Introducing: Practicum Students 2016

With the hot season of Mendocino County rearing its dry golden head, we here in the little hilltop village of the Grange School are defying the stagnancy of summer days as we enter week four of our fast-paced, intensive student practicum program. So heat be damned! We’re rolling strong through days of hearty field work, informative and interesting classes, and inspiring field trips to surrounding working farms and food producers. We’re also experiencing the joys and challenges of communal living as we practice our communication skills regularly (including taking daily ASL classes, more on that below), and attempt to individually and collectively map our holistic contexts and goals.

It’s my first semester here as the student livestock manager and student life coordinator (SLC), and I’ll say that life at the Grange School often feels like being inside an incubator of experimentation. The space is dynamic. The curriculum is one that invites curiosity, demands reasoned and creative thought, and encourages the bravery to adapt on the fly. It couples the idealistic energy of those who seek to upturn unhealthy food systems with the hard-nosed pragmatic skills and lessons needed to become better, smarter food producers. With this balance well-achieved under the direction of Ruthie King, we are all learning first how to sustain ourselves as farmers and food producers. This is how we’ll learn to sustain our communities and ultimately how to sustain our planet.

On that note, what follows are a few sentences about each of the students here, and the ambitious individual projects they’ve dreamt up and are beginning to plan and implement.

Lyndsey came through nearby Laytonville and is interested in building systems and infrastructure for the humane, responsible, and financially viable raising of livestock.  She’s begun plans for designing and then constructing a movable, secure, and efficient chicken coop to maximize comfort and ease for both the chickens and farmer.

 

James spent the last few years teaching science to high-schoolers in also not-too-far Oakland, and is particularly interested in the biology of soil and botany. He has plans to develop and plant beneficial insectaries in our orchard and vegetable field. He’s also an excellent baker.

 

 

 

Caroline picked up and traveled from the distant land of New Jersey to attend the Grange School. She has a full course of projects on her plate, many of which incorporate our field and the grounds of our living area. To name just three: she is setting up systems for bookeeping and time management for our vegetable field, planning and implementing a spiral herb garden next to the outdoor kitchen, and setting up a system and infrastructure for drying our own spices in the hot summer sun.

Paige and Grant drove up from San Diego and have become teachers here in addition to being students. Grant is profoundly deaf and Paige is his observant and skilled interpreter. Their aim is nothing less than to influence and enhance the consciousness of the people around them as they experience the world. Together they’ve begun developing an ASL (American Sign Language) class in which all of us are currently enrolled three days a week. Grant also writes a weekly blog, which you can find here: http://ourroadtoparagon.blogspot.com/

 

Artistic and socially minded Bati has transitioned from being a residential WWOOFer into a full-time student. She hails from Oregon and, in her quest to spread the message of healthier, smarter farming is planning work for various kinds of media, including a radio show and/or a documentary film.

Eva has been here now for nearly nine months. She’s following her interest born of working with the sheep by delving deeper into the fiber arts, and will be enrolling in classes to that end at Mendocino Community College. She is also our Instructional Logistics Coordinator, handling all of the logistics and scheduling of our field trips and the coordination of guest instructors. We would be lost without her.

 

 

Joshua, our Vegetable Production Manager, continues the hard work of creating smart systems for field management, sowing the seeds, and stewarding the land to grow them into nutritious food. He’s grown the output of the land so that, in addition to feeding all of us here, he’s now bringing our produce to two markets a week in nearby Willits and Redwood Valley.

 

 

Sky’s journey through life brought him to us as a WWOOfer. While he helps Joshua in the field and at markets, he’s also planning a future enterprise of cultivating fungi. Something of a mad scientist, Sky regularly forages for edible  berries and beneficial weeds and spends hours in the kitchen making all manner of interesting (and delicious) concoctions.

 

And Ruthie remains our shepherd, leading us all through the rigors of this farming education. The dynamism and excitement of the term begins with her, and we are all lucky to have her as a teacher, even if only for the short period of time we’re here.

 

As for me, I do my best to make sure the hay for the sheep gets moved to

shady areas when the sun is strongest, and that the chickens always have cold(ish) water to peck at. I can’t bring a/c into the fields, but I can try to make the heat as bearable as possible for our livestock.

Coming up soon: blog posts from individual students!