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You think cleaning up after your dog is tough? Sixth-grader Jesse Newman of Hadley removes manure from the small barn housing the Hartsbrook School's new dairy cow, Heatherbell, as part of his involvement with the school's agricultural arts program.

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Fourth-graders Will O'Connor of Florence and Sofia Assab of Hatfield tote water to the goats' drinking trough as part of their morning chores. Fourth-graders at Hartsbrook are also responsible for tending the school's small sheep herd.

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As part of his morning chores, Jesse Newman takes his turn milking Heatherbell, a purebred Jersey dairy cow. Jesse and his classmates are also learning to make butter and cheese from the cow's milk and will assist in the birth of her calf in the spring.

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Third-grader Dana Kellogg of Williamsburg holds Pearl, a black and white Crested Polish hen, one of about 30 birds he and his classmates feed daily. "It makes them happy," he says.

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Nicki Robb, Hartsbrook's agricultural arts program director, says a major emphasis of the curriculum is to help students understand the role animals play in our lives – and that food doesn't spring ready-made from supermarket shelves. Here Tess Meill of Hadley, left, joins classmate Jesse Newman in spreading fresh hay for Heatherbell. They then took turns milking and grooming the cow.

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Robb, at left, and Tess Meill collect milk from Heatherbell. Hartsbrook students learn how to make a variety of foods from the produce they raise, which includes crops such as corn, squash, pumpkins and several grains.

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Time for breakfast: From left, third-graders Aurelia Caemmerer and Alena Ayva-Zian, both from Belchertown, and Finn O'Connor of Deerfield feed the school's chickens one morning last month. Third-graders also collect eggs from the chicken coop and tend to the birds' other needs, such as giving them crushed oyster shells to eat to strengthen their egg shells.

It was just past 7:30 on a chilly December morning, and inside the small barn, Myles Olmsted and Will Harrison were trying their hands -- literally -- at a new challenge: milking a cow.

Seated on overturned buckets on either side of a jersey cow named Heatherbell, the two sixth-graders at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley were getting their first lesson of the day with instructor Nicki Robb. "OK, Will, that's good, just keep the pressure steady," said Robb as the student squeezed one of the cow's teats. "She's got quite a bit to give us this morning."

The cow munched hay from a feeding container on the wall. A few goats -- kept in the barn to give Heatherbell some company -- stood nearby, with one watching the goings-on. From somewhere outside, a sheep bleated. "This is fun," said Myles, noting that he and his classmates would be doing this each morning for the rest of the week.

Hartsbrook is a pre-school-12 Waldorf school, part of a worldwide private education system that features interdisciplinary classes integrating academics with the arts. With its generally small classes -- about 20 students per class in the elementary grades, about 24 in grades 7 and 8, and just 10 or 11 in grades 9 through 12 -- Hartsbrook also emphasizes student creativity. Part of its educational philosophy involves helping students develop kinship with the land, and an understanding of the rhythms of nature and humankind's place in the world.

The curriculum also aims to give its 270-odd students practical skills, such as how to tend a garden or manage a compost pile, which school officials say can help them develop a work ethic.

"We don't expect students are all going to take up farming when they're older," says Robb, who has a background in agriculture and has directed the farm program at Hartsbrook since 1998. She does note, however, that several former students have gone on to agriculture-related work, such as land preservation.

The program's larger goal, she says, which includes showing students where food comes from and how to care for animals, is hard to teach in the abstract. "That's why we try to do as much hands-on work as possible."

Indeed. While Myles and Will were working Heatherbell's udder, third-grader Dana Kellogg, 8, dug a metal scoop into a feed barrel outside the nearby chicken coop and carefully scattered the food across the ground. A large group of hens and roosters began pecking at the morsels. "It makes them happy [to eat]," he said as he watched one of his favorites -- Pearl, a black and white crested Polish hen with a small crown of feathers that flopped around her head.

Inside the coop, fellow third-grader Hanna Kanig, also 8, gathered eggs from nests along the wall and placed them in a woven basket. A checklist for other chores -- such as putting crushed oyster shells into the nesting areas for the birds to eat to strengthen their eggs' shells -- was tacked to the wall.

Robb, who'd come over to check on the children, asked Dana if he remembered what the crushed shells were for. "To help the eggs," he said. She also had him demonstrate how to hold a bird. He gently scooped up Pearl, cradling her body against his chest with one hand while with his other he grasped the chicken's feet from underneath.

"Very nice, Dana," said Robb. Then she took a peek at Hanna's basket to see how many eggs she'd collected: four. "We'll be using those to bake cookies," said Robb.

