create a sustainable campus. The Academy has also adopted a robust recycling program and the dining hall has further reduced food waste by shifting to tray-less dining—with one plate, students don’t overfill trays when they’re at their hungriest.
The Farm Team helps with admissions as well. Students relish the opportunity to work with animals, motivated in part by the relaxing surrounding and the chance to do their part to improve the community. For Jesang Yim ’21, it was nothing less than “saving the environment, saving the world.”
Participation on the Farm Team also bolsters a KUA education. Kopp uses data from the pig program in his classroom, complementing and informing the study of ecology, population dynamics, air and water pollution, atmospheric change, resource management, biodiversity, and energy sources. Students learn how to calculate the carbon footprint of food waste, use EPA waste reduction models, review scientific literature for methods and models of sustainability, and, sadly, but scientifically, use deceased piglets for dissection in biology class.
“What is the question you are trying to answer, what is the problem you are trying to solve?” Kopp asks his students. “You aren’t going to find an answer that you’ll quickly move on from. You are going to return to the question over and over again.”
KUA graduates have continued the academic inquiry they began tackling while on the Farm Team. Gus Jaynes ’17 is double-majoring in environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. He helped build the pig shelter from salvaged materials. “Dr. Kopp was teaching us how to be resourceful,” he says. “And it was a pretty urgent scenario. We had a pregnant sow, and we’d learned that we needed a shelter with dividers to keep the sow from accidentally crushing her piglets.”
At KUA, Jaynes investigated the longterm risks and benefits of genetically modified organisms as a Global Scholar, and studied native pollinator health and diversity with the Earthwatch Institute through his Cullman Scholarship. He says Kopp was the mentor who taught him to think about complicated ideas even if they couldn’t be solved. Although Jaynes never finalized the “serious composting” project he thought KUA needed or added more local food sources to the dining hall’s supply chain, he thought about the challenges and puzzled through how to get buy-in from all the stakeholders. “Working with Dr. Kopp, I learned to structure the way I think, the way I approach thinking about things now,” he says.
Students on the Farm Team ensure animals receive food and fresh water daily.
Aidan Davie ’22 says the Farm Team has been a great opportunity because “you can get your hands dirty and know that you are supporting the KUA community by helping raise these pigs that will later be used as our food.”
Which brings us to the bacon, the barbecue, the sausage links, ham steaks, pulled pork, and picnic roasts. One of the final student tasks of the year is to say goodbye to the pigs, knowing that they were raised ethically and humanely. This year the Farm Team produced 1,500 pounds of pork that found its way into Doe Dining Hall and onto the plates of an appreciative campus.
“I have to admit,” says Xia, “they’re so tasty that I can forgive them for cutting into my pescatarian diet.”
