From classroom to farm

Photo by addie Slanger Laura Jacobsen, 25, stands for a portrait in a greenhouse at the Homestead Organics farm outside of Hamilton. The Stanford graduate has been the adult intern at Homestead Organics since early spring to get hands-on experience in sustainability and farming. After this experience, she hopes to remain in the agriculture world, ideally in Montana.

From classroom to farm: connecting education with action

Addie SlAnger rAvAlli republic

A herd of 40 teenage turkeys rushed at Laura Jacobsen immediately after she opened the door of their enclosure. It was raining softly on the Homestead Organics farm outside of Hamilton, and the birds had been locked up so they didn’t get wet and muddy.

“Oh hi guys. Hi,” Jacobsen, 25, said in greeting to her babies. The turkeys seemed elated to be out of their kennel and into the uncharacteristically cool August weather.

Jacobsen, one of the many students who graduated into a post-pandemic world, is an adult intern at Homestead Organics. With undergraduate and graduate degrees in science, technology and society and sustainability science — both from Stanford — the Park City, Utah, native had been itching to get some practical, hands-on experience.

As a girl, Jacobsen loved animals. She had always wanted to own goats, chickens, turkeys or pigs. Her very first job in high school was at a dairy farm in Utah.

“I think it wasn’t until I was older though, in my studies in sustainability, that I just kept coming back to the way food connects with everything. It connects with health, it connects

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with culture, it connects with community, it connects with sustainability,” she said.

After graduating, that feeling persisted, especially as she sat in front of her computer working first for a tech company then conducting policy research.

“Before this, I was working on some policy stuff,” Jacobsen said. She was based in San Francisco and working remotely. “It was the middle of COVID and I was feeling really disconnected from what actually drew me to this work.”

“So I really wanted to come learn about farming and get my hands dirty and do some of the work on the ground,” she continued. “I really wanted to learn how to grow food.”

She began cold-calling Montana farms this spring. No stranger to the state, Jacobsen’s dad had lived in Whitefish for years. She had always

Photo by addie Slanger Jacobsen greets the group of over 40 turkeys she’s currently raising on the farm. “They think of me like their mom,” she said. Unfortunately, Jacobsen said with a laugh, these turkeys are Thanksgiving turkeys. So it’s important not to get too connected.

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Page 10 - Agriculture Magazine, Fall, 2021

Youth Farm Interns are learning, working and serving as counselors for the younger student camps at Homestead Organics Farm in this file photo.

known she wanted to find a way back.

That’s how she came in contact with Homestead Organics.

“It was very happenstance that [Laura] ended up finding us,” said Laura Garber, owner and founder of Homestead Organics. “We connected really quickly when she started talking to us, and we invited her to come be a part of the farm immediately when we met her. And we’ll be continuing to do [the adult intern program] now that we’ve had her and remembered how great it is.”

Homestead Organics is a 15-acre farm situated southeast of Hamilton, off the Skalkaho Highway. Founded by Garber and her husband Henry 13 years ago, the farm is host to a variety of organizations and activities — not to mention the expansive array of seasonal fruits and vegetables.

The farm grounds host the nonprofit Cultivating Connections, through which the farm’s high school Youth Farm Intern Program is held. In this program, high school interns work over the summer to put together Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes — a national program where farms send subscribers weekly or bi-weekly boxes with the week’s seasonal produce.

Included in those subscription boxes is a weekly newsletter, written by Jacobsen, that provides a relevant recipe utilizing the week’s fruit and veggies.

Along with the CSA initiative, high schoolers are responsible for putting together over 100 salads for the farm’s Salads for Seniors program, where salads are sent out to Hamilton’s retirement homes. Jacobsen is in charge of coordinating the high schoolers’ efforts.

The Youth Farm Intern Program is one of many activities held in partnership with Homestead Organics. The farm also hosts an activity day for children with special needs, said Jacobsen, where participants come to take in the sights, smells and sounds of Homestead Organics.

Additionally, a new preschool is gearing up to start its first year situated on the farm. Both Garber and Jacobsen are excited to have the children on the Homestead Organics campus.

Time at the farm has been rehabilitating for Jacobsen, who lives in her trailer on the farm land and eats farm-grown fruit and vegetables for every meal.

“For me personally, this experience has been really about connecting with what brings me joy,” she said. “I think that for a long time, I tried to intellectualize, like, ‘How do we solve all of these problems in our agriculture system?’ And coming here and learning to farm and grow food and connect with the community, it’s really just brought me a lot of joy. And it’s helped me feel a lot more connected to what I’m doing.”

The disconnect she felt in her studies and while working her first jobs out of university has quieted here in Hamilton. Being physically present in the world she cares about is healing, in a way.

“[Education] can definitely feel really disconnected from reality,” Jacobsen said. “There were a lot of things from my education I felt like I could bring with me, but being on the farm is a whole new type of education that I think is equally if not more important.”

“People like Laura, she has all this amazing education, and now we’re able to offer the real-world application of that,” farm owner Garber said. “It’s really important for people to have a connection to their food and a connection to the land and to the farmer.”

This experience has been formative for Jacobsen. She’ll stay at Homestead Organics until October, when the traditional farming season ends in Montana. After that, like so many twenty-somethings in this pandemic-afflicted world, she doesn’t quite know what comes next. But she thinks she wants to try to stay on a farm, ideally somewhere in Montana.

And who knows? Maybe soon enough she’ll be running her own operation.

“It’s definitely been kind of a reorientation for what I want to do and how I want to live my life.” she said. “I definitely want to continue on this path and figure out a way that I can maybe have my own farm one day.”AG

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