Students at Hutchison, a local all-girls private school, gain knowledge and hands-on life skills both inside and outside of the classroom, thanks, in part, to the newly renovated Katherine and John Dobbs Farm, which was dedicated last fall. While a school farm has existed there in some iteration for more than a decade, the new facility has been expanded to offer a growing list of learning opportunities for its students.
“The farm was originally just a few raised beds, and the idea was similar to other school gardens,” says Hutchison’s Director of Environmental Education and Sustainability, Mary Riddle — or The Farm Lady, as students call her. “Kids learn really well outside, and gardening is like the original tinker lab, a good place to experiment and learn all kinds of things.”
Early on, as Hutchison saw the academic benefits and holistic well-being the garden provided for students, they began to expand it. “When I got there four years ago, I loved what was there, but I thought, ‘Maybe we have an opportunity to grow this program,’” Riddle says. “Thankfully, Katherine and John Dobbs were eager to do something with the farm, too. So it was this perfect timing, a perfect match.”
As part of the Phase I farm plan, it now consists of 36 raised beds of various sizes, a greenhouse, and a big treehouse for the kids to climb into, as well as a walking trail with native plant landscaping.
The goal for the farm is to incorporate it into as many lessons and class projects as possible. “We use the farm in the curriculum,” Riddle says. “So kids aren’t going out there just to plant seeds and watch them grow and do the life-science part of things. Even though that is definitely a part of it, that’s not the end-all.
“We use the farm to teach lessons. It’s another curricular tool. For example, the second-grade girls this year were studying human impacts on animal habitats. It was a cool partnership with the zoo, and one of the classes decided to focus on the orangutans and how what we do in everyday life affects the orangutan habitat.”
As part of that project, the students learned about palm deforestation for palm oil, which is used in a variety of products. “The girls came out and planted lavender because their hope was to make a lavender palm-oil-free soap. They wanted to take some of their learning home, to be able to have palm-oil-free options to use at their own house, and that was part of a greater orangutan study.”
The world languages classes visit the farm regularly, as well, when learning words for vegetables, colors, or culinary practices. Math and science classes go out to do calculations, planning, planting, and harvesting.
“Before the pandemic, we had our fifth-grade girls come out during math and calculate the square footage and spacing of where bok choy plants should go into a raised bed. They came out in science and planted it, and they harvested it with their Chinese teacher,” Riddle says. “Then we were working from home. So the Chinese teacher actually did a Zoom class showing the girls how she cooks the bok choy, using the culinary vocabulary words in Chinese.”
Riddle says the aim is for every farm project to cover multiple subject areas. “Our goal is to have a class see a particular crop through from beginning to end, and during that process, it hits as many objectives as we can.”
An added bonus to incorporating a wide range of lessons through the farm facility: There are numerous studies out now that show the academic benefits of learning outside. When kids are learning outdoors, their ability to retain information increases, Riddle says.
“And it’s not only the academics. The holistic well-being of a child also improves. Students in gardening programs — throughout all of the studies we have seen and some of our own polling we’ve done in-house — their anxiety decreases, and their overall sense of well-being increases. Students report more positive connections among their peer groups and with at least one adult they might not have [connected with] — in this case, their gardening teacher or whoever else is out there.
“It’s good for their minds. It’s good for their bodies — we know they’re exercising when they’re outside. And it’s good for their spirits. It’s just such an all-around win.”
Another part of the original plan for the farm was to connect to local ag-tech industry leaders, as well as to share the farm facility with other schools and organizations. Before COVID-19 hit, Hutchison worked with partner organizations such as AgLaunch, to bring agriculture and gardening teachers from throughout the Shelby County metro area for professional field trips.
Plans to bring a class from Berclair Elementary for a field trip fell through as schools closed. For now, the idea of guests coming onto campus is being put on hold, but over the summer, they were still able to connect the farm to other parts of the community.
“This summer, I had a rising senior who, for her social science certificate project, had this idea to have a Hutchison community CSA, where everybody would come and pick up veggie boxes and people could donate some of the veggies to various nonprofits,” Riddle says. “But as the pandemic happened, suddenly the idea of having 30 people on campus once a week became not terribly feasible.
“Caroline Halliday has been with me running the farm this summer to grow vegetables and flowers, and all of the produce and flowers we raise there are going to New Hope. It’s a school in Frayser, and they have a farmstand there.
“The community in Frayser has been more negatively impacted by the economic fallout of the pandemic than many other communities have, so Caroline felt very passionate about — if we couldn’t have people coming to our campus to pick up veggies, she thought, this is even better. Let’s use this to support another farm program, another community.”
As for the coming school year (as of our late June discussion), Riddle hopes to expand the school’s farm learning projects. “Hutchison, thankfully, has 52 acres of campus, so we have more outdoor space,” she says. “All of the research right now is showing that being outdoors is probably the safest place to be, so our hope is that we can at least have the youngest kids, early childhood and lower-school girls, on campus, and the farm will definitely be a centerpiece of that. My expectation is that we’ll be kicking it into an even higher gear because of all of the research showing it’s safer to be outside than inside.”