1) Mission statement & Brief history:

Since 1976, the Urban Farm program has served as an outdoor classroom as well as an applied research facility. Its goal is to confront environmental issues through design, education and community. By teaching students the importance of self-sufficiency and subsistence farming, The Farm embodies productive urban land use and emphasizes the importance of both personal and community impact on the environment. Creating a connection to where food come helps The Farm to fosters a consumer understanding of the importance of seasonal and local food sourcing. The Urban Farming program teaches an average of 200 students each year how to grow their own food, educating the community on sustainable agriculture and local food systems. Focusing on seasonal produce, students each year learn the valuable lesson of eating what’s available, not just what they want.

3) Past activities and outcomes:

In the past, the University of Oregon Urban Farm has had elementary schools come and learn about the importance of local eating and agriculture while also letting the children work hands on in the garden, doing things like planting seeds for the upcoming seasons.

4) Current projects/actions:

Currently, the University of Oregon Urban Farm has multiple projects that teach students about working in nature and learning the importance of urban farming. There are two main student projects currently happening through the Urban Farm. The first being, a UO freshmen program called Project Tomato. This program takes incoming freshmen on a bike tour around local Eugene farms and teaches them about sustainable agriculture. The second main Urban Farm program is a UO class offered spring, summer and fall term. The class teaches the importance of working together in planning as a team and involves a lot of hands-on experience with soil, organic gardening practices, composting, biodynamic agriculture and urban land issues. One of the main assignments of this class is an experiential assignment where students have to conceptualize an idea of how to increase sustainable agriculture and eating habits within the Willamette Valley community.

5) How organization understands “common good”:

The concept of the “common good” emphasizes what is shared or beneficial within members of a community. The Urban Farm organization understands this concept by demonstrating their love for food, nature, gardening and leadership. Collectively as a community group, participants in the Urban Farm Organization, “grow food together, work together, take care of the land and build community.” Urban Farm highly represents the idea of the “common good” through their core values of working together as a team and practicing different methods of growing food and various composting techniques that will positively help the environment.

6) Links between work of organization and consumer culture and/or capitalism readings we are doing for Week Three:

The Urban Farm takes Speth’s concerns into literal action with an advanced emphasis on the prioritization of breaking away from capitalistic tendencies. The organization teaches students to be self-sufficient with their food consumption, a major concern of Speth. On page 52, he claims that “Food production, resource consumption, and waste generation also increase because they are linked to population and output growth.” With a growing population, heavy pressure is put on food producers to maintain the growing demand, which rapidly depletes environmental resources. Since Speth claims on pg. 57 that the world is focused on economic growth while disregarding environmental costs for the future generations, programs like Urban Farm are crucial to rewrite the script of society. Self-sufficient farming and understanding the benefits of doing so, which Urban Farm educates on, reduces the amount of pressure on a capitalistic environment, working towards eliminating the collision between the economy and the environment.