Farm Lab-DREAMS Campus with Julie Burton

00:00:05 Michelle

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how youth thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook and eat delicious, nutritious local foods and schools across the country..

00:00:16 Rick

..And the world! We’re your hosts, I'm Rick Sherman.

00:00:19 Michelle

And I'm Michelle Markesteyn.. and we are so excited to welcome Julie Burton. Hi, Julie.

00:00:24 Julie Burton

Hi, I'm so excited to be here with you today.

00:00:26 Michelle

Oh, thank you. Julie's the Administrator of Farm Lab in California. And Julie. What is Farm Lab?

00:00:32 Rick

And where in California? That's a big state, Michelle.

00:00:35 Michelle

Ohh true OK.

00:00:36 Julie Burton

Is a very big state, we are actually coastal Southern California, so it's 70 and sunny right now, of course.

00:00:42 Michelle

Always. Always.

00:00:42 Julie Burton

Love where we live and it actually provides an amazing climate for year round growing for farm to school.

00:00:48 Rick

You’re in Encinitas? near San Diego?

00:00:50 Julie Burton

Encinitas, CA. Yeah, so we're North San Diego County.

00:00:52 Rick

OK.

00:00:54 Julie Burton It’s a little beach town. Little Beach community, which is really exciting.

00:00:58 Rick

Let's go there. I could use some beach time anytime.

00:01:01 Michelle

We should come visit. I could use some 70s.

00:01:03 Julie Burton

Yeah. Sorry, it's lovely. I'm headed to the beach after this it's great so..

00:01:09 Michelle

But what is happening at Farm Lab? I just love the name and what are you doing? Yeah. What is it?

00:01:14 Julie Burton

Farm Lab is a huge project that is owned and operated by a public school district, which makes this really unique and it's a 10 acre property that houses 2 main components, we have a regenerative organic production farm that grows specifically for the farm to school program. And then we also have the district satellite sustainability campus that serves all 4800 kindergarten through Grade 6 students in our district annually.

00:01:41 Michelle

No one can see this, but Rick's mouth, like his whole mouth is open. His jaw fell open to this.

00:01:44 Rick

I want everyone to back up a second. Did you hear what Julie said? It's a 10 acre production farm owned by the school district. That's so rare these days, and that's our goal. Like every school district should have their own farm and farm to school program. How did that happen at your place? How did how did that come to be?

00:02:07 Julie Burton

So that is a great question and very quick one to clarify, we're A10 acre property. We're only growing on about 2.1 acres because we're using it for other purposes. So just want to clarify, we are not farming 10 acres. That would be big. But how we got this 10 acre property there was a huge housing development built out and the district it was built into the agreement with the city that they had to provide 10 acres of land to the school districts in the event that the addition of all those houses warranted another school be built though the price point of those houses was very high, so it did not serve new families with kindergarten through 6th grade students. So the lot sat empty and it really was a vacant dirt lot that was used for overflow parking by the San Diego Botanic Garden, but is across the street. So it was just a dirt lot, but it was in a beautiful agricultural community, again across from the Botanic Garden. And it got to a point where if the school district did not start using it for educational purposes, they were going to be taxed so heavily that they would have to sell the piece of property. So our former Superintendent would be very green minded, very innovative. We had started dabbling with farm to school on a small scale out of raised beds at one of the school sites that has a one acre farm. He knew he wanted to scale up our farm to school work and also new consistent environmental education was needed one of our pillars was environmental stewardship and health and Wellness. So a property that integrated farm to school and environmental education was a win. So that was kind of the birth place of the idea for farm lab. They broke ground in 2015. And it was a lot of iterations. I will say they started trying farming on their own, then we're asking neighboring farms for help because this initial, the initial director had school garden experience, but running a permanent bed farm is a whole different ball game, so there were just iterations of how are we doing the education? Is it going to be a farm field trip or is it going to be science instruction, so that was the birth place. I don't know how much history you want me to get into before I say like what we're actually doing now out there years later.

00:04:30 Rick

A couple of follow up questions with that and you said it was two 2 1/2 acres of growing space, still- on your website it says you create 10,000 lbs of produce a year. I'm assuming that's.. that's mind boggling that that's really cool and it's organic certified. So many questions like 10,000 lbs is great. Where does all that food go what do you do with it? Why organic? Is it an expensive process to be certified? Why should? Why should a school property think about doing that? So there's a lot in there you can unpack, but I'll go ahead.

