Farm to Institution Summit at Ohio University
All 2022 Summit presentations can be found on the Summit YouTube playlist
The Farm to Institution Midwest Summit will take place February 28 - March 2, 2022, featuring online sessions and in-person events at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio to highlight best practices in procurement of local foods, strengthening community food systems, and inspiring student understanding of the value of local food systems. The summit brings together the wide range of stakeholders who stand to benefit from a thriving regional food system, including local community members, government and higher education leaders, students, and food producers.
Key themes:
- Local Food Procurement
- Strengthening Community Food Systems
- Educating the Next Generation of Food Consumers: Reaching all.
- UN Sustainable Development Goals: Local food procurement and sustainability.
Schedule:
Day 1, Monday, 2/28:
9:00am-11:00am: Welcome and Keynote
- Opening - Gwyn Scott, Associate Vice President for Auxiliaries, Ohio University
- President’s Welcome - President Hugh Sherman, Ohio University
- Keynote Introduction – Mary Nally, Director, Center for Community Engagement, Ohio University
- Keynote: Inviting students to the table; reflections on 30 years of leading and learning with students.
- Presenter: Art Trese, retired Professor, Environmental and Plant Biology and founder of the OHIO Student Farm, Ohio University
- Keynote Description: The organic movement was the first organized challenge to the post WWII mechanization and industrialization of food production and consumption. In rebuttal, the conventional food system has continued to mechanize, automate, consolidate, and industrialize. Dispiriting? Yes, sometimes. More...
1:00pm-3:00pm: Campus Farms
- 1:00pm Session: *****CANCELLED****** Farm-situated Curricular Innovations Initiate Long-term Institutional Funding for Campus Farm
- Presenter: Julia Angstmann, Director of the Center for Urban Ecology and Sustainability, Butler University
- Session Description: Since 1992, the number of university and college campus farms have increased more than 13-fold to over 300 campuses, with more than eighty percent located on campuses with no agriculture program. Yet, most of these farm spaces are underutilized in the curriculum and often primarily used in co-curricular programming. More...
- 2:00pm Session: OHIO Student Farm Panel Presentation
- Presenters: Tiffany Harvey, Becky Clark (Pork and Pickles), Shelby George, Mary Nally, Art Trese and David Rosenthal
- Session Description: This session will highlight the Ohio University Student Farm and its impact, activities, and connections to the local food system. There will be brief presentations followed by Q&A and discussion. More...
- OHIO student farm tour (pre-recorded for viewing at any time)
Day 2, Tuesday, 3/1:
9:00am-11:00am: Educating Future Generations
- 9:00am Session: Bringing the Whole School to the Garden
- Presenter: Uli Koester, Executive Director, Midwest Food Connection
- Session Description: You have started a garden for your school. It’s beautiful, a success, and several classes and teachers use and enjoy your space. But you want buy-in from the whole school. You want all children to learn about gardening and food in this lovely space you have created. More...
- 10:00am Session: School Gardens and Classroom/Cafeteria Education in Rural Elementary and Secondary Schools
- Presenters: Keith Macartney, Federal Hocking Middle School Science Teacher; Tobey Witschey, Federal Hocking Amesville Elementary Wellness Coordinator; Lynne Genter, Federal Hocking Schools Farm 2 School Coordinator
- Session Description: Two schools in Southeast Ohio have undertaken activities to purposely influence, impact and increase student’s understanding of local and global food systems, gardening and the importance of a healthy eating. More...
1:00pm-3:00pm: Strengthening Community Food Systems
- 1:00pm Session: Strengthening Community Food Systems: Examples of Campus and Community Partnerships
- Presenters: Jake Amlin, Assistant Superintendent at Federal Hocking Local Schools and Lynne Genter, Federal Hocking Schools Farm 2 School Coordinator
- Session Description: This presentation will share the trials, tribulations and institutional lessons learned in a rural southeast Ohio K-12 school system that has set out to improve the quality of their school meals, classroom education and availability of local foods for their students, their families and the entire community. More...
- 2:00pm Session: How Relationships Can Change Everything: The Social Ecology of Food Systems
- Presenter: Dr. Lisa Trocchia, Prescott College
- Session Description: In this session, Dr. Lisa Trocchia discusses how to understand the work of local food systems practitioners as grounded in a larger context of transformative social change. More...
