Granor Farm Camp: Dirt is Required
Grace Buono writes about the camp she co-founded when she was in her tweens
In This Issue
• Granor Farm Camp (A Seasons of Change Farmer Story)
• Nature’s Farm Camp Recruiting Young Women for October Leadership Summit
• Take a Quiz
Granor Farm Camp: Dirt is Required
A Granor Farm Seasons of Change Story by Contributor Grace Buono
Publisher’s note
I believe strongly that best way to ensure a better food system for the future is to invest Good Food values in our youngest eaters. That’s why I am so fond, as I was during my years at FamilyFarmed, of school garden programs such as Gardeneers and Big Green, food education programs such as Pilot Light, and summer farm camps such as the one at certified-organic Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan (about 85 miles from Chicago around the southern end of the lake).
The author of the article is Grace Buono, whose parents created Granor Farm in 2006 (in the article, she explains that she is the “Gra” in Granor). After attending a camp on another farm during her grade school years, Grace and her sister Eleanor persuaded their parents to start one of their own.
Fast forward nine years and the camp is going strong, and Grace continues to serve as a counselor during her summers home from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is an editor on The Hoya, the school’s newspaper, and she tells a delightful story about Granor Farm Camp below. — Bob
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If you drive east down Warren Woods Roads in Three Oaks, Michigan a little too fast (which most people do), you probably wouldn’t notice the one rather large grain silo that sits 100 yards or so back from the road. At speed, the silver cylinder looks unobtrusive among the sprawling Midwestern fields that surround you.
But inside this domed structure you won’t find corn or wheat or any other kind of stashed silage. Rather, you’d find children painting murals, counselors performing plays and more precariously stashed wet paint brushes than one could ever imagine.
This is the world of Granor Farm Camp.
Next to our silo, known as the School House, sits Granor Farm, a certified organic fruit, vegetable and grain farm located here in southwest Michigan. Founded in 2006, Granor began growing produce in 2007 with a commitment to respecting the land that we sow, the products we grow and the community that surrounds us.
Granor Farm Camp is one of many programs that Granor Farm offers in addition to the produce we harvest. Each summer children ages 5 to 12 are welcomed to Granor as our youngest farmers. They are asked, above all, to “get dirty” with the soil around them to learn the value of farms and to discover the importance of trying new things.
But to really understand our mission as a camp, you also need to know how we began.
Full disclosure, Granor Farm was founded by my parents, Rob Buono and Liz Cicchelli in 2006. My first memory of the early Granor days is clear: On one very stormy afternoon my parents brought my sister Eleanor (the “nor” of Granor; I am the “Gra”) and me to a very dilapidated white farmhouse where Granor now resides. They told us that this house and all those fields were going to become a farm… our farm.
Though I grew up in Chicago, I spent my childhood summers running through farm fields. Much of that was thanks to Bertrand Farm, located in Niles, Michigan, where I attended a farm camp with my sister and friends from the time I was four years old to probably 12. At a camp that was as much a part of my educational experience as my own elementary school, I chased chickens, ate raspberries right from the bushes and attempted to make zucchini bread by my own accord. I knew of no better way to spend my summers.
Meanwhile, Granor continued to grow under the leadership of my cousin Jesse Rosenbluth. And as that little white farmhouse turned into so much more, it was only natural that my sister and I began ask: If we love farm camp so much, why don’t we have our own?
And so everything took off from there. Vicki Rosenbluth (my aunt and Jesse’s mother) was then a preschool teacher at the Mary Meyer School in Chicago. We approached her about running a farm camp at Granor, and she agreed on the spot.
“I just felt if we want the kids to save the planet or to know where their food comes from, which is so important, you have to get them into the dirt with some seeds in their hands and see what happens,” Vicki Rosenbluth recently told me.
Things were pretty rudimentary in our first year of camp. Along with 12 of my friends, we followed the Rosenbluth mother and son duo through the fields, weeding more than we had anticipated. We pulled rutabagas from the ground and ran from our then-flock of very angry hens.
