Community Colleges Seed Local Food Systems
Many Illinois schools play a key role in advancing sustainable farming
Growing Farmers’ Opportunities
Many community colleges in Illinois play important roles in providing education in agriculture and horticulture while elevating the importance of growing and strengthening our local food ecosystems.
To draw attention to these schools’ contributions , last month’s Everything Local Conference in Springfield featured a program titled “Partnering with Community Colleges for Food System Impact.” The panelists were Eliza Fournier, urban farm director at College of Lake County (CLC) in Illinois’ northeastern corner; Sheri Doyel, director of the Center for Agrarian Learning at McHenry County College in north-central Illinois; and Brittany Calendo, program director for Windy City Harvest — Chicago Botanic Garden’s non-profit urban agriculture program — who works closely with City Colleges of Chicago.
Bryan Flower, director of the Edible Campus Program at Northern Illinois University moderated the discussion. The following are takeaway excerpts from the conversation, in which the participants discussed how their programs work.
Brittany Calendo
Windy City Harvest is really focused on working in urban agriculture on the south and west sides of Chicago... Our focus is around food, jobs and health... We run our transitional jobs training program, we work with people who have been involved with the justice system and veterans, and we hire them on as part of our team.
They work with us for 13 weeks... learning how to farm, but really working on a lot of job development skills. And then one day a week, we're in the classroom working on updating resumes, applying for jobs, and learning about environmental literacy through a curriculum called Roots of Success... What we've found over the years is that people find out that they actually really enjoy the farming side of the work....
They work with us until they start the apprenticeship program, which is our farmer training program in partnership with City Colleges of Chicago. That's our nine-month certificate training program... Then the next step is the apprenticeship program, we have every year 20 to 25 people graduating from that program. We've been running it since 2009.
The people who are graduating and wanting to start a farm... that's really difficult within the city of Chicago, because land access is a challenge, getting access to water is a challenge. Most of our soil is not safe to grow directly in. So we started a farmer incubator program, where graduates of our apprenticeship program who then take a business course are able to apply to rent land from us and start and run their own farm business. It’s just trying to minimize the risks of starting a farm business, so people can really figure out what are their markets, what are the right partnerships. We've had over 26 successful businesses come out of that program.
We have 12 farm sites across the south and the west sides and none of these are land that we own. This is all through partnerships, which we think is really important because you want to be invited into the communities we're working with.
Eliza Fournier
I'm here to talk to you a little bit about the College of Lake County, which is located in the suburban county just one north of Cook County, which is where the city of Chicago is.
Lake County has three campuses, we have over 15,000 students at our three campuses. And we're just kind of starting on our journey of urban agriculture and local food systems... Just as we have three campuses, we'll have three farms showcasing and training on different models. We're going to be expanding on success.
We've had an associate's degree program in horticulture, we have six different certificates. But one of the certificates, on sustainable agriculture, we're going to try to blow that up a little bit, serving as a resource training for... Waukegan and Lake County residents...
We're really hoping to serve as a convener along with our partners at University of Illinois Extension and the Lake County Community Foundation. We brought together 50 stakeholders this fall to talk about how can we convene interest groups around food systems to really grow our local food system in Lake County. And then also community colleges can showcase and train on sustainable urban agriculture and just sustainable agricultural practices in general...
There are huge lots of land in the very suburban community of Grayslake, where our largest campus is.... A little bit towards the east... is the Greenbelt farm [in the city of North Chicago] in partnership with the Lake County Forest Preserve District. This is our newest farm just started this year, inherited from our friends at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest program. And then finally all the way east, you'll see Waukegan and our Lakeshore Campus. It's right on the lake. And that is where our Urban Farm Center eventually will be...
We have several programs on the Grayslake campus. We have credit classes, certificates and associate degrees. We have student workers who work on the farm and we have we run a summer garden camp for middle schoolers, providing as many inroads as we can to future farmers using sustainable agricultural practices as a vehicle.
We have about a half an acre of ground in sustainable production to hoop houses and greenhouses. So we can demonstrate lots of different styles of growing and infrastructure that's needed to do that growing. We grow about 15,000 pounds of produce annually. Most of this produce is distributed in our campus community at Grayslake. We have a cafeteria and we have a student-run restaurant on which we're partnering with the Forest Preserve District...
Greenbelt farm at the Greenbelt Forest Reserve is our workforce development space, where we're focusing on providing paid work experiences for high school students and then out-of-school youth ages 16 to 24. Those are individuals who have not been or are not currently engaged in work or education. So we’re providing an on-ramp to the world of opportunity that College of Lake County offers to them. We have about one acre of in-ground sustainable agriculture production. We're just talking about infrastructure. We do have a GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) approved outdoor processing station and commercial refrigerator at that space. The goal for distribution at this site is to keep it in Lake County, specifically in northeast Lake County, specifically in North Chicago, Waukegan and our Grayslake campus.
Coming soon, this is our Urban Farm Center... This is my dream. This keeps me up at night. Here we will be having workforce developed. It will be a conglomeration of all those things right in downtown Waukegan, overlooking the shores of Lake Michigan. This will host the programs for credit classes, non-credit workshops for home growers, paid internships, apprenticeships, field trips for community schools. This will eventually be a 24,000 square foot facility with indoor growing, a retail location, and cafe. This will serve as our lunchroom for our campus downtown, retail, and also a commercial kitchen for doing value-added products and aggregation space for distribution of local product.
We're hoping to eventually be able to grow up to 4,000 heads of lettuce per week, 3,000 basil plants, and 10,000 pounds of cucumbers and tomatoes annually in a controlled environment agriculture situation. Right now we're in people preparation, we're deepening partnerships, preparing the physical space for the Urban Farmer Center, and then doing fundraising.
[Click the button below to access Local Food Forum’s article about the Urban Farm Center project.]
Sheri Doyel
I'm the director of an initiative at McHenry County College called the Center for Agrarian Learning... We teach, engage and inspire food and farm entrepreneurs by sharing the latest production and business practices...
What I am proud of in terms of this initiative, that's only about four years old... was born out of a needs assessment that took about 18 months... The college was interested in what learning opportunities might be needed in the county... What is the landscape of farmer education and food system development? And where are the gaps? What they came up with was that we needed to have more farmer education, specifically for folks that are already farming or dreaming of farming, so that they can meet their financial goals and also do it in a sustainable, ecologically sustainable way. And people ask for things like we need more education on season extension, we need more understanding how to scale from small to small-direct to wholesale. These are what the farmers and other service providers were telling us...
Most of what's in my basket is doing non-credit programming for farmers or people that are interested in farming... We've done larger public events that pull in the foodies and the dreamers on topics like changing the local food system. And then we do some really specific things, like how do you grow mushrooms...
We've put together a student farm on campus now, which is super-exciting. Before we were just growing in raised beds, even though we're in McHenry County and have tons of land, 80 acres around us. So we’re super-excited that we pushed out of the raised beds. We offer tours for the public and we put together signage so if someone stops by, they can sort of educate themselves. And then we've done some weekend intensives...
In conjunction with this, the college is doing something that fits in with what people think of community colleges doing, which is a degree program. We have a new degree program called entrepreneurial agriculture, you can also get a certificate. The degree is a marriage of the foundational business and marketing courses with food production, soil science, plant science. So if you have run a business and you just want to learn about growing food, you can do the Certificate in Business and Marketing, or maybe you've been farming for a while, you're not doing so good on the business side, you can just get the certificate in business and marketing... We want our students to get jobs on local farms, or at least be on their way to knowing how to launch a sustainable business.