Day 3, Wednesday, 3/2:
9:00am-11:00am: Sustainable Development Goals
- 9:00am Session: Women, Agriculture, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
- Presenter: Dr. Rachel Terman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Ohio University
- Session Description: In this presentation I will discuss how a focus on gender and women in agriculture is relevant to UN Sustainable Development Goals. More...
- 10:00am Session: Using Foodways Programming to Support Local Food Systems within Communities
- Presenter: Thom Stevenson, Assistant Professor of Instruction and Dean’s Fellow for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Patton College of Education, Ohio University
- Session Description: In this presentation, I will discuss the process of building resiliency through the use of foodways programming. More...
1:00pm-4:00pm: Closing Keynote and Tours of Local Food Aggregate Sites
- 1:00pm-1:30pm. Closing speaker: Hylie Voss, CEO, Sugar Bush Foundation
- 1:45pm-2:30pm. TOUR: Ohio University Central Food Facility (in-person and pre-recorded video for viewing at any time)
- 3:00pm-4:00pm. TOUR: Chesterhill Produce Auction and GAP-certified Farm (in-person and pre-recorded video and Power Point presentation for viewing at any time; allow 30 minutes each way for travel time from Athens to the Chesterhill Produce Auction)
- Athens Farmers Market: Outdoor winter market; indoor winter market (Pre-recorded videos for viewing at any time)
Please email FarmtoOHIOinfo@ohio.edu with any questions.
The summit is a project of the Farm to OHIO Working Group (FOWG), which has been working to strengthen our regional food system through institutional procurement of locally grown food, engaging community partners, and developing our regional food network since launching the Initiative for Appalachian Food and Culture in 2016. Through close collaboration between Ohio University, Rural Action, and Community Food Initiatives, the FOWG has reduced many infrastructural barriers to institutional buying of locally grown produce and has increased equitable access to local food on campus.
Institutional investment in local food is a critical part of building community resilience for many reasons, one key reason being the number of individuals an institution serves. Institutions have the power to offer considerable financial support for local food producers, potentially inspiring future farmers while simultaneously influencing future consumers of local food, ultimately creating systems-level change for our community. When we choose local food, we choose to support a system that is equitable and just for all community members, good for our planet, and supportive of local businesses and jobs.
Affiliations of 2022 Summit Registrants
ACEnet
Allegheny Mountain Institute
Brigham Young University
Butler University
Central State University
Chartwells
Community Food Initiatives
Denison University
Federal Hocking Local Schools
Franklinton Farms
free bird farm
George Mason University
KVCC ValleyHub
Live Healthy Appalachia
Marietta College
Midwest Food Connection
Minerva Local Schools
Northwestern University
Oberlin College
Ohio University
Organic Association of Kentucky (OAK)
Prescott College
Ross County Health District
Rural Action
Snowville Creamery
Soujourners Care Network
Stayner Architects
The Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain
The Foodbank, Inc
The Ohio State University
University of Dayton
University of Nebraska Lincoln
University of Pittsburgh
Washington University in Saint Louis
Western Central Missouri Community Action Agency
Presenter Biographical Sketches and Session Descriptions
Art Trese has been growing vegetables for over 50 years, and an advocate for Organic practices from the beginning. Following a Pre Med undergraduate degree he pivoted to his true love, healthy plants. He completed a MS and PhD in Plant Pathology, and taught Plant Biology courses at Ohio University for thirty years until retiring in 2021. Over a span of 20 years he expanded the Plant Biology Learning Garden into a nearly 2 acre, student centered production farm. Currently, Art is serving as the unofficial, volunteer, farm manager at the Ohio Student Farm.
Keynote Description: The organic movement was the first organized challenge to the post WWII mechanization and industrialization of food production and consumption. In rebuttal, the conventional food system has continued to mechanize, automate, consolidate, and industrialize. Dispiriting? Yes, sometimes. But what better inspiration than new generations of motivated students? Nevertheless, I want to share some thoughts on the special opportunities that a campus farm can provide to students as they explore their own relationships with food, wellbeing, community, and nature. After all, what is more inspiring than to meet with the optimism of a new generation of students?
