Written by Jack Walker ‘21, Sustainability Program Coordinator
Summers at the O-Farm pass by in a blur of color: green mostly, corn plants shooting up verdant stalks, kale leaves shining with dewdrops, and, this year even more than most, grasses, galinsoga, and other weeds growing inches seemingly right before your eyes – that’s organic agriculture for you! Against this backdrop of shades of green, the O-Farm has been a buzzing hive of professors, students, and community members utilizing the farm as a lab for many types of hands-on learning experiences. Building upon notions of campus as lab, in which university campuses spark inquiry and serve as testing grounds for climate solutions, the O-Farm provides fertile grounds – literally! – for skill-building, creativity, scholarship, and coursework.
Each week, students from Professor Theresa Ong’s ENVS 25: Agroecology course have visited the farm to conduct labs that explore regenerative farming practices and collect data across the O-Farm, including pollinator counts, undergrowth in our maple sugarbush, and growth of our greenhouse tomatoes. We love having the Agroecology lab on site all summer because it brings a new group of students into relationship with the land in a unique and lasting way. We look forward to seeing many of these students return to the O-Farm in many capacities as they move through their time at Dartmouth. Students from Architecture I also visited the farm to learn and develop vertical farming systems to be built and used on campus. We worked with them to help consult about what kinds of plants, flowers, and herbs would thrive in various environments, and we planted starts for them to use in their final installations. Our staff loved seeing the curiosity and enthusiasm for growing food start to bubble out throughout the project. If you are near the Visual Arts Center, take a peek around for the vertical planters adding vibrance to the outsides of that space!
Students from Architecture I and undergraduate film students discuss site plans for their projects with Sustainability Assistant Director Laura Braasch and Professor Jack Wilson in the barn.
Farm Program Coordinator Jack Walker speaks to the Agroecology lab group about greenhouse growing. Photo by Tobin Yates '26
The O-Farm is also the site of new and ongoing long-term research projects. PhD student Kristen Jovanelly has been caring for a nursery of trees on-site for multiple years, using these trees as agroforestry teaching and community sharing tools. New this summer, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, with help from our undergraduate Farm Club, is establishing a plot to study plant provenance, or how the geographic source of seeds influences plant growth! Alongside these plant-focused research projects, Thayer professor Dr. Mukal Sharma has begun research using leftover plant debris to produce biochar, creating a readily available energy source as well as a nutritional soil amendment for farmers in underdeveloped areas.
All the while, the undergraduate Farm Club has led workdays of 10-20 students multiple times a week, creating entry points for interested students to get their hands dirty and maybe even munch on some veggies that countless Farm Club students have had a hand in growing. We also had so much fun hosting a very competitive (and very silly) O-Farm Olympics! Students formed teams to compete for farmy prizes and participated in events like “Squash put,” wheelbarrow relay races, speed weeding, blind herb tasting, “How low can you hoe" limbo, and more! It was a truly joyful experience and we had lots of laughs and celebratory cheers.
Students finding out “how low they can hoe” at our recent 2024 O-Farm Olympics!
Our student farm interns have also gotten into the spirit of trying out new projects and have been busy building new composting systems for plant waste from our fields as well as trying out each and every weeding method they possibly can to stay on top of a very jungly field. All in all, it has been a great summer here at the O-Farm. It’s been hot, rainy, and weedy, but our spirits have not been dampened. We have been so inspired by the positive attitudes and genuine sense of community that has formed out here this summer and all of us are hoping to carry that spirit through the fall! There is so much potential for awesome hands-on projects out here and we would love to see more students start to use the farm as a space to try out their cool ideas and get their hands dirty.
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