Culinary Arts & Vertical Farming: Creating New Career Pathways For Students

Written By: Briana Zagami, Media Strategist at Agritecture

Editor’s note: The following information is derived from an interview Agritecture conducted with Julie Buisson, Business Operations Manager at SpringForward.  

PHILLIPS Programs is a private, nonprofit organization serving over 500 children and their families annually in the Washington metropolitan area. The PHILLIPS School - Laurel is a school that caters to students with emotional and behavioral health needs. Their specialized education program offers highly individualized learning environments, social skills training, individualized and integrated related services including counseling, speech and language therapy, occupational and physical therapy, career and technical education curricula, and authentic job opportunities in the community, along with crisis prevention through a strengths-based approach.

PHILLIPS decided to incorporate an indoor farm at their Laurel school in order to expose students to the different forms of hydroponic growing and expand their skill sets by training them on how to grow crops and manage an indoor farm.

Their 500 square foot hydroponic farm is located directly across the hall from their culinary kitchen, allowing the students to learn to cook with what they grow. “We strive to offer a holistic approach to food and nutrition by taking participants on a journey from seed to plate. We also incorporate elements of entrepreneurship by selling a small portion of what we grow to some local restaurants in Baltimore,” says Julie Buisson, Business Operations Manager at SpringForward. 

Building a farm in conjunction with a culinary arts kitchen allowed PHILLIPS to take their students on the entire seed-to-plate experience. “It highlighted the importance of teaching students not just how to eat but how to grow. It allowed for a holistic approach to nutrition. It is also a growing industry that allows for future work opportunities for some of our graduating students,” Buisson explains.  

After connecting with Agritecture’s CEO, Henry Gordon-Smith, Julie Buisson began discussing ways to implement an engaging career and technical education (CTE) opportunity for her students. “We felt the convergence of the career pathways, ability to see results quickly (growing microgreens) and an emerging industry made it intriguing enough to pilot,” Buisson said. These aspects propelled PHILLIPS to add hydroponics to the early science curriculum. It evolved from there to become a CTE program where students earn CTE credit, from there the culinary arts program was added.

Agritecture supported PHILLIPS by producing a development of the concept that included sample crop lists and associated yield estimates, sample growing system selection, initial economic estimates (CAPEX, OPEX, ROI), farm layout and visual renderings, as well as a site selection checklist. “Agritecture was one of the only firms that specialized in this kind of work. They had the right team to do the work and were committed to investing in it for the long term,” said Buisson. 

“One of the main challenges was understanding the right farm design for us, the scale of the growing area, and how much produce we could grow. Additionally, we weren’t sure what was required from our end to upkeep the farm,” said Buisson.

Yara Nagi, Director of Operations at Agritecture explains, “Like any other project, this was more about understanding the challenges that come with expansion and the increased costs/general logistics.”

On the educational front, PHILLIPS wanted to make sure that the students were going to benefit from this project and learn practical skills on how to grow. “While we have a skilled staff and curriculum, at the time, we weren’t too familiar with the basics of hydroponics.  So, we wanted to work with Agritecture to help us incorporate Controlled Environment Agriculture into our current Science classes or after school programs.” Working with Agritecture allowed PHILLIPS to understand a sense of output expectations within a certain farm size. 

Visible benefits of this curricular addition for students include “an increased willingness to incorporate fresh produce into their diet, an increased desire to try new flavors and unknown herbs,” and “more willingness to regulate their emotions in order to participate in farming/culinary class than other classes,” according to Buisson.

“The most unique and interesting element was the intent to create a social enterprise model that gave the staff ownership over a portion of the farm,” said Nagi. 

This project started out as a small pilot farm in an educational institution and now is being planned to become something much bigger that will benefit a lot of communities with behavioral health needs and developmental disabilities. The success of their program has allowed them to look into an expansion to create a commercial-scale farm operating on a social enterprise model.

FURTHER READING:

PHILLIPS AND AGRITECTURE PARTNER FOR A BETTER FUTURE

VERTICAL HARVEST PAIRS INNOVATION WITH AN UNDERSERVED POPULATION

FARMS NOT ARMS TACKLES THE REFUGEE AND FOOD SECURITY CRISES