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Ohio Voices in Education | Igniting Ideas, Inspiring Change
Season 2 of The Conversation is here! This season we’ll be exploring themes that will keep you informed, excited, and engaged —with a new twist, several of our episodes will include a student’s perspective. Listen along this fall as we ignite ideas and inspire change.
Trevor Horn:
The problem is is affordability, really when you look at it. Everybody likes to throw around the term organic, but at the end of the day, is it affordable for everybody? Our goal is to try to close the gap on that.
Rachel Daniels:
That was Trevor Horn, Director of the Mid-Ohio Food Collective. And on this episode, he'll share about his work at the Mid-Ohio Farm Center and their mission to ensure equal access to fresh food for Central Ohioans. Let's dive in.
John Hambrick:
Hello, and welcome back to The Conversation. I am grateful to be alongside my co-host Rachel Daniels with the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio. And again, my name is John Hambrick, and we are very grateful to continue these dynamic conversations. And today, holy cow, we've got Trevor Horn with us. Trevor is the Farm Director at the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, and he has got some just incredible things happening.
So Trevor, we're just going to start right in. Can you tell us about the exciting things happening at the Mid-Ohio Farm Center and how that fits in with the overall arching goals of the Mid-Ohio Food Collective?
Trevor Horn:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, John, for having me. I'm really excited to be a part of this podcast. We've got really some exciting things going on. Talking about the Collective in general, there's just a couple ideas of the direction that people might have a misconception on of the local area. About a year ago, the title has changed from the Mid-Ohio Food Bank to the Mid-Ohio Food Collective because we've actually decided to focus on five different pillars.
So the first pillar is the food bank system, things that have been in place since 198., so almost 43 years now has the Collective been working on supporting the community and helping feed the area. We also have the pharmacy, which is focused on healthcare. We've got the kitchen, so we're doing school lunches for students, as an example. In the summertime, breakfast, lunch, and getting out to the communities for some of the retired folks as well. And then, we've got markets where people can actually come through and they're treating it like it would be a grocery store concept. And then, last but not least, what my main responsibility is for, is the farm pillar.
So you mentioned the farm and its perspective of the area we're working on, the west side of the city of Columbus. And the cool thing about this is, is that it's an urban growing setting, so we have seven acres in that one specific area. We also farm 2.7 acres behind NBC4 News Studio, just off Olentangy. And at our headquarters themselves, we've got education gardens that are designed for demonstration to help support people either learning how to grow in their homes or teaching teachers how to teach it in the classroom. So a lot of arms that branch out throughout the community. For us, the main focus is definitely growing and agriculture.
Rachel Daniels:
Trevor, could you talk to us a little bit about what your vision is for the farm over the next few years?
Trevor Horn:
Yes. So we've got some really great plans in the works actually happening as we speak, but we honed in on four different aspects of focus where we want to really support the community. The first one obviously, from a farming standpoint, is production. How much food can we grow? Our motto here at the collective is, "Make every acre count" as far as agriculture is concerned, and we're doing our best to maximize our yield and production to help support what those markets look like. So all the food that we grow does go into the pantries. It helps support the kitchens themselves, and it just closes the gaps between the distance the food travels from the farm to the table.
The second aspect of that we hone in on is sustainability. So we can grow food, but can we grow good, more nutritionally dense food? And we partner with our pharmacy pillar on this aspect just to make sure that we can start talking to people a little bit more about why they're eating those specific foods, why, for example, a head of lettuce is a better purchase as opposed to buying canned green beans, let's say as an example.
So we're really focusing on the nutrition piece, but the sustainability pillar is how it's raised. So we've got a you-pick orchard that's being planted as we speak, and it really talks about the idea that we can close the gap again between how far that food travels to the table of our surrounding neighbors. At NBC4, we've got Riverview International Center, which is a partnership for new Americans. And those individuals have access to a community garden, which we've developed over this fall, and they'll have access to those you-pick orchards as well.
We're looking at growing in the ground more frequently, and that means we have to build our soil, so we hone in on the microbiomes and the science behind how we can better provide those nutritionally dense foods. The better we take care of the soil, the better the end product is as far as produce is concerned. So that touches it a little bit.
