Seeds of the Food System

Many urban youth who live in the five-mile square City of Poughkeepsie (and other cities in our region) would never have the opportunity to step foot on a farm, even though there is one located within city limits. Without this experience, these youth - the seeds of our future - may never come to understand the importance of local agriculture nor make choices to protect sustainable farms. Through Seeds of the Food System, urban youth have an opportunity to be exposed to a farm, to experience connections to the land firsthand and to gain an awareness of sustainable agriculture. 

The PFP’s working seed garden serves as a venue for youth education. Seed gardening and saving provide an opportunity for meaningful work that benefits the community. Youth visitors to the farm receive seeds to grow or pass-on, which they can share with the community while sharing their knowledge about growing food and saving seeds. Gardening skills are taught, applied and taken one step further, completing the plant life cycle. Learning about seeds is tangible and immediately accessible, while serving as a gateway to complexity and implications, with a tremendous amount of potential for learning about many facets of the food system, including:

The PFP’s working farm and community programs are fertile ground for youth to gain an understanding of the food system. PFP food distribution represents a local food system with many fewer steps than the conventional food system – mainly production and distribution / marketing. 

Through Farmers-in-Training experiences on our working farm, youth can learn the basics of organic vegetable production on a small farm scale, including seed sowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting. 

Meaningful work continues through a series of distribution modules that combine hands-on and interactive workshops on local food distribution methods with opportunities to apply learning by experiencing or participating in that area of work. This connection between learning and doing reduces abstraction and provides opportunities for youth to cultivate leadership abilities as their share their knowledge and skills with the community. Developed modules include Harvesting for Market / Farmers’ Market Sales Training with Working at a Farmers’ Market Booth, Food Access with Volunteering at a Soup Kitchen, Large Scale Meal Planning with Execution, Alternative Food Systems with Managing a CSA Distribution and Why Save Seeds with Seed Saving Practice and Demonstration (including a Cooking Demonstration to prepare a healthy pico de gallo snack).   

A highlight of working with urban youth has been the implementation of large scale Community or Family Meals. These provide an opportunity for teens to share the food they have learned to grow, the cooking skills they have gained and their perspectives on local food and community as they plan and prepare a healthy meal that they serve to the community or their families along with an educational program that they develop. This also provides an opportunity for the community to celebrate our youth and enjoy a healthy and delicious meal they prepared.