00:05:14 Julie Burton

There is a lot to unpack, so I will share. I mean, despite the kind of rough start of trying to figure out how to do what we're doing now, we were the first school district in the nation that owned its own certified organic farms. So our first organic certification was through CF and that was important.

00:05:15 Rick

There you go.

00:05:34 Julie Burton

We wanted the food to go into the central kitchen. It made it a lot easier for her to be able to use our produce when were certified organic. You asked me so many questions, Rick.

00:05:47 Rick

Well, 10,000 lbs.

00:05:49 Julie Burton

Oh yes. So and that is a minimum annually. So I always like to undersell and overdeliver our Max for one year was 24,000 lbs. But that was we had a lot of melon and squash.

00:05:57 Rick

OK. Heavy stuff.

00:06:02 Julie Burton

Because we tried different things over the year to figure out what works. Heavy things. So but minimum of 10,000 lbs. And what we have figured about unlike most farms that just grow seasonally and whatever they grow, they sell, we are beholden to the needs of our central kitchen because we are solely growing all of that produce for the central kitchen in the school district. Everything we grow ends up on school salad bars that are daily fresh school salad bars or in scratch made lunch items. So what we have found we can grow year round or during the school year, I should say all the lettuce and carrots that she needs, which is five to six crates of lettuce a week and three to five crates of carrots. So we have created a crop plan where we know we are seeding every two weeks and then planting 300 seeds of lettuce every two weeks. So we've learned how that works. Lettuce doesn't weigh very much. So we are growing a ton of lettuce. So when you recognize that 10,000 lbs, that is a lot of food and then we do other seasonal produce that can easily go on the salad bar or in a side like cucumbers are online. We're all set for students to come back in August with our lettuce. Remember also during the year we're growing broccoli, we're growing snap peas. We're trying cherry tomatoes this year because there's no prep for the kitchen. We just have to make sure we have the labor to do it. And I think my favorite part of our 10,000 lbs that go to the central kitchen is our large harvest of paste tomatoes in the summer. We obviously don't have students during the summer months, so we trail off our six sessions of lettuce and carrots. So they end at the end of June and then we're planting to make sure they're fired up when students return mid August. But in the summer time, we are farming year round, we try to grow 5000 plus pounds of organic paste tomatoes that the central kitchen roasts and freezes and they use in scratch, made pizza and pasta sauce all year.

00:07:59 Rick

Oh, that's so cool.

00:07:59 Julie Burton

So that's a pretty exciting part of our principal program.

00:08:03 Rick

So. So that's great. The 10,000 and up and plus at the at the low amount 10,000 that's going out to all your kids. How many kids are we talking about? How many schools in your district are you feeding from that?

00:08:16 Julie Burton

So we're just under 5000 students and they are at 9 sites. So we're serving 9 schools all year.

00:08:26 Michelle

This is so in the weeds, but just…

00:08:29 Rick

I get it. Weeds. Yes. It's a school garden episode.

00:08:32 Julie Burton

We're counting farm puns, folks. We're counting them..

00:08:34 Michelle

Counting farm puns. So logistically, how do you get the produce to the school sites? Cuz transportation and distribution is often really one of the barriers to farm to school.

00:08:48 Julie Burton

Well, luckily we are located in the middle of all nine of our school flights and because we have a central kitchen, school, breakfast and lunch has to be delivered to the school sites daily. So we harvest twice a week we harvest on Tuesdays and Fridays and have community volunteer opportunities. We are actually dependent on volunteers. And I will tell you, the community loves to come and harvest food when they know where it's going. So we harvest every Tuesday and Friday morning. It's washed and packed right on site. And when I say packed, it is just right into crates that go into our cold storage that was purchased with a grant.

00:09:13 Michelle

Oh my God.

00:09:26 Julie Burton

And the driver, once you've finished delivering lunch, 1 driver comes to the farm and picks up the harvest and it travels less than 3 miles to the central kitchen and then is put in their cold storage for use. So we're minimizing the district's footprint in many ways with very limited packaging, almost no transportation of this produce. Really, it's pretty incredible program.

00:09:48 Michelle

This is amazing. It's amazing. So that's one part and I know we could probably we could dig into that one more. But and that's the production part. But then there's a second part to Farm Lab right, “dreams.”