We talk about water usage, and we also focus a little bit on how we can compost and regenerate our soil using scraps to keep food out of the landfill. They say 40% of our food is wasted across the country. We hope to capture that, and at least minimum feed people with that 40% of waste, but actually feed our soil and that in turn making us a little bit more sustainable as far as not having to buy fertilizers and things of that sort.
A major aspect of it is outreach, too. It's bringing people around in the community to help support the growth and the idea that agriculture can be studied and it's always evolving. So outreach for us is incorporating local companies. We're actually working together with Ohio Earth Foods, which is a local organic soil amendment company. And we're really partnering together in our warehouse division with Earth Peaks Organics, which is a aerobic digesting, composting company right out of Dublin. They're going to capture our food scraps, and last year there was roughly a million pounds of food that went to the landfill. This year we plan on capturing that food waste, sending it over to Earth Peaks Organics. They'll make compost for us in less than 24 hours, and then we'll utilize it on our farm. So we're really closing the gap between the food waste piece and focusing on that sustainability pillar.
Most important to us is education. So for us, yes, we can produce food and we can get a certain amount of poundage, what that looks like as we expand and grow in our growing spaces, but what's the learning process behind it. Right? We plan to incorporate opportunities for learning not only to support biodiversity in these specific spaces in our soil, but also pollinator-friendly areas. We're teaching about the idea that there is such an important aspect of making those good choices with food and how it impacts our environment. Across the board, the idea is, is if we can get as many people involved, the more we learn, the better we are at it, and the more precise we are at utilizing our natural resources to be better environmental stewards.
Rachel Daniels:
My brain is filled with so many follow-up questions, but I'm going to land on this one. Unlike my colleague John, who's been to your sites including the farm and Channel 4, and has sort of been able to see these masterpieces in person, could you give me and our listeners just a visual description of what we might see when we come to the farm, what a person might expect sort of as they pull up? And I hear you have some unique structures and sort of points of interest, so I just want to give a moment for you to give us some descriptions to paint a picture for our listeners.
Trevor Horn:
Absolutely. So out at our Mid-Ohio farm on the hilltop, we've got that seven acres that I mentioned earlier. As you park in our parking structure, you'll walk in through the main multipurpose building. Inside that multipurpose building is a wide open space. People keep asking me through construction, "What is your approach? What are your plans?" In my mind, I like to envision a nature center, in our minds of focusing on the idea behind horticulture, but horticulture based on food production. So there'll be many different ways in the landscaping that we can identify perennial plants, native species, and edible growing, and it'll be right on the forefront in some of those parking spots. We've had discussions about putting fruit trees in the parking lot. We're planning and mapping that out with our landscaping design team, and my team at the farm will be able to support that aspect of making sure people see things grown for the first time potentially in their lives, especially in an urban setting.
So inside that multipurpose building, we'll have 10 different learning stations that we've designed and set up specifically to the idea of environmental stewardship as I had mentioned. There will be a station where people can learn about soil. There'll be a station where they can learn about water quality, air quality, and composting, vermicomposting potentially, and then focus on pollinators throughout the space.
We are working on a grant currently that will allow us to develop a mobile science lab, and working together with the Corn & Wheat Association and the Soy Council through education projects, grow NextGen and Feed the World. We're working on being able to teach people not only the agriculture piece, but why those large commodity agriculture practices are important as far as ethanol creation, livestock feed, and potentially other opportunities for biofuel. So we'll be working on some workshops there to incorporate learning.
We also have a demonstration kitchen that is a replica of people's homes so that they can come in and learn more about how to cook specific items. For example, we might teach them how to make pasta from scratch and then utilize the tomatoes they grow to make a sauce or pizza sauce or whatever they might choose to create so that they are actually learning how to eat nutritionally dense food that tastes good at the same time.
