At Aiken High School, a group of students, many of them immigrants, is learning to grow food, care for living things, and expand their horizons.
Images Madeleine Hordinski

A good farm is an ecosystem, with plants and animals, soil, water, and sunshine all working together to produce something good.

The student farm at Aiken High School is an ecosystem that’s rich beyond the usual understanding of the word. It’s 100 high school students from Cincinnati and all over the world. It’s four soulful-eyed alpacas, a flock of tiny, egg-shaped quail whose home was built by the students, a high tunnel ventilated using solar power, a former football equipment shed turned into a barn, a network of community partners, a committed principal, an above-and-beyond teacher, vegetables from everywhere the students are from, mushrooms, duck eggs, a coffee cart with coffees from around the world, a hiking trail.

The sunshine comes from the interests and strengths and the beautiful energy of those 100 students. Altogether, it can be expressed in the concept that teacher Aaron Parker learned from the father of an Afghani student, the Pashto word chantukarry. It means involvement, community, cooperative oneness.

The farm is the classroom and laboratory for Cincinnati Public Schools’ Agricultural and Environmental Systems Career Tech Pathway and fits into Aiken’s project-based learning model. Aiken is a college-prep high school, so the program is not necessarily training students for agriculture jobs immediately after high school. But the program does get them started on the road to a number of agribusiness majors in college. It also teaches the lessons you learn from being responsible for other living things.

Touring the Farm

I got a tour of the farm from Rojina Rai, Pawan Rai, and Ankita Rai who are Nepalese; Hunter McElrath and Star’nasia Johnson, both from Cincinnati; and Peregrina Sanchez-Jose, whose parents came to Cincinnati from Guatemala.

I was impressed first with the richness of the educational experience. It’s hands-on and non-virtual. It takes place in the fresh air and the soil, but also includes classroom biology and a series of four classes including animal and plant science, global economics, and food markets. They read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and watch Farming While Black.

My next impression: These are young people that American farming could really use now and in the coming years, whether they become farmers, activists, or informed consumers. Maybe they’ll be leaders; those skills are built into the program, too.

“These kids are really doing the work,” says Aiken principal Lisa Votaw. “That’s very important to me.”

Aiken’s student-run farm grew quickly from humble beginnings: It began as a way to give kids something to do while they were learning English. Parker is trained as an English Language Learner teacher and was hired at Aiken to start an international program that could diversify the school body. Aiken is in College Hill, but pulls students from all over the city. Fully 100% of students are lower income (they qualify for free and reduced lunch) and 95.2% minority. Parker recalls that when he was hired in 2016, “there was just one lonely and angry Honduran kid.” Among the international students at Aiken are kids from countries like Nepal and Zambia and Syria, 50 nations in all, speaking 40 languages. They arrive here in Cincinnati in a variety of ways. Some students’ families have lived in refugee camps for 20 years or more before qualifying for refugee visas to the U.S. Many of the students had interrupted—or very little—school in their prior life.

But Parker discovered that they had many other non-linguistic life experiences and skills. “You need something to do and communicate about while you’re learning a language,” he says. So one day he took a class down behind the school where there were some raised garden beds.

Quail eggs, along with chicken and duck eggs, are donated to students in need. Seedlings for Thai Rai Kaw Tok squash are ready to be transplanted into the garden. Aiken High School teacher Aaron Parker wrangles some of the livestock, including a cow and some llamas, that are part of the student-run farm.

There were 35 of them, constructed for a garden club that Principal Votaw and some of the math teachers had started. Parker’s students responded immediately, some getting their hands right in the dirt. Many had exposure to agriculture before, as Rojina tells me: “In the refugee camp, we had a garden that I helped with.” Small gardens supplemented the rice and oil staples from the UN in the camps where many Congolese lived in other African countries, and where Nepalese lived in Bhutan. Other immigrant students know subsistence farming, or their families were involved in commercial farming, such as picking coffee, in their homelands. Still others have relatives working in other parts of agribusiness, like chicken processing plants.

The gardens grew as part of the international program, then became formalized in 2020 as the Agribusiness and Production Systems track. It’s still popular with the international kids, but the program is open to everyone at Aiken, and current enrollment is about 100, a mix of Cincinnati-born students and those from elsewhere.