00:10:02 Julie Burton

There is that we have the satellite sustainability campus which we have titled Dream, so that same former Superintendent who kind of ideated the whole program, he had created a different acronym for STEM or Stream and he made his dreams because he felt R&D was a key piece of any real world project based learning and design thinking was critical, so dreams that stands for design. Engineering, art, math and science. So when yeah. So all students come out annually and it's not a farm field trip. Like, people assume they're coming out to farm Labs. So of course they're just, like, hanging out on the farm. It's actually robust…

00:10:32 Rick

Oh, how cool.

00:10:47 Julie Burton

..project and place based science education that is grounded in next generation science standards. The UN Sustainability goals and our California environmental principles and concepts. We're literally taking a standard off teachers plates that is sustainability based and we use the farm as a teaching tool to model. An integration of indoor and outdoor education and project and place based learning. I'll give you an example. So the the students are on the farm, each grade level. And of course we want to build that awareness of food systems and we want them to know where their food grows because as we all know, that encourages students to try new foods, eat healthier foods. And they tour the farm each year with a different lens, like our kindergarten unit, and they come in the fall and it's really exciting because our pumpkin patch is almost ready. We do seed it to compost with pumpkins, with our kindergarten. So they come out and they this is their first exposure to, hey, this is where the produce on your salad bars. From they get to go into the pumpkin patch, choose a pumpkin, and they're also learning about composting and sorting waste, which all of our school sites do waste diversion and composting on site, and we hear like, why don't you, like have them doing farming? Doing gardening it's because they only come once a year to farm lab because we are serving 5000 students in each school site, we're so fortunate. Have robust garden programs, so when they're coming to Farm Lab, they're looking at agriculture through a different lens, depending on their units. And I'll go way away from that to our fifth grade unit. Is water wise dreams. So students are learning about the importance of conservation reclamation and reuse of water. We are a drought prone, right? So they're looking when they're on the farm at all the ways where water wise at farm lab, the use of drip irrigation, the use of rain catchment, bioswales and how we've planted native gardens everywhere to kind of bring in pollinators. But then they can also talk about how that's so different than if we planted a lawn.

00:12:43 Michelle

Wow.

00:12:43 Julie Burton

So they are looking at the farm through a different lens each year, depending on what the content is and then as far as bringing that R&D and engineering in. So 5th grade, the day three. And I mean they've done circuits to understand what close. Oh, that's actually 4. So many things, water table looking at reclaimed water under microscopes to understand the need for filtration. Just so many different components and at the end they just learn that if all of our conservation and reclamation work isn't enough in coastal Southern California, our Plan B is the… So on day three they engineer and build functioning desalinators is how that looks. So we're modeling that kind of education for all the visiting teachers and providing project based opportunities for students that are almost too labor intensive for a classroom teacher to do on their own, could they? Yes, absolutely. But is it likely that they'll have the time and resources to do so? No. So we are trying to provide that for all of the teachers in the district and all of the students across the grade.

00:13:53 Rick

For the people in the other parts of the country that aren't in the West, it's important to note that the water comes from Colorado River and it feeds 7 states, including all of Southern California, where all of the bread basket of the nation that feeds a good portion of the world, and that water is a finite supply.

00:14:13 Julie Burton

And all of the lessons have those deep understandings about our resources are scarce, and they won't last forever. If we're not being mindful. I mean, really, the whole idea behind the whole dreams campus is providing students with those real world hands on opportunities to learn that they're options have an impact and that they truly can make a difference by making different choices.

00:14:36 Rick

The people that want to see what your operation looks like, I'll leave a link in the notes page of a video of your place and let me tell you, if you wanted to like, think, how can I design the ultimate most beautiful school garden with art everywhere, and the Dreams campus piece with a wonderful state-of-the-art kitchen that's integrated with Farm Lab and everything. I mean, it is such a beautiful operation. I can't. I'm very jealous. And when I was when I was looking at it, it it's such a neat looking thing.