Once you walk out of our main multipurpose building, there'll be an event space. Throughout the area, again will be perennial and native species landscaping, mostly edible as long as we can support in that space in an urban setting is our goal. You'll see a couple different growing systems. There's a Verti-Gro tower, which will allow you to grow 20 heads of lettuce in a foot-by-foot square radius. We also have another innovative concept coming to the table called GardenSoxx, which is a compost filled stocking that will allow us to use 70% less water and grow higher nutritionally dense foods while testing the soil and being able to be precise with its additives.
To the left when you walk in, which would be on the east side of the property, we have three very large greenhouses that will be focused on future farming practices with controlled environmental systems, so hydroponics, some aeroponics, and other smart ways that we can use technology and teach technology to be better and more precise growers. We've got three high tunnels, which are outside growing areas that allow us to extend our growing season a little further, which we'll be experimenting in with other more innovative growing processes as well.
So it's an exciting space. There's a lot of opportunity there, and as we grow through the next couple of years of phases, we're hoping to create better partnerships with the community, invite everybody from the West Side of the city in the particular area to either help support from a volunteer standpoint or just come out and learn and have a nice clean, safe environment for everybody to kind of just collaborate and get a chance to meet one another.
Rachel Daniels:
That sounds fantastic. And John, you have to take me with you on your next trip out. Okay?
John Hambrick:
Absolutely. And Trevor, holy cow, you're laying a really great picture of what educators, students, community members are going to experience when they come out to the farm, so thanks for laying that out. And you've got a lot of excitement around how you're engaging with the community. I'm kind of curious, between the three different areas that the farm is impacting, is there a particular obstacle that you had to overcome to make sure that you can get to where you're at today? And then, how is that going to positively impact our students, our educators, and our community members?
Trevor Horn:
That's a great question. Every day there are a multitude of hurdles as we go through. I think just like anyone could tell you who's been a part of STEM or STEAM-type learning, where innovation is in the forefront of it, anytime you're creating something from scratch, there's no model, right? So from my perspective, in my vision, there's always going to be hiccups along this run. And I tell my team this frequently, it's like, "Enjoy the journey, because there's going to be all kinds of bumps. And we'll obtain some bruises and we're going to have to sway in different directions, whether it's funding from certain aspects of things or whether it's getting people to understand why this is important, right?"
Traditionally on that West Side, people were expecting lower-income housing or affordable homes for them to live. And when they found out that we were turning it into a farm, I think it might've ruffled some feathers in that specific area. Lately, we've been working with other groups and hosting meetings to talk about why this is important. So ultimately, at the end of the day, when you talk about challenges and hurdles, it's our food system in a state that it's in currently at this point in time.
I won't vilify fast food restaurants or anything along the lines of that because they create jobs. But accessibility has sort of tricked the American consumer, and at the end of the day, producers give the consumers what they ask for and where they're spending their money. The goal here, and the biggest hurdle to us if you ask me, is to make sure that people understand why it's valuable, why we need to keep continuing to focus on agriculture and bettering agriculture practices, right? As population increases, as we're at 8 billion right now and it's skyrocketing towards 10 billion by 2050, we have to figure out ways where people are going to live in a spot where we're going to provide houses and then where we're going to grow our food, right?
So the challenge really is to get the general consumer to understand the importance of this, knowing that making better choices with food will ask producers to give them better choices of food as opposed to convenient-based foods.
The problem is, is affordability really, when you look at it. Everybody likes to throw around the term organic, but at the end of the day, is it affordable for everybody? Our goal is to try to close the gap on that. We're not planning on saying we're organic growing, we're going to say as organic as possible. And that means that we're focusing on, again, water quality, focusing on our insecticides and pesticides that are used in the growing process, and making sure that we're just really providing environmental safe practices of growing nutritionally dense foods. And what that looks like, it could be tomatoes, it could be cucumbers, it could be lettuce, greens that we're getting down pretty well. We're going to throw strawberries out there. Our apple orchards will all be focused on soil biomes.
