Reflections on Farm Week: Our Connection to Hawthorne Valley Farm

“If children are given a sense for the living earth and their connection with it when they are young, they will develop into adults who are, on the one hand, more securely rooted in themselves, and on the other are more capable of acting as caring custodians of the natural world.”
    -Rudolf Steiner, Lecture given in Torquay, August 14 1924
More than thirty-five years ago, a group of teachers from the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City saw the need for students to have knowledge of, and experience with, biodynamic farm work as part of their education.  They recognized that something vital was missing from the student’s education and that these city children needed to have a place where they could go to learn about life on a farm.  Through this initiative, what is now known as Hawthorne Valley Farm was transformed from a small, ailing farm into a working biodynamic farm with the intention of offering farm education.
 
Hawthorne Valley Farm is located about 100 miles north of New York City in the bucolic, rolling hills of the Hudson Valley. The Visiting Students Program, run by Nick Franceschelli, a graduate of Rudolf Steiner School and fondly known as Farmer Nick, introduces school classes to a unique week-long farm experience.  Each year over 500 children visit the farm. Students, teachers, and farmers live and work together.  The rhythm of nature and life on the farm remove children from the classroom and the everyday course of hectic, modern life.  Awakening to the environment, the children encounter the joy of learning and working together in a place where daily labor is authentic, gratifying, and something to which we can all feel connected to.
Third grade, a time during which the child undergoes the nine-year change, is farm year in every Waldorf School all over the world.  It is during this year that third graders will not only experience as much gardening and house building as their surroundings will allow, but many of them from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions will also spend a week at Hawthorne Valley Farm.  The development of the child at this age is synonymous with the picture that his or her “house” or physical body has been built and now stands firmly on the earth.  It is a turning point between being a young child and an older child, when a new awareness begins to arise.  Students from our school visit the farm in third grade, and return in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grade, and finally once more in the tenth grade.  With each year, the focus shifts to complement the curriculum.
On the one hand, it could be said that going to the farm is nothing more than an exercise in enhancing the children’s academic learning.  Taken from an intellectual point of view, that perspective is quite valid; however, over the years I have observed subtle changes within children, which are deeper and more profound than simply learning to identify the animals and plants of a working farm.  When we are at the farm, each moment is purposeful and presence is required.  Our chores are not created in order to keep the children busy and occupied.  There is no grade given.  The work simply must be done and the children know this.  They work eagerly and with joy that is not often witnessed in the urban classroom.  To say that Hawthorne Valley Farm is magical might seem, to anyone who has never been there, a romanticized opinion, but I will stand by that statement.  Hawthorne Valley Farm is special, not just because it is biodynamic.  One can feel the earnest intention of every human being who works on that land making the energy and vitality there palpable.
From the eyes of a class teacher I can attest to a change in the demeanor of the students from the moment they step off of the bus.  The air is filled with the smell of cow manure, and the first thing one often hears from the children is a resounding, “EW, gross!”  But before anyone can turn back to hide among the seats of the bus, we are greeted by an enthusiastic Farmer Nick, flanked by Tessa, Matt, and a lively bunch of fresh and eager farm interns ready to teach us all about life on the farm.  We are promptly put to work unloading the bus in a beeline fashion. The children happily join in, as our time at the farm has begun.  By evening meal, the air seems remarkably fresh, the playground is rose-colored in the setting sun and, somehow, watching the black and white dairy cows pass by on their way to the barn seems commonplace. 
Each day there the children and I are given the opportunity to feel what it is like to rise before the sun, to work all day with our hands and bodies, and to come to rest when the sun sets.  There are no distractions like television or iPods, jackhammers, or honking horns.  The day is filled with farm activities such as stacking wood, feeding the animals, collecting eggs, cleaning the barns, tending the garden, baking bread, making yogurt, bringing in the cows, and setting the tables for meals.  The list of farm chores is endless.  Soon, the faces of the children become rosy and their eyes sparkle.  By the end of our stay on the farm, many children, even those who might have been homesick at first, experience a longing to remain.
We know we will return and, with each new school year, the students persist in asking, “how soon until farm week?” We at the Rudolf Steiner School have the great fortune to return in fourth grade just past harvest time as the calendar nears Halloween.  The air is crisp and the mornings are often frosty.  The days are shorter and the children love to stay out past dark to watch the stars emerge.  One wet and snowy morning during our fourth grade visit, a calf was coming into the world just as we were waking.  The news spread throughout the farmhouse and the children, dressed in pajamas, muck boots, and winter coats, dashed out to witness the miracle.
We returned to the farm in late spring of fifth grade, when all had been newly planted and the air was fresh with promise.  We had returned to work and to learn about plants for our botany block. When we arrived, the children, having remembered the precious calf born a year and half before, wanted to promptly go and see her.  They were told that the calf had grown up and had become part of the cycle of life.  Many of the children were sad and stricken by this notion that cows would be slaughtered and eaten as food even though they all ate beef.  The goal was not to shock any of them, but neither to sanitize the reality of what happens to farm animals.  Some children responded by deciding to become vegetarian and are to this day.
  
