MSU SAFS Farm & Food Systems Field Course
A short course exploring the farm and food systems of Michigan
In 2015, the SAFS Undergraduate Minor evolved to include a field course (224). As a former student said, “there’s only so much you can learn about farming from a classroom”. The SAFS steering committee helped design a course that takes students to farms and food system entities that represent a diversity of production systems in Michigan, the second most diverse agricultural state in the U.S. The class fosters meaningful conversation with practitioners and peer-to-peer interdisciplinary learning. SAFS graduate students desired more student sharing and on-the-ground familiarity with agriculture, so in 2019, we created a graduate course (893) that shares the tour and discussion experiences. While our grad students bring more advanced disciplinary knowledge, many of our undergraduates bring personal experience and additional passions that enrich all the course participants.
The map and stories below aim to capture some of the beauty, wonder, creativity, risk, hardship, and hard-earned pride of our food system practitioners. These experiences prove that reconnecting students with our food and farms, the land and the water that sustain them, and the labor and care offered along the food chain helps move perspectives towards a nuanced and rich understanding of food in our lives. With SAFS, possibility grows.
SAFS Field Trip Visits!
From row crops and potato producers that grow across thousands of acres and state lines, to diverse fruit and vegetable farms, to small homesteads and urban farms investing in tradition and cultivating community, we love seeing the passion and knowledge that all growers bring to their work. We hear how beginning farmers lean into their creativity to “hack” the tools and resources they need to provide delicious, safe produce. We’ve seen hand-woven branch fences around community garden spaces, built in the tradition of lands left behind by resource-limited new American immigrants. We learned about medicinal herbs and bee-keeping practices in community gardens designed to heal hearts, minds, and bodies in recovery. We’ve watched potatoes from harvest to cleaning to storage to delivery to chip testing -yum! We’ve followed apples from tree to press to hard cider stills, and watched milk flow from the automated milking machines to on-farm pasteurization to the processing and packaging machines, and enjoyed a refreshing cold cone of unbeatable ice cream at the end. We’ve even seen behind the scenes at large retail distribution warehouses, where bananas ripen for the shelf and automated machines pluck items and prep them for shipment for consumers who never see behind the curtain of this immense system that feeds most of us.
2015-2018
Primarily undergraduates visit farm and food system entities. Each year Julie and Brooke aimed to visit a different set of farm and food system entities to capture the diversity of the Michigan food system, and gather different interpretations and applications of the idea of "sustainability" in agrifood systems.
2019
After a graduate program revision, the graduate students and former SAFS Director Dr. Mathew Grieshop, along with Julie and the undergraduate SAFS crew, chartered a bus for the first joint SAFS field course! The driving assistance and a mobile PA system meant that no student need be left behind or miss the conversation.
2020
During COVID, Matt and Julie hosted panels of farm and food system experts that provided meaningful insights to their operations. From the veterinarian responsible for the largest flock of laying hens this side of the Mississippi, to a family shifting to hemp production with an eye on the sustainable building materials industry, to local farmers virtually walking us through their animal operations and providing a visual feast while prepping bouquets for the farmers' market, students had rich experiences thanks to our generous farm and food system community.
2021
Despite the continuing COVID concerns, we were able to add creative campus forest and landscape tours to consider how we design and evaluate our environments. We also added a local urban agriculture walking tour that got students out and about among a dedicated and passionate community of practitioners on Lansing's Eastside.
2022 and on!
Though we said goodbye to Matt in early 2022, we added Issy Smith, SAFS alumni and program assistant, to the field course team. Julie and Issy successfully restarted the full in-person field course, and expanded resources for our forest tour. While the field days are long, we appreciated the richness our site visits and hosts brought to the course.