00:15:14 Julie Burton

I'm glad you mentioned the kitchen space because we have our main campus, which is the board classroom that kids are going to have three educators, we had a complaint of we only get to come once a year. And So what we did is we built out new extra spaces and they are the dill and Rosemary room because they're meant to be the research and design spaces. All of our classrooms have vegetables or our herb wing is our R&D space and the design space is the Nutrition science Lab that has commercial grade equipment, but also all of the materials for five groups of students to do anything that is to table any teacher in our district can sign up to use those spaces. And we have a few champions. We have a kindergarten teacher that comes up and hosts a pop-up restaurant out of that space with her 6th grade buddies and her students are learning about roles and how the community works together. They ideate a whole restaurant concept and when they come, they set it up. They have hosts, they have cashiers. They have servers, they have the little chefs putting things together. We make sure it's a pretty simple menu that they just put it all together, but they're serving and they set up the restaurant on the upper deck. It's just incredible. There's incredible opportunity there for all kinds of project based learning. And in my research room, it's kind of robotics research. There's a whole film set up with a green screen. I'm hoping to do a straight from the Farm Sustainability Podcast run by somebody out of that room and there are robotics and high-powered microscopes that teachers want to come out and test different parts of the soil. There's just we're barely scratching the surface on what we're offering. So it's exciting that we do have those bonus spaces that teachers can be champions and take advantage of the site for their own learning experiences as well.

00:17:00 Michelle

And as you're talking, I'm just in awe again and thinking, you know, we have so many gardens that are limping along or, you know, called the three-year love bubble where there's a lot of excitement and people all come in and they build a garden and it gets going. And then and then two years later, we're doing it again, like…

00:17:17 Rick

Or even more than that, what I'm a parent and I want to start something and looking at your program, you know, how do I get to where you are? Like, how do you start even?

00:17:31 Michelle

Well, how in the world did you make this work?

00:17:37 Julie Burton

So it was definitely one step at a time. It's taken 10 years to see what you see and there were a lot of missteps. But one thing is for sure. You definitely need vision. You definitely need champions, but if you don't have a school district that from the top down is supporting this work and literally willing to put their money where their mouth is. You're not going to be able to have something sustainable that continues to evolve into these really incredible programs so early on we needed to have a grant. We needed buy in, but as everything rolled out and we figured out what our baseline is as far as an education team and a farming staff are we have, we are part of the general budget. If I wanna do above and beyond and expand like cold storage, we wanted cold storage, so we didn't have to hustle to the central kitchen. That was a grant. But as far as baseline operational costs and paper we are a budget line item, so if you want anything to be sustainable, there have to be funding from the top down from the district. That is why I think we've been so successful and we are able to continue to evolve. And as the space has evolved, been incredible. We leased an acre of land to the city, there's a community garden on site. We have these sprawling native gardens and created a courtyard space, and the site has evolved into a just beautiful space, let alone being a campus in a farm and people want to host workshops there and come use the space. So I live a clean San Diego host, an annual sustainability fair at our site. We have environmental film companies that come and use our site to play their environmental film, so we've become this community hub. None of that would be possible if the district wasn't funding the baseline of our site. So I think that is truly the key. There is a second piece though that this programming and all of this would not be possible without key partnerships. So would love to be able to share a bit about those key partnerships that make this work.

00:19:47 Rick

Please.

00:19:48 Julie Burton

All right. So one is transportation because I will tell you if teachers had to get drivers. Ohh, I'm gonna pause. Most states have busing have school buses Southern California. We don't really have school buses. Our district parents have to drive their kids to school. We don't have buses for field trips, nothing. So it's their busing. Kids say to 6th grade camp. It's important because for a lot of people to sort of be…

00:20:04 Rick

Oh really?

00:20:07 Michelle

Good clarification.

00:20:12 Rick

Interesting.

00:20:13 Julie Burton

..A point but like for 6th grade camp it's I think $600 a day to rent a bus that holds 60 students, and we're bringing 65 to 100 students a day. Depending on the size of the school. Because what we do is host one grade level from one school site each day, some of those grade levels come from multiple days in a row, but that we need to bust a lot of students every day. That would have been cost prohibitive because if you require teachers to get parent drivers, you can't require that they come. And this is part of a comprehensive science curriculum in Encinitas, all teachers are required to come now, they're thrilled to come and excited, and they fight for spots and dates. But you know, it wasn't always that way, but having… the best thing was the key piece, so the YMCA offers before and after school care in our district and they, you know, bus students to their school site before school to get them all set. Well, their bus is sat vacant all day. So we talked to them and they wanted to expand their after school programming but didn't have any space. Well, I had 4 classrooms. So in exchange for the use of our four classrooms after school, they bus all 5000 students to their learning engagement at no cost to us. So it's just an MU. No money is exchanged, and now we've been able to expand after school care offering for families because we provided the YMCA additional space.

