Sarah Wiederkehr teaches, collaborates and plants. To every thing in her life, there is an academic quarter, and as Stanford's first farm educator she's cultivating both land and ideas.
The plots of land are small—beds of soil about 15 feet long and 3 to 4 feet wide—but they do a good job of making growers out of students whose fingers are more familiar with laptops than legumes. The course offering that experience is Local Sustainable Agriculture, which features fieldwork in organic farming. Depending on the season, crops include tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, kale, carrots, spinach, lettuce, herbs and more.
"It's a come-out-and-play-in-the-dirt kind of course," says Wiederkehr, and it can lead to some savory revelations. "A tomato pulled out of the garden," she notes, "tastes different than a store-bought one in December that was ripened with chemicals." The underpinning for that discovery is the exploration of environmental, labor and political issues affecting agriculture and food. In any course she teaches, says Wiederkehr, she wants students to gain an appreciation for how challenging it is to grow good food.
As useful as those little growing beds are—there are about 50 in the educational portion of Stanford Community Farm (west of Oak Road near the Environmental Safety Facility)—they only hint at the University's ultimate vision. Wiederkehr says the big idea is for her to eventually help create a full-scale production farm that would provide food for student dining and research areas for a variety of academic disciplines. The wide interest in the concept is evident, she notes, in the way many people "sought me out and found me right away."
"The conversation about a sizable effort at Stanford to both study sustainable food production and produce sustainable foods for the University has been on the table for a number of years," wrote Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences, in an email to Stanford. It picked up traction, she added, about three years ago when Erin Gaines, '07, who had become the sustainable food coordinator for Stanford Dining, helped formalize the idea for a farm.
The ground was set for Wiederkehr. "When we hired Sarah," continued Matson, "we were indeed looking for someone who had great teaching skills but also the knowledge and know-how to actually take the next step of building a viable sustainable farm for Stanford's use. Her past experience in setting up and running urban sustainable farms is one of the reasons we hired her."
Before applying for the job at Stanford, Wiederkehr was managing a nonprofit educational farm in Sunnyvale. Most of her time was spent working physically—65 to 75 hours a week—but she felt fulfilled. That passion for farming had motivated her to stop work on a second master's degree at UC-Davis, where she had earned a master's in international agricultural development and integrated pest management. She started a farm near Davis, absorbing practical experience. But she had trouble eking out a living. By the time she got to Sunnyvale, her joints were indicating that she wasn't built for so much toil in the soil.
When the opportunity at Stanford came along, she was conflicted. Back in a primarily academic setting, she sometimes felt a twinge of confinement. But a year into the job—and expecting her first child in January—she started turning to her husband every few days and saying, "I really have a great job."
Before classes began in September, she got an email from a former student who was wondering if he could use his open time to work at the farm. Not only did that mean Wiederkehr was going to get much-needed help, it meant she had won over someone eager to trade free time for work. It was one of those tiny defining moments, as Wiederkehr puts it, of "instant gratification."