Our program has grown into a much more organized and cohesive experience over the past 14 years, now hosting nearly 200 campers across each summer. Yet the heart of Granor Farm Camp remains the same.
“I always wanted [the kids] to do farm work,” Vicki said. “When you see a dozen little kids pulling potatoes out of the dirt, it’s exciting, and picking up bugs and squishing hornworms, learning by doing and getting dirty.”
In addition to planting and harvesting, campers at Granor have always had the opportunity to cook — a puzzle piece in the farm to table equation we want our mini-farmers to understand. This is a special treat for our campers because they get to cook these days alongside Abra Berens, Granor’s chef, who has masterfully found a way to teach kids about recipe making and food chemistry without them quite realizing it.
[Abra in 2020 was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Great Lakes award and is author of Ruffage, a highly regarded vegetable cookbook published in 2019.]
“If there is any curriculum for children, it’s cooking,” Vicki said. “It’s the whole essential of learning how to use tools, learning how to read a recipe, learning how to take turns, learning how that bowl of flour and salt and water and sweet goes together and makes cornbread or something like that.”
Until this year, Farm Camp ran out of the “Tall Barn” at Granor. Each summer Vicki and I arrived the week before camp to clear out our space, sandwiched between a workshop and farm storage. And so we mastered the dance of sharing a space that had purposes far beyond our few weeks of camp.
“We weren’t just a little camp on the sidelines, we were in a working barn for many years with combines, garlic hanging from the roof, cats chasing and eating mice in front of us,” Vicki said. “We wanted the campers to feel as free as free chickens, but they really weren’t.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year and Farm Camp paused like the rest of the world, our program began to change and innovate. We built our School House and entertained the idea of how camp could grow into more than just a three-hour morning program a few weeks each summer.
And so now, here we are in 2021. Working as co-directors, Vicki and I spent the winter concocting new visions for Farm Camp. From building Aldo Leopold benches* to hives for Mason bees**, no session of camp is the same. We work with the season: What’s growing? How can we cook that?
This summer we are running four sessions, hosting a morning program for 5-to-8 year olds and an afternoon program for 9-to-12 year olds. With the School House as our blank canvas, Granor Farm Camp has landed in a new home.
The best part of Farm Camp is how our campers have the space to grow up here. Summer after summer we see the same faces, many of whom are now counselors. And really, at the end of the day, Granor Farm Camp is about getting dirty, having fun, and learning a thing or two about why farming is so important.
“We introduce new projects and they have to grow into that,” Vicki said. “But you know what? Every year they still want to make pickles, they still want to make the little blueberry pies, and that has not changed since day one.”
* An Aldo Leopold bench is a simple bench to be used outdoors in nature. It is named for the famed, ahead of his time conservationist and environmentalist who lived from 1887 to 1948 and wrote A Sand County Almanac.
** Mason bees are pollinators that produce no honey; males have no stingers and females’ sting has been likened to a mosquito bite.
Women 16-19: Apply for Nature’s Farm Camp Summit
While we’re on the topic… Nature’s Farm Camp, which takes place at the Angelic Organics Learning Center in Caledonia, Illinois, is holding a Farm Camp Teen Food Leadership Summit October 15-17. If you identify as female and are ages 16-19, you are invited to apply to attend the summit by the August 12 deadline. BIPOC teens are encouraged to apply.
The 12 applicants selected to attend will each receive a $300 stipend for participating.
As the application form reads:
Do you love great food? Want to spend time with friendly goats and discuss economic justice? Would you like to meet farmers and activists working on creating solutions to poverty, disease, climate change and racism? Want to spend time on a diverse 200-acre farm and gain leadership skills to bring back to your community empowered to advocate for positive change?
Click below for more information.
Take a Quiz
The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, named for famed conservationist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold, is located at what university?
a) Michigan State
b) Iowa State
c) Wisconsin
d) Purdue
Answer: b) Iowa State University is home to the Leopold Center.