We Teach What You Can't Learn On-Line

First Year Student, Lucy, contemplates the best stems to trellis in a tangle of tomato vines. Trellised properly and consistently, tomatoes can contribute a significant revenue stream for beginning farm businesses.

At the Organic Farm School, we know that there are so many ways to gather information about how to grow food. In a world that is changing as rapidly as ours is, that’s a very good thing. Information is important.

However, when it comes to owning and/or managing a community-scaled farm, the window of time between learning and a make-or-break farm business is brutally short. That is why we have always focused our training program on experiential learning in the midst of our working Farm.

Academic courses and on-line learning can absolutely be part of the overall educational experience for farmers. In fact, we may one day add a few on-line courses of our own on the more technical aspects of growing food. BUT we have seen how an imbalance between “information” and “experience” can lead to an inability to make decisions in real time on the farm. We’ve seen how too many ideas can lead to “analysis paralysis” in the field. And we’ve seen how following a single philosophical approach to farming can be financially catastrophic for those just beginning their career.

That is why we teach what you can’t learn on-line.

Over the course of a training season, students learn how to work as a team even when no one feels like it. They learn to ignore early season weed management at their own peril — and then learn how to make the tough decisions around fighting established weeds in what should have been a profitable carrot bed or turning in that bed (with all of the time and money invested in it) to start over again. They learn that while the crop plan looks great in an Excel spreadsheet, the weather doesn’t pay any attention to our plans, and that a wet spring that goes on too long can wreak havoc with your cash-flow.  As they work through hundreds of planting successions, they learn how to think critically and quickly about how to best use tillage for benefit rather than harm. In between such things, they learn how to evaluate when a day should end at 5, and when an extra hour today will ultimately save a full day tomorrow.

In other words, the most important things we teach can’t always be conveyed in an Instagram post or a YouTube video. They require the “heat of the moment” and the wise guidance of a skilled farmer.

If you’ve been picking up summer farm jobs and think you’re ready to call yourself a farmer, check us out. Jump into the deep end of planning, decision-making, prioritizing and pivoting with the OFS as your guide . We are certainly in the midst of a continuum of learning opportunities, but we think we offer something deeply valuable…we can help you avoid very costly 1st-5th year farming mistakes and work with you to chart a path to long-term farming success by teaching what you can’t learn on-line.