Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

122 Designing ecological Habitats
Members of a ‘crop
mob’ working on a
U-pick berry CSA
at EcoVillage. These
20-30 volunteers did
a tremendous amount
of work in 3-4 hours
on the land.
the lunches were a huge hit. “It was the first time I really learned how to
cook with vegetables,” one young man in his mid-twenties said. “I found
out they were really good.” Students earned six credits through the local
community college, but even more important than the credits was the lifelong
knowledge and appreciation they learned for local food and farming.
A number of the students felt the program had changed their lives.
Groundswell also initiated an innovative program that was first
developed by farmers in the Hudson Valley. The new Finger Lakes CRAFT
(Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) offers advanced
training to aspiring farmers in the Ithaca area. The CRAFT approach builds
on the training provided by individual farmers to their interns and employees
during the course of the growing season and includes nine day-long training
sessions at one of the three farms mentioned above. The CRAFT approach
has been highly successful in increasing the quality, depth and breadth of
new farmer training in several other regions in the US and Canada. And
communities with a CRAFT program tend to attract the most serious and
committed trainees, which is a great benefit to participating farms. We’re
excited to be developing this program right here in the Ithaca area.
I asked Joanna how she felt about Groundswell’s progress. “In a way,
Groundswell is a culmination of decades of work – a weaving together of
many of the existing strands in the local food system with some new ones,
notably: EcoVillage at Ithaca, Cornell Cooperative Extension, the farms,
the community college, Cornell, Ithaca College, and local public schools,”
she told me. “It’s also a very replicable model I think.”