Julia L. Angstmann, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Urban Ecology and Sustainability at Butler University. She is a broadly-trained urban ecologist and leads efforts associated with the Center’s mission to explore, steward, and enhance urban systems using place-based interdisciplinary research, education, and outreach through collaborative projects with the Indianapolis community.
Session Description: Since 1992, the number of university and college campus farms have increased more than 13-fold to over 300 campuses, with more than eighty percent located on campuses with no agriculture program. Yet, most of these farm spaces are underutilized in the curriculum and often primarily used in co-curricular programming. The project presented here posits that a lack of integration with curriculum across the university stymies institutional commitments to the long-term funding of campus farm spaces. Thirteen faculty and staff co-created cross-disciplinary undergraduate course modules that used food and farming as a situated learning context at Butler University —a small, liberal arts, primarily undergraduate institution. The farm-situated place-based experiential learning pedagogical approach and its success in generating institutional support for the campus farm space will be detailed. This approach resulted in a permanent University funding line for the campus farm and its personnel, created 16 classes from 11 disciplines (biology, chemistry, environmental studies, communication, education, marketing, religious studies, pharmacy, political science, art history, and English) that use the farm as a curricular space, enhanced key student learning outcomes associated with civic mindedness and scientific literacy, and culminated in a new Applied Local Food Systems minor.
Becky Clark is the Owner, Butcher, and Executive Chef of Pork & Pickles, a company she founded in 2016 with the mission to create a unique food experience that both
expands the palate of her diners and holds up the local agricultural community. She believes in partnerships of equality - superb products in exchange for sustainable income. Clark uses food as a platform to shed light on issues of economics, climate change, and social justice. She believes everybody has a right to healthy, delicious food and fair wages, and uses her company to approach that one bite at a time.
In addition to her own company, Clark is the Executive Chef at Little Fish Brewing Company, a restaurant consultant, a mentor for Rural Action’s Whole Farm Program, the newest member of the Community Food Initiatives’ Board, and a proud OU Alumni. Her menus at Pork & Pickles and Little Fish center around seasonal local food (what the farmers have available at any given time). The Ohio University Student Farm is one of her favorite sources of fresh produce.
In her spare time Clark is a loving partner, dog mom, auntie, daughter, granddaughter and friend. She focuses her time outdoors, pushing her limits physically in many types of adventure recreation, and growing, cooking, and eating delicious food.
Shelby George is a sustainably focused prep cook at Little Fish Brewing Company and former production manager at Pork & Pickles. She graduated from Ohio University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Food and Nutrition Sciences. During her time at the university, she interned at the Ohio Student Farm with Dr. Arthur Trese and five other students. This experience sparked her focus in small-scale agriculture and local food systems.
David Rosenthal is an Associate Professor of Environmental and Plant Biology who studies plant responses to environmental stressors. He is particularly interested in climate change impacts on plant and crop productivity. Prior to joining Ohio University, Dr. Rosenthal studied soybean responses to climate change on large-scale, industrial, monoculture farms. David’s interests have since broadened to include addressing challenges associated with small scale, diversified, sustainable agriculture. One of those challenges is connecting local farms to local food systems. With little operational support from the University, the Environmental and Plant Biology Department maintains The Ohio Student Farm as a viable operation. The farm depends on a volunteer farm manager, student workers, and interns to grow produce that is sold to local businesses, at auctions, and to Ohio University culinary services. Excess produce is donated to campus and community food banks. https://www.ohio.edu/cas/rosentha
Tiffany Harvey is a second-year graduate student studying Environmental Studies. She has served as a graduate assistant for the Farm to OHIO Initiative for the past two years. Her role has involved expanding GAP certification (food safety certification) among local farmers who must obtain certification to sell their produce to Ohio University Culinary Services.
Guided by a belief in a robust local food system and appreciation for agriculture, she has successfully maintained GAP certification at the student farm, supervised summer student workers at the OHIO Student Farm, and assisted many local farmers with obtaining and maintaining their GAP certification.
She hopes to have her own farm in the future where she can apply the skills she has learned while working at the OHIO Student Farm.
