Community partnership cultivates farm at Ocoee charter schools

Soon enough, students at Hope Charter and Legacy High schools will be giving a new meaning to the farm-to-table meal concept.

That’s because they’re going to be involved in growing their own nutritious food through a four-component farm right in the Ocoee schools’ own backyard. 

The Hope Farm, as it’s being called, has been under construction on a property right by the school for a couple of months now. But the concept has been in the works for much longer.

Josh Taylor, who founded both House Blend Café in Ocoee and Do Good Farm in Winter Garden, always has been passionate about building sustainable food systems to grow food for people in need. 

For Taylor, his primary motivators behind this pilot project are twofold. He believes nutrition and hydration play a large role in how our brains and bodies function, and he and his team want to be able to impact the poverty gap, which he said is affected by malnutrition and the food deserts in communities. 

In Orange County, Taylor said, there are tens of thousands of children whose families could be considered food insecure.

“If nutrition, or malnutrition, for that matter, plays a role in perpetuating that poverty gap, we want to have an impact in that space,” he said. “This project is kind of a pilot project to really launch that effort.”

PROJECT WITH A PURPOSE

Taylor said there will be four components, or four different farming practices, involved — aquaponics, hydroponics, traditional soil gardening and a permaculture food forest.

“Permaculture is the same exact system you have in the rainforest, jungle or the Amazon,” Taylor said. “Aquaponics is the same ecosystem you have in lakes, rivers and streams.  Aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics. You put the two together, and you have the same ecosystem that you have in the waterways. Fish waste creates nutrients that bacteria converts into food that plants can eat. We’re also going to take nutrient-rich water from the aquaponics system and feed that into our hydroponics system. It’ll be better than just a traditional hydroponics system because it’ll have all the micronutrients that come from the fish water.”

Do Good Farm received a $250,000 grant from the West Orange Healthcare District last year that has greatly assisted in developing the working farm at the schools. Taylor said there also have been others participating in the process and giving their time or finances to assist.  

While the farm itself is nearly up and running at this point, another portion of the project’s vision is to build a farm-to-table school cafeteria for students to use. That component will require about $150,000 in additional funding, which they are actively seeking and working toward.

The reason Taylor and Do Good Farm initially partnered with Hope and Legacy, he said, is because the schools’ charter emphasizes the importance of hydration and nutrition. Although it’s something the schools’ founders are passionate about, there have been some puzzle pieces missing that make it difficult to do so — including the fact that Hope and Legacy do not yet have their own cafeteria.

“Whenever you start a charter school, you have to justify why you’re going to take public funds out of the main public-school system, if you will, so you have to have a good reason for doing that,” he said. “They’re passionate about it and need a viable solution in this space, so that’s why it seems like a really good fit. I would say, too, as a charter school, there’s a little more flexibility … as we try new things. Some things are going to work, and some things aren’t, and because it’s a privately run school, there will be some flexibility to switch directions if we need to, if something doesn’t work, and to work out the kinks and the bugs.”

Taylor said in Orange County’s public school system, the budget is $3 per child per meal, which can make it challenging to afford nutritious, fresh and local produce. With the concept of something like Hope Farm, a few dollars can buy thousands of seeds to be grown and cooked right on school property.

FUN WITH FOOD

Affordability of fresh and nutritious foods is one issue. Another, Taylor said, is that even if money wasn’t an issue, there’s no way to guarantee that children will actually eat what is put in front of them. 

“We have found that when kids participate in the process and plant a seed, watch it grow, wash it and take a bite out of it, they’re much more likely to actually eat their vegetables,” he said.

That’s where the fun of actively being involved in growing their own food comes in. Not only will they be able to grow the food, but also they’ll learn about how the ecosystems in the forests and waterways work. The Hope Farm can also serve as a STEM learning laboratory because there is math, science and even social studies involved in farming.

“Instead of sitting and learning concepts out of a textbook at your desk, you’re getting to go and weigh some fish, take an average weight and figure out, ‘If they eat 3% of their body weight per day and divide that by three feedings a day, how much food do you need to give them at this feeding?’” he said. “Then you get to throw the food in and watch them go crazy over the food. Now it’s a really interesting learning environment for concepts that may not be as interesting to all students.”

There also are benefits for ESE and special-needs students. Taylor has a friend who has run a farm at the Roosevelt Academy in Lake Wales — which serves many special-needs students — for 25 years now.

“It’s an opportunity for them to be involved in something meaningful and learn a job skill that can potentially provide for them when they graduate high school and have to figure out next steps in life,” Taylor said. “That’s another additional piece of the puzzle we’re really excited about.”

Taylor also plans to partner Hope and Legacy — and hopefully future schools, as well — with a school in Guatemala. That way, students from Ocoee and Guatemala will be able to do some video conferencing, conduct experiments together and share data.

“All of that helps to expose our kids to kids that have much less than them and to realize that they don’t have things that we just take for granted here,” he said.

 The hope, Taylor said, is to have the students eating the food by January 2022. 

“We’ve really come a long way,” he said.