Farm Field Trips – Planting the Seeds of Lifelong Learning

Each fall and spring, participants from farm to school programs across the nation walk, ride, and bus their way to the farms that they have been learning about all year. Here in the heart of Massachusetts, students from Mass. Farm to School’s Worcester Kindergarten Initiative enjoy their spring field trip at Community Harvest Project, a nonprofit farm in nearby North Grafton that relies on volunteer labor and donates its produce to the Worcester County Food Bank. As the yellow school buses rumble onto the gravel driveway, students’ shrieks of excitement are already audible from the barn. Clearly, these kindergartners and others are thrilled to visit a farm. But besides providing students with a fun outing, why should we encourage schools to participate in these field trips?

In today’s mainstream academic environment, learning takes place predominantly through reading, listening, and writing rather than by actively doing. Activities that facilitate learning through engagement, experience, and exploration are more and more frequently being replaced by lessons that cater to standardized expectations. The current lack of emphasis on hands-on learning is having a detrimental impact on students by eliminating the components that ignite the spark to learn — excitement and interest.

Current research heavily supports the benefits of experiential learning, especially in its ability to increase understanding and improve the retention of both lessons and behaviors (Lynch, 2012). Farm field trips are an excellent way to provide students with an experience that engages all of their senses and piques their curiosity in the subjects that are frequently accused of being “boring” — the natural sciences, technology, engineering, and math. These visits are bursting with opportunities for students to make classroom connections in a real-world setting that lends itself to extending the power of the concept. For example, a study in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition (conducted by Joshi, Azuma, and Feenstra,2008) found that, before a farm trip, only 33% of students could accurately explain where food comes from. After visiting a farm, 88% of the group was able to provide a correct response to the question. Another post-farm trip group demonstrated a 40% increase in their understanding of how food travels from field to table (Joshi, Azuma, and Feenstra, 2008).

In addition to increasing conceptual understanding, researchers believe that students who engage in field trips featuring experiential learning components are more likely to take part in similar behaviors and experiences outside of the school day (Greene, Kisida, and Bowen, 2014). Farm to school programs such as Mass. Farm to School’s Kindergarten Initiative strive to instill healthy behaviors in students during their early childhood experience. They encourage strong nutritional habits, trying new foods, understanding community, and connecting to the local food environment, all within an academic setting. What better way to provide a capstone to this learning than a trip to the farm, where students are able to see a full year of concepts in action?

Farm field trips are where we, as program coordinators, educators, farmers, parents, and caregivers can see it all come together — as well as a catch a glimpse of how a student’s new ideas and behaviors might extend into the future. We witness the light bulb turn on when a student who has been learning about the stages of plant growth sees a tiny seedling for the first time, the simple joy a kindergartner experiences when running her hands through soft soil, the excitement of a parent or caregiver who asks if he might return to the farm to volunteer with his child, and the careful decision a self-proclaimed vegetable-hater makes to taste her newly-planted cherry tomatoes when they grow.

On the farm, abstract ideas can become tangible. Whether this experiential learning is focused on a complicated scientific concept or on the straightforward motion of planting a seedling, education that engages the full child can promote long-lasting appreciation, understanding, and connection to education, community, and the environment.  So let’s go get our hands dirty!