Local woman elevates the land with regenerative agricultural revolution
Travelers along Eddy Street in South Bend, Indiana, may notice the unusual landscape between Colfax Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard. Sloping up the east side of the road, alley-cropped rows and an edible food forest—wilder looking than conventional farms—spread around Good Shepherd Montessori School (GSMS). This is the home of an advanced regenerative school farm where students learn about sustainable farming.
The force behind this landscape is Theri Niemier, a woman on a mission to foster earth stewardship in all ages. A teacher and regenerative agriculture specialist, Farmer Theri—as she’s affectionately known—has worked with GSMS since 2002, with students regularly visiting her nonprofit, educational Bertrand Farm in Niles, Michigan. In the fall of 2020, Niemier sold the farm and moved her farming operations fully to the school grounds. She hopes the farm serves as a proof-of-concept model to encourage collaboration between other schools and small farmers. She believes that all schools should include a farm component. “Really it just takes one passionate person,” she says.
On the farm, chickens meander around two enclosed green spaces, eating lunch scraps and their favorite weeds and clucking away. These chickens don’t just produce eggs. They reduce food and weed waste through their diet, help control pests and enrich the soil through their waste. In regenerative farming one of the goals is to create a system where elements serve multiple functions and interact in ways that decrease waste and ultimately increase land fertility through a special focus on caring for the soil.
Now, Niemier wants to increase the farm’s presence as an urban agricultural learning center, a place where people can see firsthand the connection between how our food is grown and its impacts on human and environmental health. Already the farm offers an annual Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) membership, and soon Niemier will publish a curriculum that incorporates her 25 years of working and cultivating relationships in farming, education and environmental health.
“When we talk about health, we cannot separate living things. The environment includes air, water, soil, plants, animals and people. … We are all interconnected, and if one fails to be healthy it affects all the others,” she says.
Niemier's passion derives in part from the knowledge that current agricultural practices are unsustainable. Conventional or industrial agriculture (most agriculture in the U.S.) relies heavily on fossil fuels, and its chemical fertilizers and pesticides destroy the soil, leading to erosion and run-off in waterways. One way to change our reliance on an unsustainable system is learning about alternatives. Regenerative farming prioritizes the health of the soil so that it ultimately produces healthier food and sequesters more carbon. Permaculture is a style of regenerative agriculture that focuses on designing landscapes that are self-sufficient and mimic nature.
In May, strawberries are interwoven through the hills of the edible food forest. The food forest is designed with swales, a permaculture technique that mimics a ditch, in order to capture rainwater in the soil, reducing the need for supplemental water. Features of the food forest include goji berries, apple trees, horseradish and comfrey—all perennial plants. Perennials limit the need for human intervention, and since the roots stay in the soil, they can grow deep, bringing up nutrients from below to surrounding plants and minimizing soil loss due to erosion.
This summer, the farm’s lush landscape hosted the Food, Farming & Sustainability Conference: A Whole Systems Approach for Farm-to-School Education for the Future of Food Security, recorded and available online. The series features presentations and farm tours from local experts. Ben Hartman, a Goshen, Indiana, farmer and author of The Lean Farm, gave a keynote presentation about increasing efficiency in farming practices and cultivating positive relationships with school cafeterias. Another presenter explained how to apply for grants from the USDA for conservation-related projects. Niemier hopes this will be the first of many yearly conferences.
Niemier’s upcoming curriculum, a legacy project before retirement, explains the connection between growing food and environmental health through lessons and activities suitable for different ages. It includes Next Generation Science Standards for teachers, but Niemier hopes that it will also be used by families and individuals. She says it's designed “for anybody who’s interested in connecting more closely with food production and its connection to environmental restoration.”
The curriculum is organized by seasons and divided into months, with a monthly focus (November’s is whole foods) and four weeks of lessons. Week 1 is a sustainability lesson, week 2 is recipes with fresh produce, week 3 offers three options of in-depth lessons for use over multiple years, and week 4 focuses on a farm-related topic. The curriculum is filled with overlapping concepts so that key ideas are presented in different contexts, as a nod to the interconnected and cyclical ways of the natural world.
Ultimately, the hope is to empower community members with knowledge of how to care for the land in a way that restores health to the soil and to ourselves. Niemier believes education is an essential part of the process. “I think that it empowers people to be part of the solution, and everybody wants to be part of the solution,” she says.
To learn more about the urban farm at Good Shepherd and programs offered, visit gsms.org/farming-the-city/ or email the farm team at farmandschool@gsms.org.
Gwynneth Hurley works as a freelance editor, researcher and writer in South Bend, Indiana. In 2019 she graduated from Indiana University with degrees in cognitive science and journalism. She loves to explore and learn about the world through a holistic perspective. She can be reached at gwynnethhurley@gmail.com.
Copyright ©2024 Edible Michiana. All rights reserved
