Learning Farm
At the Learning Farm, children and families engage in the outdoors and discover their connection to local, sustainable food production and shared community meals.
Our mission is to give children the tools, support, and motivation necessary to become responsible, knowledgeable, and caring citizens. We do this through fostering a better understanding of where food comes from and involving kids in production, distribution and consumption of sustainably farmed and fished locally-produced food. We want them to grow, harvest, cook and share the great bounty of what grows abundantly nearby to where they live and to do so in a mindful and caring way.
Mission
Our mission is to give children the tools, support, and motivation necessary to become responsible, knowledgeable, and caring citizens.
This is a place where community members immerse themselves in the study of living things, agriculture, and food, as well as have opportunity to brainstorm and discuss practical solutions to the challenges facing the planet with regard to how we grow food. Here, students learn the meaning and value of bio-diversity: how animals -- cows, horses, birds – interact beneficially with orchards, wildlands, woodlands; and how row crops – vines, root veggies, grains – do well right next to bush fruit and berries; and how insects and other beneficials – microbes, mycorrhizae, spongi – are their friends, all going in together to support a healthy and vibrant natural world and great food.
We provide high quality produce and handmade products to our community in ways that regenerate and leverage the land so that all can be nourished.
Owner, Christa Núñez, is an African American entrepreneur, researcher, agriculture educator, social justice practitioner and storyteller. She focuses her work on creating cooperative land governance models and equitable food systems with African diaspora communities. As a facilitator for change in the realm of narrative building, education and food justice, she collaborates with stakeholders across multicultural, multigenerational and interdisciplinary lines, cooperating primarily on projects with children and families.
She studies various current stories of people of color, using the historical record as well as current scientific research on health impacts experienced by systemically-urbanized African diaspora communities as narrative connective tissue. The narrative building activities of her work reside in conducting studies guided by communities of color on cooperative land governance and alternative food production experiments and distributes collected data on community-derived assets such as selfie videos, spoken word, music, interviews, art and research projects. In order to achieve replicable community development models, a broader application of her work will include stories of empowered rural homesteads for former urbanites and the creation of justice-informed land and food-based infrastructure as lived experience.
Owner, Pete Núñez, was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Harlem, NY. He developed a love for the outdoors while living in the beautiful Redwood Forest of Northern California and enjoys working the land and producing good food for the community. As a behaviorist, he loves working with young people in all phases of their development and enjoys supporting pathways to healthy communication and relationship-building.