Mary Nally is a native of Southeast Ohio, and has a personal interest in contributing to the
sustainability of the region by developing strong community resiliency. Mary holds a Master’s of Science in Environmental Studies and a Bachelors of Arts in Social Work from Ohio University. Social justice issues have been the driving force for her career; for ten years she worked with people experiencing homelessness, chemical dependency and brain disorders, before returning to Ohio to focus on community health policy and food justice issues. Mary serves on the Athens Regional Food Policy Council, Athens Healthy Community Coalition, and is a board President at the Athens Metropolitan Housing Authority and board chair member at Hocking-Athens-Perry Community Action.
Session Description: This session will highlight the Ohio University Student Farm and its impact, activities, and connections to the local food system. There will be brief presentations followed by Q&A and discussion. Farm activities are coordinated by faculty in the OU Environmental and Plant Biology Department but the farm is effectively managed by volunteers, interns, and work study students. The Ohio Student Farm engages in educating students about food production, basic farming, agro-ecology, soil ecology, and the physiology of plants. Produce is sold to local businesses (e.g. Pork & Pickles, Little Fish, The Village Bakery, Jackie O's and others), Ohio University and at the Chesterhill produce auction. Excess produce is donated to on campus and off campus food banks.
Uli Koester is the Executive Director of the Midwest Food Connection (MFC), a Minnesota non-profit that brings education on food, cooking, and gardening to children and their families. Trained as an elementary teacher, Uli launched MFC in 1994. The organization now employs four teachers and works with over 50 schools each year. Uli especially loves leading students in multi-sensory adventures in the schoolyard garden.
Session Description: You have started a garden for your school. It’s beautiful, a success, and several classes and teachers use and enjoy your space. But you want buy-in from the whole school. You want all children to learn about gardening and food in this lovely space you have created.
This workshop will explore the difficult challenge of teaching many students in a schoolyard garden. What keeps a class of 25 children busy for 40 minutes outside? How can you have enough food and activities for four such classes in a row? Come, learn and practice easy-to-implement lessons, get tips on classroom management in the garden, and create activities tailored to your garden.
Keith Macartney has been a middle school teacher for the Federal Hocking School district for 19 years. In the past 11 years he has developed one of the largest school gardens in the country in order for students to understand and appreciate the value of food that they can grow for themselves. The food that the students grow is used in the cafeteria, distributed to the community, and also prepared into meals by the student gardeners.
Lynne Genter has 2 degrees from The Ohio State University. She received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and four years later a Master’s Degree in Health Care Administration. She practiced nursing in various roles for more than 35 years and served as the Director of Rehabilitation Nursing at The Ohio State University Medical Center. As a nurse she witnessed first hand the effects of both good and bad nutrition on the human condition. While at Ohio State she reshaped the foodservice to ensure that patients experienced healthy, delicious food in a dining room setting, implemented a weekly fresh food camp for “Mom’s TO BE” and worked along side the dieticians and food service staff to improve the quality of Meals served . In 2002 she founded the Clintonville Farmer’s Market, now a 50+ farmer strong market. She is an active member of OEFFA ,The Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association & hasserved on the board Currently she is the Farm to School Program coordinator for Federal Hocking Local Schools.
Tobey Witschey is a Registered Nurse who serves as the Wellness Coordinator for Amesville Elementary School within the Federal Hocking School District. The school district is located in rural southeast Ohio and serves approximately 900 students in grades preschool through twelve. This is Tobey's second year with the school district.
Prior to her work as Wellness Coordinator, Tobey's fifteen years of nursing experience includes working as a Diabetes Educator, Public Health Nurse, Pediatrics, and Cardiology. Her previous work experience has helped shape her passion to provide health education and create hands-on learning opportunities for students. She is a firm believer that empowering children to make healthy lifestyle choices is key to prevention and improving their quality of life.
One of the biggest projects Tobey has led at Amesville, is their school garden. Not only has Tobey increased participation within the existing garden, but is currently leading an expansion project. Other ways she is involved with students include healthy cooking, taste testing, health and wellness challenges, and individualized classroom health education.
Session Description: Two schools in Southeast Ohio have undertaken activities to purposely influence, impact and increase student’s understanding of local and global food systems, gardening and the importance of a healthy eating. This presentation will focus on the school gardens and classroom/cafeteria education underway in these rural elementary and secondary schools. Both of these schools have implemented unique experiences for students. Successes as well as failures will be shared.
