story by MELODY SIMMONS; photos by KRISTINE BULS

About 15 miles from their campus near the tattered corner of Belair Road and Erdman Avenue, fifth graders from The Green School wandered across 33-acres of farmland and marveled at the city’s newest classroom.

It was a field trip to Great Kids Farm, a key component of the Baltimore city school system’s push to provide fresh fruits and vegetables that students can eat at lunch and appreciate for a lifetime. On this sunny September day, the project was being honored by Johns Hopkins officials who had assembled for a ceremony inside the Catonsville farm’s main building.

But just outside the door, 10-year-old Akil Williams’ attention was fixed on a lowlier scene: a pile of worm manure.
(To see more of Great Kids Farm, click through for a BREW SLIDESHOW)

Williams explained the function of the huge dirt pile with vivid detail.

“The worms eat the rotten vegetables and they produce manure to help the plants and everything else,” she said. “And I learned that the vegetables help the soil to make more and more vegetables.”

Her classmate, Justice Harris, added, “I learned the process of making compost and putting that in and what different kinds of plants do to the soil to help grow extra plants.”

It was exactly the kind of insight the farm’s organizers have been trying to cultivate in city students — an understanding of how the food on your plate got there. Their efforts have been attracting national attention but on this day they were receiving a hometown award. Dr. Michael Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and Robert Lawrence, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, were presenting the farm and its founders with a gold-colored place-setting plaque, to honor their “visionary leadership in food procurement and food education.”

Learning to love fresh fruit and veggies is the main focus of Great Kids Farm, says Tony Geraci, Director of Food and Nutrition for Baltimore City Schools. In less than a year, Geraci has revamped many menus at city schools, and instituted Meatless Monday, a move to offer students vegetarian entrees once a week.

“The single most powerful tool that is available in our arsenal to change the way kids think about food is to let them plant a seed, put it in the earth and watch it grow,” he said.

“When a kid plucks a cherry tomato off of a vine that he or she planted, and it’s still warm from the summer sun, and you pop that into your mouth and the flavor explodes, that’s a moment you can’t teach in a book. That’s a moment that every child should experience.”

Geraci is a leader in the national Farm to School movement, started by chef Alice Waters in Berkeley, Calif., after she planted a vegetable garden at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School and established the Edible Schoolyard program.

This past year, Geraci has spent nearly $600,000 purchasing Maryland-grown fruits and vegetables to serve to city students. His next step is to open a central kitchen where fresh home cooking – and not just processed foods – can be cooked and offered at school cafeterias.

Great Kids Farm sits on a site just off of busy Route 40 in Catonsville, near the Wal-Mart, a mattress shop and several fast food offerings. It was sold to Baltimore City in 1953 for $5 by a black abolitionist who demanded that the site be used as an educational facility for young black men, who at the time were perpetual victims of segregation.

The large main building is brightened by sunlight, and surrounded by acres of crops bearing the likes of corn, lettuce, basil, collard greens, and even figs. Chickens strut in a pen nearby, while goats tend to much of the farm’s weeding duties.

“Those trees over there are from cuttings from a tree my father’s father brought over here from Sicily,” Geraci said, pointing to a row of fig trees rooting in pots. “We’re transplanting them here. It’s about that cycle of life. That’s what this place is about. Long after you and I are dead and gone, kids are going to be eating figs off those trees.”

Greg Strella, chief gardener at Great Kids Farm, nearly welled up speaking about the transformation of the acreage.

“Ten months ago, there were no students here. There were no fields. There was no money to create a farm,” he said. “We are building a place for vegetables, for bees, for fruits, for wild flowers….”

Since December, about 1,500 city students have made it out to the farm. They have helped to germinate more than 7,000 seeds into vegetable transplants, many of which have been replanted in smaller cooking and teaching gardens established by Geraci at city schools. Next year, Strella said, it is hoped that students will help germinate 14,000 seeds.

“What we have created is alive,” he said. “Our young people are hungry for these challenges.”