Sometime between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago during a transitional period known as the Neolithic Revolution, modern humans began turning away from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settled into permanent communities. For the last 100 years, scholars have debated why people began this transition to living together in permanent communities.
The arguments range from natural climate change (the ending of the last Ice Age) forcing people to adopt a new way of living to ancient communal religious ceremonies that eventually brought people together into larger groups with shared values (1). As has often been the case with these debates over causation, my personal feeling is that the truth of the matter may lie at an intersection of a few different explanations.
Whatever led modern humans to the transition from nomadic hunter/gatherers to the more sedentary life of permanent settlements, it is clear that within only a few centuries or millennia agriculture began. It started with the grasses. Selectively breeding and sowing the seeds of the most desired and useful of wild grasses, eventually gave rise to the grains that dominated the staple of the great civilizations. The wheat of the Fertile Crescent, the rice of China, the corn of the Americas and the sorghum of Africa are all descendants of the wild grasses that ancient people altered over many generations (2).
These grasses were so important to mankind that their natural distribution serves as an historical road map of the rise of the great civilizations. Scientist Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel) points out that the abundance of easily domesticated wild grasses in the Mediterranean and Middle East provided an environmental advantage for the people of those regions to create the early, dominant civilizations. The scarcity of these grains in Africa, Australia and America probably explains the delay in a transition to agriculture.
Once human civilization embraced and refined its agricultural system, technology and innovation began an eventually exponential path towards the future. In this last fraction of the 200,000-year timeline of modern humans, we have gone from nomadic people that followed the migration patterns of other animals to more than half of us living in urban areas. As this trend of urbanization and technological advancement continues and as the population of the world approaches 10 billion, our reliance on agriculture increases. At the same time, fewer and fewer of us retain the agricultural tradition and know-how that brought us to this place. In the last 80 years, the percentage of people involved in agriculture in the United States has dropped from 25% to less than 2%.
In an effort to combat a growing disconnect between people and their food, Randy Smith, Phil Titus, and I applied for and were the recipients of a Carla and Leonard Wood Faculty Professional Development Endowment Award. We are very appreciative of their support and generosity and would like to take a moment to describe the nature of our horticulture program project.
In what we have come to refer to as our “DarFarm” project, we have either begun or are in the process of planning a variety of interconnected improvements and additions to campus. The campus greenhouse is at the center of our activities and over the last 30 years had fallen into a state of minimum functionality. At the moment, we are only a few weeks away from a fully renovated greenhouse with new tables, work space and automated climate controls. Once finished, it will serve as our base of operations for starting and maintaining plants throughout the school year.
Along with growing plants, we are in the early stages of designing an aquaculture unit that will be located within the greenhouse. This unit’s purpose is to allow for the raising of fish in a system that cycles water to plants that remove waste products. It will serve as a single system that raises both fish and plants in a symbiotic manner.
Outside the greenhouse, we have started a few raised beds, a small in-ground garden plot and a small scale composting operation. The two raised beds and the in-ground plot are located behind the old gym in an area that once served as a student parking lot. Since September, students have grown carrots, beets, peas, spinach, mustard and cabbage. A few plants have been harvested and eaten by these students as an early trial run to gauge the feasibility of our location and methods. Behind the ELA-2 buildings, there is another raised bed that fourth-grade teacher Elisabeth Lawson has used to provide planting and growing experiences to the younger grades. We are happy to report that almost all of the plants we have started to date have either matured or are still growing.
Over the winter of this school year, we will continue to tend these areas as well as make plans for larger plots and new locations for a spring planting. One prospective location is the field between the ELA-8 and Faculty Circle. Soil samples will be taken and tested over the coming months and inquiries into water availability will be made. Our hope is to have a large, productive and visible planting area by the end of this school year.
Another aspect of the DarFarm is to provide interdisciplinary opportunities for learning and enjoyment. We have talked to AP U.S. History teacher Kelly McDurmon about growing a plot of cotton to allow students to have a hands-on experience with the challenges of harvesting and processing this resource. FLIK dining services would like to work with us on growing herbs that could be used in food preparation. They have already made an excellent partner with our composting project, which has recycled a few cubic meters of food waste that would have otherwise ended up in the trash.
Other projects have included hatching chicken eggs and plans are in place to add solar panels in locations around campus. It is easy to see the wide scope the DarFarm encompasses. We want to pursue any well-thought-out project that we have the manpower to implement, which brings me to my final point. We need your help. We want ideas, material and people to work with to make our entire campus a learning space. Anyone who wants to get their hands dirty and get back to the “roots” of origins of human civilization can contact Randy Smith, Phil Titus or me. Thanks!
Citations:
1. The Seeds of Civilization by Michael Balter, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2005
2. The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hansen, published by Basic Books, 2015