In spite of the news of the calf, they relaxed into the routine of the work and drank in the farm with a new consciousness.  Matt, the gardener, taught them about the herbs that were growing in the garden and how teas and preparations could be made with them.  Gardening was a focal point that year.  The children looked at all of the plant life in a more thoughtful way and began to consider their healing powers and interconnectedness throughout the life of the farm.
In sixth grade we plunged deep into the earth.  We studied mineralogy during our time on the farm and were taken into a wild cave by a guide from the area.  For our class, this would be the last year that they would come to the farm together until tenth grade.  As sixth graders, having worked on the farm for three years, they felt a stewardship of the land, and yet, at the same time, there was more distance between themselves and the earth as they were now observing the ground beneath and below their feet.  During this time, known as the twelve-year-change, children begin to separate themselves from the world to take a more critical look.  As we sat laughing and singing around a campfire on our last night at the farm that year, Farmer Nick spoke to us about the connection between the farm and the food on our tables. Some children hadn’t yet made this leap.  Others understood, but still could not quite bring the two together.  Their experience of eating food at the farm is starkly different from the way in which most eat on a daily basis.  Though their families might buy fresh produce and prepare meals at home, a large number of my students, having grown up in the city, could not make a connection between the farm and food in the city. What was obvious was that they were still categorizing the experience as something unique only to this place.  Some children did understand; others were not quite ready and would likely not be until later in their adolescence.  
To round off their studies in ecology, our tenth grade students return to Hawthorne Valley Farm.  It is at this point that they are introduced to various farm techniques and given lectures about sustainable farming practices, with a focus on biodynamic farming.  While there, they work on the farm by being given more responsibilities than in younger years and are instructed about farm-to-market economies.  They visit other local farms as well so that they are exposed to the interconnectedness of small farmers throughout the region.  My current students are not yet in grade ten, but my daughter who is, went a few years ago.  I didn’t know what to expect upon her return, as at the time she had become enamored with city life.  To my surprise, something quite remarkable happened to her during her time there.  Being at the farm and working each day, then as a sixteen year old, brought her to the simple discovery that the work of the farm was real.  She felt physical pain coming back to the city as she saw the waste, the concrete, mindless busyness and consumerism all around her.  She longed to go back.  And now, as she begins to plan her college years, she feels compelled to spend a year living and working on a biodynamic farm. 
Going to the farm is a new and different experience for the students with each changing year, but what remains constant is their relationship to the land, the animals and the people who help bring them into this deep and meaningful experience.  Spending a week at the farm year after year gives us the opportunity to settle into what it feels like to wake and rest with the sun, to expand and contract according to the elements and the needs of the animals; to breathe into a pace that is more in tune with the earth. As human beings, we meet ourselves and each other in new ways through working together cleaning the barn or baking bread while also discovering the life-sustaining forces of the biodynamic farm, often eating food that was picked that day from the field or eating an egg that was given to us by a hen we fed that morning.  In the early grades, the children will not be able to intellectualize the experience and we wouldn’t want them to.
It is certain that the authenticity they experience through their hands and their bodies will develop a keen sense of responsibility and respect for the earth as they mature into adulthood, yielding adults who will have been given this knowledge that is as important today as it has ever been.
Jennifer Rosenstein is a class teacher at Rudolf Steiner School, New York City.