Nice Roots Farm-to-School Module 2: Growing from Seed to Harvest
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We’re closing out Farm-to-School Month by sharing the next installment of Nice Roots’ Farm-to-School curriculum: Growing from Seed to Harvest. You can check out Module 1 here: Food Justice, Land Sovereignty and Deconstructing the Food System.
The resources in this series are meant for anyone who wants to learn more about food justice, environmental justice, and nutrition & wellness.
Module 2: Growing from Seed to Harvest
When students visit Nice Roots Farm to learn about growing food from seed to harvest, they start by discussing how growing their own food can be an act of food justice, and things to consider when sourcing food ethically and sustainably. Then, based on what is in season during their trip, students dive into learning more about a specific plant family. The module wraps up with a hands-on activity like seed starting or food tasting that supports students in deepening their relationship to their food, nutrition and the land.
What—and why—we grow at Nice Roots
Growing our own food is an act of resistance in an inequitable food system.
| Crop / Plant | Season |
|---|---|
| Cold Weather Crops | Fall (Sept – Nov) & Spring (March – May) |
| Warm Weather Crops | Summer (June – August) |
| Herbs | Year-round |
| Edible Flowers | Year-round |
| Fruit & Nut Trees | Year-round |
When we grow our own crops—especially in cities like Philadelphia where an estimated 15% of people lack access to fresh, whole foods—we are working to create improved access to healthy foods, support community health, and expand the variety of food available. Growing food close to us allows the same people who are growing and eating the food to keep track of how their food is grown and the conditions in which it is grown as well. Through the process of growing our own food, we can decide what we add to our soil and root system to help our plants grow. We also then have access to free produce that Nice Roots distributes back to the community at no cost–a very intentional act of food justice.
Considerations for Growing and Sourcing Ethically: The Immokalee Farmworkers’ Fight for Fair Food
When students visit the farm during tomato season, the Immokalee, Florida tomato farmers’ struggle for fair wages and working conditions is presented as a case study of how unjust conditions in our food system affect all of us, and how these conditions can be changed for the better through collective action.
Most of the tomatoes sold in the U.S. are grown in California, Florida, Texas, and Mexico, which means most of the tomatoes available year-round in grocery stores are shipped long distances to get to Pennsylvania.
Immokalee, Florida is known as the tomato capital of the United States. Tomatoes are grown here in very large fields, with hundreds of farmers working alongside each other to plant, tend, and harvest thousands of tons of tomatoes year-round. For decades, tomato farmers in Immokalee and other communities were paid only 40-45 cents per 32-pound bucket of harvested tomatoes. To make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, tomato farm workers had to pick 5,500 pounds of tomatoes per day.
Beyond being paid shockingly inadequate wages and experiencing physically taxing working conditions, many farmworkers in Florida were also subjected to serious harassment and human rights abuses in their work environments. Beginning in 1993, tomato farmers in the U.S. from Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti united with other allies to fight against the large corporations who support, enact and promote these atrocities, and as a result developed the Fair Food Program. Formalized in 2011, the Fair Food Program is an agreement that increases farmworker wages, improves working conditions, and uses market pressure to push buyers large and small to purchase ethical tomatoes and other crops.
The stories of the human rights abuses farmworkers face and their resistance to the oppressive conditions of for-profit farming in the U.S. are the stories of how our inequitable food system affects and implicates all of us who purchase and eat food grown in the U.S. These are also the stories that teach us how collective resistance to exploitation can move us closer toward a food system based in restorative, regenerative foodways and racial, economic and environmental justice.