Editor’s note: This story is part of The Great Experiment, a series produced by Professor Kathy Roberts Forde’s Longform Narrative class in the Journalism Department at the UMass Amherst.
The warm March air signals the start of a bountiful farming season. After completing a lesson on irrigation systems, UMass farm students trek up an icy trail toward the summit of Mount Sugarloaf, towering above the UMass Crop and Animal Research and Education Farm in South Deerfield.
After a year of mandated social isolation, most students feel grateful just to be outside.
“Being outside, being connected with people again, and working towards a meaningful project” — these are the things sophomore sustainable farming major Alexeya O’Brien appreciates about the yearlong UMass Student Farming Enterprise program.
This hike is sowing the seeds of a long relationship between the student farmers.
“I felt super-disconnected for a long time, and before I came to UMass, I spent a few years traveling. I was really feeling kind of lost,” said Nat Ross, a junior sustainable farming major.
Farming helped Nat and many other students in this program feel rooted, connected to both the earth and a broader community.
“Putting work in the land, and seeing the land give back to you, is amazing,” said Nat.
At the peak of Mount Sugarloaf, students formulated the “moral focus” of their farming efforts this year: increasing fresh-food access across the Five Colleges community.
Amanda Brown, director of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture’s Agricultural Learning Center, located on North Pleasant Street, manages the student farming program.
Most of the students, Amanda said, have “never worked at a farm before.”
Students take a “very calculated approach to production,” Amanda said. Each student cultivates three or four types of produce or livestock across a two-semester program, including the summer, when they become UMass employees while maintaining their crops.
The majority of the spring semester is spent planning, as Amanda and her students develop a “harvest goal,” a produce quota everyone must cultivate by the fall. The quota is formulated based on demand from visitors to their CSA, local markets, grocery stores and the UMass dining commons.
The student farm also donates a large portion of its products to local hunger and relief agencies. The COVID-19 pandemic made this difficult for the preceding 2020 farm students, with donations decreasing from years past.
Understaffed and uncertain about the effects the pandemic would have on UMass student farm work, Amanda was conflicted when the university closed most campus operations in March 2020.
“Do we just say, ‘This year we’re gonna put everything in cover crop and just walk away?’” Amanda remembered.
While weighing her options, Amanda found inspiration from an unusual source: a couple singing on YouTube.
“It’s really sweet, this husband and wife talk about being in quarantine and COVID,” Amanda said. “And how they just keep going on, because what else are you gonna do?”
So Amanda kept on going. “We decided [shutting down the farm for a season] was a terrible idea because we’re farmers,” she said, “and we wanted our students to also [know], if you can farm through this pandemic, you can do anything.”
With the help and cooperation of the Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (CAFE) faculty and staff, who manage and maintain the five other farm and research facilities associated with UMass Amherst, Amanda was able to plant and nurture early season produce including winter squash and potatoes in South Deerfield.
Besides these early season crops, the majority of the planting was transferred to the Agricultural Learning Center. With students sent home, Amanda, alongside farm managers Jason Dragon and Tom Mirabile and graduate teaching assistant Arthur Siller, completed the work originally planned for 14 people in four months.
“All of this was for the benefits of the students, really,” Amanda said. “This is their farm.”
The farm students returned in July 2020 to pick up where Amanda and company had left off.
A new crop of students manages the farm each year, publishing and passing down roughly 300 original pages of lessons from their work. This yearly manual includes notes on individual crops and takeaways about group dynamics.
Lucia Nicastro, a 2020 farm student, wrote, “You’re not just a worker on the farm blindly taking orders, or a student in the classroom following a rigid curriculum; you are the UMass Student Farm, and its legacy is up to you and your teammates.”
The 2020 student farmers passed the spade to the 2021 students, who think of previous students as “ancestors” guiding them in their growing processes, mental development and emotional resonance with their crops.
“You can go back five years and sort of see how the wealth of knowledge has been built upon by each crew,” Alexeya said.
Weeks after the hike up Mount Sugarloaf, Nat and Alexeya are hard at work at the Agricultural Learning Center, the warm spring weather leading them to shed layers of clothing throughout the day.
They push wheelbarrows full of organic compost to the greenhouse and dump the earthy remnants of produce, spreading it on raised garden beds with their bare hands. Nat loves the smell.
All the farmers then gather to pull weeds around the roots of premature apple trees. The teamwork past farmers had written about, which sometimes feels abstract behind computer screens, was now in full force.
Alexeya is excited for what comes next and ready to do it as a team.