And again, the real problem is, is getting the general public to understand that we have to make some changes. So the only way, in my opinion, we can do that is through education. It's starting children off at a young age, knowing that a tomato from the garden tastes much better than the tomato from the grocery store. Same way with strawberries. If they like strawberries, you should taste the ones that grow out of our GardenSoxx, as we focus on the soil to make sure that they are the most nutritionally dense and they're the sweetest based off the glucose levels that can be created by supporting the biome, right? All super science stuff that we aim to teach people about, but the most important thing, and I can't emphasize it enough, is educating the communities of why this matters.
John Hambrick:
That's amazing. Thank you. I cannot wait to taste those strawberries, I'm just telling you right now. But I'm grateful that you're here and you were able to utilize this platform to broaden the educational component of this. Rachel?
Rachel Daniels:
So Trevor, we're coming to the spot in our podcast where we're nearing the end, and I want to wrap this up with a call to action. I just can hear sort of that impassioned plea in what you just shared with us around the value of students and adults and all stakeholders really understanding where food comes from, the value of food, the value in having knowledge around growing our own food, and just sort of having a more broad understanding around this such important necessity in our lives. So could you wrap us up by talking to us about what ways schools can get involved in this project?
Trevor Horn:
Absolutely. At the Collective, we believe food is health. So we could start from school cafeterias and supporting what growth might look like in looking to know that students eat there twice a day at minimum, whether it's their own school lunches or whether it's breakfasts that were provided at the school or from home, right? So that is one aspect, that one thing that everybody in education and every person has in common is the food piece.
We look forward to hosting field trips potentially as we get set up later in the spring at the end of the school year, but then looking at some summer programming being created as well. We don't just want to focus on sticking around in our facility. We plan to take our show on the road, so we are working on a five-day program or opportunities for our team to outreach in the winter months specifically when we're growing less.
We're looking for partnerships for each of our farms techs to be in a classroom once a week, minimally, throughout the of end of November, end of December, and January, just because it's the right thing to do as far as starting to build connections with the students. In my six years of teaching post-kitchens, my students can only listen to me so much, right? It's always nice to bring somebody else into the picture who is in the field, who is an industry professional that can provide those students with opportunities to learn about not only careers, but the science that goes into the agriculture fields. Anywhere we can implement agriculture into a biology class, into environmental science, a physics, a chemistry class, you'd be surprised how it all links together. And that's our aspect, is how can we teach teachers as well to teach ag in their schools as much as we can?
There is such a big gap between the idea of where their food comes from and actually it hitting the table. In my prior life in kitchens before education, part of my role was to do some recruiting and build teams and kitchens. And I would ask people specific questions like, "Where would you source your spinach from?" And they'd be like, "The back of the truck," right? I'm like, "Well, where does it come from?" Right? And these are aspiring chefs and culinarians, so to me it's like, "Do you know that spinach farmer? Do you know what part of the country it comes from? Do you know if it even comes from our country?"
And so, that is just a huge piece. If you go to the farmer's market, you have direct face-to-face contact with who is growing your food. And not a lot of people do that these days. There are a lot of people who are trying to, but cost and the supply and demand chain, going to a grocery store is much more convenient. And there's no face that comes with that spinach. There's no face to the protein cuts of meat that we get in the butcher's section.
So for me, if we can really outreach as much as we can, it would be to take the show on the road, to get into classrooms, just implement and support teachers. Teachers need a lot of support. That's an understatement, especially on this podcast. But there's so much that can be done that's outside, but actually fits into objectives of curriculum, right? Agriculture is the connecting piece. It connects all four aspects of major curriculum between English, science, history, and math, right? They're all involved with food in some aspect, so if we can close the dots and start collaboration as much as possible, that is what we're really aiming to do.
Rachel Daniels:
Trevor, I think the underpinning that you are sharing that keeps circulating in my head is that what food means for me is hope. And when you're teaching these lessons about food to students, you're bringing hope for the future. And for that reason, I just find the work you're doing to be so uplifting.
We want to thank you. John and I want to thank you for joining us here today on The Conversation. All of the resources that are mentioned will be linked in our podcast description. Thanks to our listeners for joining in with us, and we hope that you will continue to follow our journey here on The Conversation. Thanks, everyone.