Daniel at Amherst: Book & Plow Farm

(Word count: 526)

Outline:

Work-Study

Straight to farm pics!!!

Orientation

I had the good fortune of having my LEAP (glossary page link) trip at the Book&Plow (B&P) Farm, which was definitely the highlight of my Orientation experience at Amherst College. The program lasts for 3 days (Thursday-Saturday) and started off at 8:30am and ended by 4pm (with the exception of Saturday which ended by 1pm) each day. Being only a 15 minute walk from the main campus, the B&P Farm is surrounded by the college's Wildlife Sanctuary (500 acres of nature -- which deserves its own blog post) and as of 2016 the land cultivated stands as thus:

20 acres of vegetables,
8 acres of cover crops,
and 25 acres of pasture. (the B&P has/had 20 pigs, which are reared at farm, but butchered and processed elsewhere)

Map of the B&P farm, and relation to campus
Retrieved from bookandplowfarm.com/land/ on 10.26.16

For two days, my schedule for the B&P Orientation looked like this:

Breakfast
Meet at Keefe
Farm Work -- from 9-12, 3 hours of actual farm work out of a full day of activities! (D1: onion topping and picking cherry tomatos [OMG the best]; D2: weeding)
Lunch
Free Time
Afternoon Adventure (D1: hike to Mt. Sugarloaf, D2: trip to Puffer's Pond; D3: graduation ceremony!)
Dinner
Evening Adventure (D1: dinner on the hill; D2: square dance)

And here are the pictures...

Tobin showing us what a good cherry tomato looks like

Nature and stuff

Lucas Zeller '17 and his pickings

The whole squad after conquering Mt. Sugarloaf

End of D1: dinner at Tuttle Hill!

Watermelons by Puffer's Pond! D2 excursion

End of D2: square dance open to the whole school!

Work-Study

Having had such a great experience during Orientation, I signed up immediately for the work-study program at the B&P. The Work-Study program at the B&P, not to be confused with off-campus Federal Work-Study which is a program available nationally to the financially needy (and only American citizens at that) has been and continues to be highly educational for me. Since I've spent my life in cities where the production aspect of food is often obscured by distance -- compounded with the fact that I've been most recently based in Singapore where local food production is nearly non-existent -- I've really enjoyed getting my hands dirty, and my thumbs a little green!

However,

As an international student, I needed to apply for an SSN, which was an adventure in itself -- to the nearby city of Holyoke, which isn't the prettiest. Although the paperwork was a little intimidating, Nancy Robinson from the Financial Aid office was of immense aid by explaining what SS very concisely and clearly was and how I played into it, and is an example of the great resources at students' disposal at the college.

In my first (Fall) semester at the Farm, I've done a lot of harvesting and cleaning of produce! Including but not limited to: