by Linda Booth Sweeney
These days, children tend to learn about nature far from nature. In classrooms and labs, they try to understand the nutrient cycle and other living systems that compose our world. Farmers understand living systems. They exist to protect and help us all benefit from healthy living systems.
When children meet farmers and are immersed in the real work and cycles of life on a farm, farms can become classrooms where students can see and touch systems and come to understand interconnected and interdependent nature of all living things. When farmers become educators, they can share their understanding gained from experience, that nothing stands in isolation, that connections in nature, people, problems and events bind us all.
On a recent trip with a group of third graders to Gaining Ground, a non-profit farm in Concord, Massachusetts, I found myself spellbound by the outhouse. I couldn't take my eyes off it. The outhouse had been lovingly painted in a riot of colors, and carved in a gingerbread theme. It was at once whimsical and functional, and clearly a valued structure on the farm. The farmer, Verena Wieloch, talked about the structure to students, who had cautiously gathered around it, giggling, wincing, and pinching their noses in anticipation of foul odors.
“Is this where we go to the bathroom?” said a boy, squeamishly.
Verena smiled. She had a sweet secret to share: This was no ordinary bathroom. This was a composting toilet. “After you use the outhouse, the waste is composted, or broken down into a fertile soil that is full of rich nutrients, like nitrogen, for the soil. The farmers here put that compost on the herb and vegetable gardens.” Verena stopped before detailing what that meant: We then eat the herbs and veggies that grow in the compost from the outhouse. After digesting our food, we can return to the outhouse and the cycling of nutrients continues.
Yet Verena’s point that day was that in nature, there is no such thing as waste. One species’ waste is another’s food. This is the “waste = food” living system. At this farm, the outhouse-to-garden practice of turning our waste into food for herbs and vegetables reveals how if we understand living systems, we can work with them, rather than disrupt them. And how our farms can thrive when they mimic the ways of nature and in doing so, foster respect for land and nature, an essential element to understanding and meeting today’s environmental challenges.
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