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The Agricultural Arts program offers a year-round set of classes for Hartsbrooks' students in grades 2 to 12. Day-to-day care such as feeding and grooming the animals -- the livestock include sheep, some young milk-bearing goats, chickens, a cow, a rabbit and a donkey -- is handled by students from third through sixth grade. The chores are done before classes begin in the morning and at the end of the school day. Responsibilities are designed to follow a natural progression and be age-appropriate, Robb says. Third-graders, for instance, who feed the chickens, helped raise some of the younger birds as chicks when they were in second grade.

The dairy cow -- recently donated by a Hardwick farmer -- is milked by sixth-graders because Robb says its size might overwhelm the younger children. The sixth-graders are also learning to make cheese and butter from Heatherbell's milk, and they'll assist with the birthing of her calf in the spring.

Eighth- and ninth-graders, meantime, keep bees.

Animal care also falls under the rubric of "animal husbandry" for some of the older students: studying the life cycles and breeding patterns. "A lot of it is observation -- just watching the animals, how they graze, how they move and eat, and keeping journals on what you've seen," says Robb.

Outside the barn, students learn how to plant, tend and harvest crops: beans, corn, pumpkins, squash, grains such as rye and oats. They mill the grains and prepare food with the produce. Younger students work with squash, beans and corn to get a sense of Native American agricultural patterns that predated the arrival of European colonists. Seventh-graders study composting.

The agricultural program has traditionally included more offerings for younger students, partly because, until last fall, Robb did not work full time at the school; she had simultaneously led the School to Farm program at Hampshire College, which introduced area schoolchildren and teens to basic farming practices. Now, though, Robb has become full time at Hartsbrook, and she's adding high school classes such as sustainable farming techniques and land use, soil management and cultivation of trees and shrubs.

Robb has a longtime personal connection to the school. Originally from the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, she came to the Valley in the 1980s and helped develop what became Brookfield Farm in South Amherst, one of the nation's first Community Supported Agriculture farms, in which members buy shares in its annual harvest. With two young sons, she was one of the founding parents of Hartsbrook, then called the Pioneer Valley Waldorf School, which began as a nursery school in the early '80s. Some of the first classes were held in her South Amherst home on the Brookfield Farm property.

Robb, who now lives in Leverett, says the school has long-range plans for increasing its cultivated acreage. Hartsbrook is set on rolling fields and woods that were once part of a Hadley dairy farm, and approximately two acres are used for growing crops. But the school could expand that amount considerably -- to perhaps 25 acres or more -- in part by renting adjacent land. Robb envisions not only growing a greater variety and quantity of grains and vegetables but planting orchards as well.

Hartsbrook also offers agricultural programs to the general public, with "farm camps" and workshops for children during school vacation weeks and on selected afternoons. Robb will lead summer farm programs at the school in June and July.

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The week before Christmas, a day after the winter's first snow had thinly carpeted the ground, Hartsbrook students came spilling out of an assembly at 3 p.m. to do their afternoon farm chores. (During school vacations, some of the parents help Robb by taking over the childrens' jobs.) Fourth-graders Nora Cooper and Nona Yglesias, both 10, filed into the sheep pen to put out fresh hay.

"I probably like the goats the best," said Nona, who like the other fourth-graders is responsible for tending to both the goats and the sheep. "They have more personality. But we all really like Iris" -- she pointed to a sheep with white wool -- "because she's very affectionate."

At the cow barn about 40 yards away, Robb had enlisted a few third-graders to help put fresh hay into Heatherbell's feeder. "Oh, can I get one from the top?" asked Nicholas Roblee-Strauss, as he began climbing a 15-foot stack of bales. "Fine, Nicky, but please be careful," said Robb, who watched him clamber upward. "Now, slowly and gently, push [the bale] over and let it slide down." Nicky grunted a bit as he tipped the heavy bale onto its side, sending it tumbling to the floor at Robb's feet. "Beautiful job," she said.

She and the other children then pulled a cord that held the hay in a block. "Remember how we do this -- lean over and press your knee into the top," she said, demonstrating the move on a bale. Once the cord had been loosened and removed, the children broke the hay into smaller chunks and handed them over the side of Heatherbell's pen to Robb, who stuffed the hay into the cow's feeder.

"I love climbing on hay bales," volunteered Nicky before running off with the rest of the children.

Robb laughed. "Nicky is very enthusiastic," she said. She likes that kind of enthusiasm. Children are curious about nature, she says, and when coupled with their affection for animals, it makes for young pupils eager to absorb the lesson she wants to teach: their role in the natural world.

"That's what it's all about," she says.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.