You might miss it when you drive by, but there's a 1.75-acre farm wedged between the football field and the active subway and freight train tracks at the back of the Sotomayor Arts & Sciences Magnet High School campus in Glassell Park.
A herd of Irish Dexter cows, a group of New Zealand Kunekune pigs, Southdown Babydoll sheep and a variety of feathered poultry are just some of the menagerie that lives among fruit trees, vegetable gardens and lush native plants along a rainwater channel.
“Agriculture can restore natural ecosystems and become part of the solution to climate change,” said Reies Flores, an agricultural educator in Sotomayor’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) program. The agricultural sciences program is separate from the rest of the academic curriculum.
The farm at Sotomayor Arts & Sciences Magnet High School.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Breeding endangered species is a lesson in the importance of biodiversity, she said. The first topic of discussion in each semester’s urban farm-to-table class is the climate impact of meat consumption, she said. “Students connect with animals as other sentient beings.”
When the Los Angeles Unified School District opened the school for grades 6 through 12 in 2011, agriculture was on the curriculum, a holdover from the region’s farming past. But the project languished until the arrival of Flores and her teaching partner, Arturo Romo, an artist who works with natural dyes and fibers.
Flores said CTE prepares 230 students each semester for professional careers, students who are more likely to graduate to work for environmental groups than for industrial agricultural companies.
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Flores, who has free rein to manage the farm as she sees fit, teaches students organic and sustainable gardening practices that emphasize working in partnership with nature. “It’s regenerative agriculture,” she said, which can repair the environment and protect it from climate change.
Students add cow manure to food scraps from class and the school cafeteria to create compost that serves as soil for the gardens. They learn how the farm's pigs eat everything, including leftover milk, and do the composting work themselves as they dig through their straw bedding.
Class time is spent working on the farm, said Flores, who initially works alongside his students, talking about whatever task they have at hand. “Water only what you eat,” he tells them. “Waste is a resource.”
Farm animals are part of the lesson plan, not the meal plan. The Farm to Table cooking class is vegetarian.
The students run the place, Flores said, cultivating the gardens and caring for the animals. “I just step back and let them do it once I see that they know how to do it.”
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1. Michelle Chan and her brother, Harry Chan, tie onions to dry at Sotomayor Arts & Sciences Magnet. 2. Chickens roam around the chicken coop on campus. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Mastery of the work, he said, is a better measure of what they have learned than any written test.
“These kids have a lot to offer,” Flores said. There are 516 students at the Title I school, and 95 percent qualify as economically disadvantaged. “Within the boundaries of the school, they’re doing a lot of work,” she continued. “The farm allows them to learn and achieve in a different way. That’s good for their special education student and it’s good for their honor roll student.”
Flores raises money to cover the cost of the program and says she has dedicated about 100 hours of her personal time over the past three years to applying for local, state and federal grants that support the farm. Among them is an annual Perkins grant, which ranges from $25,000 to $60,000 annually, “a competitive grant that funds educational materials and equipment for the program,” she said.
“If the district would foster spaces like ours such as ‘climate literacy learning’ and give teachers the tools they need to teach it, it would help a lot,” Flores said.
Some teachers use the farm as a laboratory for special projects. Social studies students who read books by Michael Pollan, who has an “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” philosophy, have come to the farm to see his principles in action, Flores said.
Romo, Flores’ teaching partner, connects the farm’s lessons to his Chicano heritage. “I was raised with a reverence for the Earth,” he said. “We are of the Earth and so we take care of it. And it takes care of us.”
Students learn “about the connections between the farm’s ecology and their own history,” Romo added. “How their history connects to the willows on our farm and the history of the indigenous people here. And then how to treat the Earth with respect.”
