Sonya Brown
Fellowship Report 2024: A Recipe for Composting and Community
“Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of our capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship.”
—----James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small
Summary
For two weeks in August, I worked on Native Earth Teaching Farm in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard. Under the wisdom and guidance of Rebecca Randall Gilbert, the farm’s owner along with her husband Randy, and the watchful eye of Freckles, the matriarch ewe, I picked beans, harvested indigo leaves, fed guinea fowl, talked to sheep, herded ducks, chased after goats and had goats chase after me (that is, when we weren’t doing yoga together). But mostly what I did was connect to community through stories.
Each day, Rebecca started our session sitting on the farm stand porch sharing stories from the farm’s twenty year history. Most often, as we sat there, someone would drop by on an unscheduled visit for a bit of the harvest or to pet the animals, and would end up sharing a story or two of their own. In this way, I learned of Rebecca Amos, a woman born in Guinea, West Afrika, enslaved in the mid-18th century and brought to Martha’s Vineyard where she “made history by alerting colonialists to the British landing on the shores of the Island during the War of Independence, earning her the title of the “Black Paul Revere” and “defied expectations by owning property—a rare achievement for enslaved individuals” (“Rebecca the Woman of Africa: Celebrating a Trailblaze in Island History).
I returned to the farm on October 6 to attend a community celebration and unveiling of a sculpture of Rebecca Amos that is now permanently installed at Native Earth Teaching Farm as part of the African American Heritage Trail on Martha’s Vineyard.]
And of course, I learned how Rebecca and Randy make their blue-ribbon award-winning compost. Rebecca shared the compost recipe which combines the farm’s food and yard waste with a variety of manure from the farm’s animals. Along with the recipe, she explained the extended process of building up a well-balanced pile, periodically turning it over to aerate while it “cooks” for a year or more to become compost ready for use. Finally, she showed me their then three main piles of compost, each at a different stage of the process.
Rebecca Gilbert (l) and me with our day’s bean harvest.
Learning the composting system at Native Earth was my main project objective, with the ultimate goal of starting a pre-composting program at BAA. However, I gained much more. From my experience at the farm, I gleaned two key takeaways for my teaching: an affirmation of the immense community-building power of story and knowledge of the local, historic heroine, Rebecca Amos. Moreover, the experience directly impacted my personal practice of composting. At home, I’ve now figured out a composting system—based on the one I learned from Rebecca, but on a much smaller scale—that, so far, seems to be on its way to producing quality compost without devolving into a smelly mess. At school, I’ve connected with the head of the Kitchen Team and the Custodial Crew, and we are now in the process of developing the pre-composting system for our school community that will help take us one more step toward sustainability and fighting global warming.
Compost from the “ready to use” pile at Native Earth Teaching Farm on Martha’s Vineyard
How have your knowledge, skills, and capabilities grown?
I’ve always connected frequently and deeply with nature. Most often this has been through camping, hiking, and gardening. However, I’d never spent time working on a farm. At Native Earth Teaching Farm, I spent hours spiritually and physically connecting to a variety of plants including three different types of beans, several kinds of herbs, and my favorite root vegetable, garlic. From working with the plants, I gained practical skills such as making dye from fresh indigo leaves and harvesting crops in a way to generate more growth. However, it was connecting to the animals that led to a kind of growth I hadn’t anticipated.
Amid the weeding, harvesting and preparation of plants, every day at the farm I also connected with the animals. I fed the fowl, played with the yearling goats, watched the ducks preen themselves and each other, and listened to the heartfelt bleating of sheep. Other than hanging out with our cats at home, I’d never before spent so much time with animals. As a result, my awareness of the connectedness of “all creatures great and small” and their “humanity” increased.
Hanging out with Smore the G.O.A.T
What is the greatest personal accomplishment of your fellowship? How would you describe to a friend the most fundamental ways in which your fellowship has changed your personal and/or professional perspective?
A few days before I arrived at Native Earth, one of the does on the farm had given birth. Unfortunately, one of her kids was sickly; she was the runt of the litter and was not thriving. Although Rebecca took steps to help the doe strengthen her kid, sadly, the baby goat died. After that, it seemed to me that the mom and her siblings were in mourning. Witnessing the impact of their loss on them, and the community around them, including me even though I had been there a short while, helped me realize that it’s important to spend time, not just in nature, but connecting with nature. It helped me realize, it is important to heal our planet because it is not just we humans who are the inhabitants and inheritors of the earth. It is all of us, great and small. My world(view) has been enriched and enlarged. For me, this expansion of my perspective is also the greatest personal accomplishment of the fellowship.
Are there issues or challenges in your school, community or the world that you feel better prepared to address with your students? What are your plans to work collaboratively with colleagues?
According to BPS, “Food waste is estimated to account for more than 35% of the total waste exiting the 119 Boston Public Schools.” To reduce that number, BPS began to pilot a food waste collection system for composting in select schools. Last year, BAA was supposed to be one of those schools. However, at the time there were barriers to implementing it. This year, some folks from the Kitchen Crew, the Custodial Crew, the students’ community service club and I have decided to form the Composting Crew and collaborate to gradually roll out the initiative at BAA. We’ve designed a system that will capture the food waste from the kitchen this year and expand next year to capture the food waste from students during breakfast and lunch.
As a result, in what ways will your instructional (or other) practice change? How will your experience positively impact student learning in new ways?
Even though my project was focused on making change at the whole school level, much of the work of creating a culture of composting could start inside the classroom. Currently, once a week in my humanities classes, I show students “acts of kindness” videos from around the world. The goal is to help students recognize their connection to the human family across country and construct. Because of my Pat Cooke Fellowship experience on the farm, I have expanded the videos to include animals, both domesticated, and within their natural habitat. Now, my goal has expanded to helping students develop a more expansive understanding of the value of the earth beyond a human-centered perspective. With that view, I hope students begin to see themselves as stewards of the earth, and that putting their food waste in the composting bin instead of the trash bin is one simple, but incredibly impactful and meaningful act of stewardship.
Harvested indigo leaves, skeins of naturally dyed yarn, and a sculpture of Rebecca Amos all find a home at Native Earth Teaching Farm.