Crops for a Closer Community:

A project by Mount Holyoke College students

Heidi Roop, Geology and Agrarian Studies Double Major and

Kristen Schafenacker, Architecture Major

Overview:

As students of Mount Holyoke College, we are concerned with the growing disconnect between the Mount Holyoke College community and its environment. After researching other educational institutions’ efforts to address the growing lack of environmental stewardship, we have concluded that a project that sheds light on Mount Holyoke’s inputs and outputs of food, or foodshed is a highly effective way to address our local and global environmental impacts.

Why food best addresses the issue of sustainability:

Focusing on food will enable the College to address some of the serious issues revolving around the lack of respect for food production including, the rapid loss of food biodiversity, food and culture homogenization, and the environmental degradation associated with our consumption habits. Realizing the true environmental costs related to our growing dependence on foreign production and distant consumer-producer relations such as ozone depletion (as food must travel by several planes, trains, and automobiles to reach the consumer, requiring fossil fuels) and water and air contamination created by unnecessary pesticide use, will put students at the face of the problem. Students have an obligation to assess where we can positively change these destructive aspects of the globalization and homogenization of this system. By reengaging students academically, physically, and emotionally with their food and environments (eventually through the creation of an organic farm) we can achieve long term solutions to these numerous and persistent concerns.

Sustainability in the context of Mount Holyoke:

Although numerous efforts are currently underway by Mount Holyoke College to become a green campus, we as a community have an opportunity to do more. Space, resources, and woman-power can be made available so MHC can get to the root of a problem and work literally from the ground up. Through hands on education in the tilling of the land, the addition of agriculture related courses to the curriculum, and finally offering the final product, such as organic salads and stir-fry’s at the Blanchard Café, students will become like plant roots in soil; being deeply rooted and connected, by all their senses, with the land that provides them with the nourishment to live.

N

Lower Lake

Upper Lake

On this land, here in lies

Soil to be revitalized.

To the west the Stony runs

All it needs is someone’s funds.

Long-Term Goals: Tilling the Soil and Laying the Table

Ultimately, we would like MHC to designate a physical space for an organic garden/farm that will directly integrate students with food production and their environment. One possibility for a site is located on Morgan Street called Long’s Field which is connected to campus by pathways stemming from Upper Lake and the Equestrian Center. Long’s Field currently serves as exercise and jumping space for the Equestrian Center’s horses.

On this site:

- An old timber-frame barn currently used for FacMan storage

- The Stony Brook on the west perimeter

- Rolling hills and gracious flat land near the barn

- Perfect open space with maximum sun light