Jake Amlin serves as the Assistant Superintendent at Federal Hocking Local Schools and knows that equitable access to healthy food is as crucial to developing children as equitable access to quality education.. He has been involved with Federal Hocking's local food acquisition and distribution program for several years and helped secure the USDA Farm to School grant that has supported the district's efforts for the past two years. Jake and his wife Tera, also an educator at Federal Hocking, live in the district with their five school-aged daughters.
Session Description: This presentation will share the trials, tribulations and institutional lessons learned in a rural southeast Ohio K-12 school system that has set out to improve the quality of their school meals, classroom education and availability of local foods for their students, their families and the entire community. Along with the importance of the many partnerships forged for the program the role of leadership will be discussed. Efforts initiated with a USDA grant awarded in July 2020 will be shared. A candid conversation about both successes and failures will be included.
Dr. Lisa Trocchia is a graduate of Ohio University with an interdisciplinary PhD in the Social Ecology of Food. She designs courses and teaches in the online graduate program in Sustainable Food Systems at Prescott College. A long-time resident and local food systems advocate and practitioner in Athens, she now spends most of the year living in a mountain village on the island of Crete. Lisa is a sensory ethnographer who photographs, researches, and writes about the performance of food, cultural foodways, and the modulation of affect embodied in food spaces. Dr. Trocchia is also active as social systems network consultant offering support in network design, facilitation, communication, and the development of structures that activate self-organizing, equity, and horizontal leadership.
Session Description: In this session, Dr. Lisa Trocchia discusses how to understand the work of local food systems practitioners as grounded in a larger context of transformative social change. Because food holds such an intersectional space in our lives, values-based food connections–networks that form a social ecology of food--begin to re-order our relationships to economic opportunity, to the environment, and to each other. Transformative social change occurs by shifting multiple systems, which requires nurturing connections. The social ecosystems that emerge can center equity and guide the emergence of resilient economies, healthier people, vibrant communities, and establish regenerative natural environments.
Dr. Rachel Terman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio University and an affiliate faculty member of the Appalachian Studies Program and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She specializes in the sociology of Appalachia and the rural U.S; through her research she focuses on intersecting identities, inequalities, and people’s relationship to place. Before moving to Ohio, she worked with the Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network and is a coauthor of The Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture forthcoming from University of Iowa Press. Dr. Terman earned her Ph.D. in rural sociology and women’s studies from Penn State University and her MA in Appalachian Studies from Appalachian State University.
Session description: In this presentation I will discuss how a focus on gender and women in agriculture is relevant to UN Sustainable Development Goals. I will start with a brief overview of women in agriculture in the U.S. and central Appalachian region including demographics and historical context. Next, I will share the results from research conducted with the Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network, which includes the Feminist Agrifood System Theory (FAST). Using FAST, I will discuss some of the barriers to farming that women face and how they have used sustainable agriculture to overcome those barriers. Specifically, I will focus on ways that connecting eaters and institutions to women farmers supports not only gender equality but several of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Finally, I will conclude by offering recommendations for understanding how additional social identities like race and ethnicity are also essential for meeting UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Thom Stevenson holds a M.A. from Antioch University, a Masters Certificate in Educational Public Policy from Ohio University, B.A. from Governors State University and a A.A.S and Food Service Management Certificate from Sinclair Community College. Thom is an Assistant Professor of Instruction and serves as the Deans Fellow for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Patton College of Education. Thom is currently working on his Ph.D. in Philosophy- Leadership and Change from the Graduate School of Antioch University and is certified in sales, customer service, hotel analytics, and a CHE (Certified Hospitality Educator). Before becoming a professor, Thom worked to create his own nonprofit- ChefVet as well as worked for Ohio State University, Hyatt Corporation, Columbus Hospitality and the Cancer Support Community of Central Ohio. Thom teaches classes in Restaurant Operations, Intro to Food Production, Catering, Food and Culture, and ServSafe- Safe Food Handling. His major research interests include foodways, sustainability, food with a mission, universal design and organizational behavior/ organizational change.
Session description: In this presentation, I will discuss the process of building resiliency through the use of foodways programming. I will share how the use of narrative inquiry, community based learning theory and experiential learning all come together to help individuals build resilience one tasty bite at a time. This session will include a student representee whose multi-generational family lives off the land and how that practice has encouraged a greater support for and understanding of how best to nourish oneself.