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Last year’s food-supply vulnerability provided multiple teachable moments like this for the students who took Associate Professor Emelie Peine’s course, IPE 331: International Political Economy of Food and Agriculture. The syllabus typically runs the gamut from the politics and economics of today’s global food system to the emerging concept of food sovereignty, which offers communities decision-making control over local food production. 

Oechsner, a first-generation farmer, also served as a good illustration of a concept that Peine had been discussing with her students: vertical integration. He and his team first grow their grains—whole wheat, einkorn wheat, rye, and spelt, among others—on 1,400 acres in New York’s Finger Lakes region. After the harvest, a second branch of the enterprise, called Farmer Ground Flour, mills the grain. Some FGF products get routed to New York metro Whole Foods stores and top New York City bakeries (one FGF customer is Orwasher’s, tagged “a venerable outpost for artisanal bread” by Zagat). Flour is also earmarked for a third Oechsner offshoot: the Wide Awake Bakery Crust Fund, a community-supported agriculture program that sells bread directly to local residents. 

Meanwhile, grocery shelves weren’t the only thing wiped out in the early days of the pandemic. Home gardening skyrocketed, leading to a dramatic run on seeds available for purchase. “It was, ‘Not only am I going to buy all the canned beans and hoard them in my basement, but I’m going to plant beans in my backyard,’” Peine says. “That is really what drove the demand for seed.” 

Harvest Pierce County, an urban agriculture organization in Puyallup, Wash., offered Peine’s students the chance to dig into the newly rediscovered practice of seed saving. 

“A lot of our gardeners are in the practice of buying their seeds every year,” Program Coordinator Renée Meschi ’15 says. “But we might not get that in the future. We need to make sure people know how to save their own seeds.” 

To work toward food security, Harvest Pierce County is starting a seed library to build on its annual in-person seed swap that, pre-COVID, brought gardeners—including those who farm the extensive network of local community gardens overseen by the organization—together each February to share seeds and enjoy a potluck meal. In a socially distanced world, a seed library is seen as a better option for residents to “check out” seeds, grow them and, at the end of the season, return to the library the seed they harvested. 

A former student of Peine’s, Meschi needed research help on best practices. “How does it look in other places?” she wondered. “How could it look here?” Peine dispatched her students to research seed library models and groups that teach seed saving, as well as interview local seed savers. They also investigated technical requirements for saving seeds, producing a blueprint that Harvest Pierce County could use to set up its program. 

COVID-19 whittled Peine’s normally field-trip-heavy course to just a handful of outings, including a trip to The Farm at Franklin-Pierce (owned by the Franklin-Pierce school district and run by two Puget Sound grads, Matt Price ’12 and Emily Strong ’11); a service day at St. Leo’s Food Connection food bank; a trip to Wilcox Farms, a major egg producer in Roy, Wash.; and a couple of work days in the on-campus garden. 

“Work days are for garden tasks that require a bigger workforce, like turning compost and hauling wood chips,” Peine says. “The students spend a lot of time out there.” 

Designed to give students a seed-to-harvest experience, the campus garden runs on a pick-your-own basis, with oversight from Chloe Bouchy ’21. Last fall, the garden featured two types of kale—dino and curly—as well as cabbage, rainbow chard, lettuce, garlic, and fennel. During the warm season, the students grow tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, edible flowers, and herbs like rosemary and lavender. This spring, Peine made use of the campus garden in teaching ENVR 356: Garden Practices. “We’ve completely overhauled the garden to increase productivity,” she says, “with plans to start a free farmers market in the fall where we will give away all the produce that we grow.”