00:21:27 Michelle

That's brilliant.

00:21:41 Julie Burton

And we had our transportation needs met and bonus. When those bonus spaces were built that I shared about that teachers can sign up to come use if they're learning engagement is 2 1/4 hours or less, we can provide busing for them because one of the YMCA buses will go and pick up an additional class and bring them back to the site for their own learning engagement. So that transportation partnership. The key to making this sustainable and an integral part of science instruction for our district. So that's one, and that's the education side and the other is folks, I'll tell you what we are educators, not farmers. So kind of going back to farming as I rolled in, we partnered with because I'm an educator and I'll give you a little background on me in a second. But we have been dabbling. We weren't having great success with consistency on the farm. So we found a nonprofit organization that that was their Forte. And we partnered. And in exchange for supporting us with the infrastructure build out and the design of the farming part of our property. They were using the acreage we didn't need to meet our minimums for farm to school for themselves, to sell up at their farmers market. Well, shortly after we partnered, they assumed their own farm, but still stuck with us and made sure that we got all of our infrastructure built out. Have our systems going and then the partnership slowly dissolved and I've been independently managing the farm now for three years. But again I am an educator, you know, administrator, instructional leader, not a farmer. So we have leased the 1.1 acre certified land that we don't need to meet our farm to school minimum to an organic flower and herb farm, the owner of which used to be a lead farmer for that nonprofit. So we have a lease agreement with them for that property and I have a consultant agreement up into the amount of their lease in which they will support my farm team and empower my farm team when they need collaboration or troubleshooting, they support us with our monthly crop planning meetings to make sure we have a really comprehensive view of what's happening and don't misstep. So it's magical. My farm team has support. We are having many, many pollinators attracted to our site and they're beautifying space, so it's just a win, win, win and having them on site has made this manageable for someone who isn't a farmer to successfully manage a regenerative organic production farm so that partnership is key and having consulting is key. If you're a school district and not, you know, super-versed in farming. That consultant piece has been a game changer and having them on site is just the most beautiful reciprocal partnership I could imagine.

00:24:38 Rick

Well, thanks for sharing that. Thanks for listing your partners Julie and Wow. I can't. I'd love to jump down there and visit, you know, wish you were closer. So Julie, thank you for that. It sounded very good. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us before we leave for the day?

00:24:56 Julie Burton

I feel like this will work matters more than anything that we're doing in education. It really does, as we're building awareness of food systems and increasing the health and Wellness of our students, we are also mitigating climate change by how we're growing food for student lunches.

00:25:16 Rick

Oh, OK, how so?

00:25:18 Julie Burton

Regenerative AG, it's obviously any organic. You're not putting pesticides on your food regenerate organic principles like no till use of cover crop, crop rotation, really building biodiversity. It builds the soil and leaves it better than you started, and it allows it to sequester far higher levels of carbon than traditional farming methods. So we're literally able to offset our district's carbon footprint by the way we're growing school lunch.

00:25:50 Michelle

That's extraordinary.

00:25:52 Julie Burton

So how we're growing matters just as much as what we're growing.

00:25:55 Michelle

And with that, Julie Burton, I feel that we are better off having spent this time with you on the podcast and really just appreciate you and all your partners and consultants and folks doing great work in the world. Thank you.

00:26:13 Julie Burton

Thank you. Happy to share.

00:26:14 Rick

And thanks everybody for tuning in today.

00:26:17 Michelle

Farm to school was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn, with production support from Leanne Locker of Oregon State University. This podcast was made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:26:30 Rick

The content and ideas of the farm to school podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, and the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA, Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:26:49 Michelle

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episode show notes and our contact information by Googling Farm to school podcast, OSU.

00:26:58 Rick

Thank you everybody for tuning in. Yeah, please stop by Michele's website that she just said and drop us a line or give us give us an idea for a future podcast.

00:27:08 Michelle

We'd love that!

00:27:09 Michelle

And thanks again Julie for connecting and sharing your story.

00:27:12 Julie Burton

You are so welcome. It was great to be here.

00:27:17 Rick

All right. Thanks everybody. We will see you next time.