We Should Teach Farming in Schools

I don't feel like I learned enough about farming in school, both because it was 30 years ago and because we didn't spend much time on it. It's important that the next generation is equipped to understand where their food comes from.

• Local Food
• Education
• Farming

When I was in school, I feel like I spent a grand total of a week learning about farming. Granted, I wasn’t in a particularly farm-oriented community and the “science” I was taught is now 30 years old, but I still wish we’d gone deeper into farming, what farmers do, and how the various farm subsidies work. (that’s a safe topic that wouldn’t get too political, right?)

What I did learn was a basic 4-year crop rotation plan, that one of those years the field should lie “fallow”, the nitrogen cycle, and a really rudimentary version of the carbon cycle (that while humans breathed oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, plants did the reverse). While I don’t fault my education for not teaching me about mycorrhizal fungi (good luck getting a 9-year-old to be able to spell that consistently), I feel like I learned more about farming from Clarkson’s Farm and This Is A Gardening Show.

So where do I feel like I missed out?

The discussion of farming I described above is very plant-oriented. Forget about the fact that it’s focused specifically on monocropping the “industrial” way or that regenerative agriculture was ignored; I don’t remember a single mention of how animals were farmed for meat, dairy, eggs, any of it. Importantly, I think this contributes to how disconnected we as a society are from our food supply.

I know I’m not the only one

I had a conversation with some acquaintances recently that started with me referencing an article about a company developing new alternative ways to produce milk (the details of this deserve their own article). I was immediately faced with comments that the way we get milk from cows is “weird” and “inhumane” and causes pollution due to methane and nitrogen waste. Now, all of this deserves its own article as well, but the fact that no one mentioned other animals that we keep for milk production (like goats) or fact that this is more of an indictment of the factory farm system (which is way too detailed for a 4th-grade classroom), but not necessarily a depiction of every small dairy farm, suggests to me that this stance was learned after any farming discussion in schools.

A previous discussion with a similar group about beef cattle also led to similar misunderstandings and curiosities. And it’s this sort of thing and how the two cycles relate that I think 9-year-old Brian would have been fascinated by. If children are capable of understanding Punnett squares (though I think I was a little older when this was discussed), I think they’re more than capable of understanding how a dairy cow gives birth to a calf, nurses the calf for a while, then the remaining milk becomes available for human consumption; meanwhile, the calf grows up and becomes beef, veal, or a bull (males only, obviously) and the cycle continues.

Learning about farming outside the school

I probably could have gotten involved in an organization like Future Farmers of America or 4H when I was younger, but I see that as more of an option for kids who want to go even deeper. If you learn where your food comes from and you want to be involved in the process, go for it; but a prerequisite is that you know where your food comes from. I feel like I didn’t know where my food came from until I went and figured it out.

I also don’t fault parents; they may not know where their food comes from (again, because people my generation didn’t really learn where food came from in school). In my case, I did go apple-picking and berry picking as a child and I learned the lifecycle of the wild salmon (and learned why it has such a vibrant color and mouthwatering flavor compared to most of the fish you find in the supermarket). My parents shpped at local farmstands and farmer’s markets. But at that level, the how has already happened and it leaves out the sciency bits.

Farming is science

In high school English, I read The Grapes of Wrath. If you want a memorable image of dustbowl-era midwest during the great depression in excruciating detail, this is the book to read. But it’s also not about farming. (You could argue it’s about how not to farm, or what happens when monocropping goes too far.)

Farming is definitely not math (well, not specifically math). Maybe it’s history to a certain extent, but I think the most obvious place for farming to be discussed is in science class. Farming is biology and chemistry and anatomy and medicine and weather and… need I go on? All of the things you probably learned in your various science classes are relevant to farming and overlap slightly, but you most likely never had anyone bring together all the pieces and fill in the little gaps that make the whole food supply chain work.

What do you think? Is it time we taught farming in school?