Connecting Students to their Heritage

It was the middle of February when the students gave me a guided tour—and there was plenty going on.

We started with coffee. The students run a business called the Awaken with Aiken coffee cart (its slogan is “Coffee with Culture”) serving coffee they roast themselves. They work with La Terza Coffee to source beans from all over the world and learn how to roast and brew each variety. They made me choose which I liked best of the three types I tried. I went with the Sumatran, roasted by Star’nasia.

Since they didn’t grow the coffee, it might not seem appropriate to an agriculture program. But not only is coffee an agricultural product and a huge international business, many of the coffees come from the same countries as the students. Recently Awaken with Aiken featured a coffee from the Mexican state of Chiapas, roasted by a student from Chiapas.

Coffee is also a useful metaphor for the Parker’s teaching style. ”Each kind of coffee has to be ground and roasted differently. Each kid had different strengths and needs, too, and we want to build on those,” he says. For instance, Star’nasia is the treasurer of Awaken at Aiken. “That’s a strength and interest of hers and we let her go with that,” Parker says. Hunter, a ninth grader, has his own business called Sabroso, making and delivering food in his own neighborhood, and that’s no doubt going to get hooked into Aiken’s program, too. Profit from Aiken’s student-run businesses goes back to the students in the form of college scholarships and financial aid for students in need, and to global crises that the students select.

The coffee program is unusual enough that it was featured at a Future Farmers of America convention that some of the students attended last year in Indianapolis. Pawan, who says it was a great time, recalls, “60,000 students were there, and they all were wearing the same jacket.” FFA is a big part of agriculture education throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and membership offers leadership opportunities to officers of the Aiken chapter as well as the chance to attend national events. Ankita, in the program since seventh grade, was the chapter president. The Aiken program is atypical with its urban setting and international focus. But FFA is changing too, embracing the coffee program and recently translating its pledge into Spanish.

Learning to Care for Living Things

After coffee, we visited the Mush Room, a new setup for growing mushrooms donated to the school by Sproutly Farms. Hunter did not raise his hand when I asked who liked mushrooms, but he was the one to figure out how to set up the growing apparatus, a sort of complicated indoor tent. In this room, there’s also an egg incubator where the students incubate and hatch fertilized eggs from their chickens, ducks, and quail. The kids showed me how to “candle” eggs using a cellphone flashlight to see if they’re viable. (I’m not sure I quite got it, but they seemed to have a handle on it.) “I love that I can learn something I’d never even thought I’d know how to do, like candle eggs,” Hunter says.

A sloping path behind the school leads to the farm, where most lessons take place. The original raised beds are there, including three plots for community members. There are some orchard trees along the path (community partner: Green Umbrella’s Common Orchard Project), a fledging prairie planting (partner: Sleepy Bee through its recently closed College Hill location), and a pollinator garden (partner: NKU).

The chickens were nestled down into their boxes, sitting on eggs. The little grey quail were darting about in their pen, which the students designed and built. Ankita, the smallest of the group, had climbed up on top and finished the roof.

There is a new hoop house, funded by a USDA grant, a very roomy structure that allows for the growing of produce year-round, an important addition to a school program that goes through the winter. The 2023–24 school year was the first time they tried winter growing. They’ll grow whatever produce the students want: a wide variety of chili peppers from around the world, including fish peppers, an heirloom southern African-American favorite, plus bitter melons, collards, cabbage, cucumbers, eggplants, and an assortment of Asian greens. Some do fine, some not so well. “We call it a dynamic laboratory of imperfection,” Parker says.

I did not anticipate the alpacas, but there were four of them in a corner of the hoop house, with dreadlocked hair, to be shorn and used by local weavers. A student from Ecuador had formed a special connection with the alpacas. In the barn shed, there are Nubian goats who came up to the students for head-rubbing, and one Zebu cow from South Asia.

Chicken and quail are kept for eggs, which students sell to teachers or give to kids who need the protein, like athletes. “Can’t run on ramen,” says Parker, who is also the cross-country coach. Sometimes, an old hen that doesn’t lay anymore becomes available for meat. They can’t butcher it at school, so a student’s family will take it home. At Peregrina’s house, that chicken might go into Guatemalan caldo. At Pawan and Rojina’s, it might be made into a dish of chicken and rice seasoned with a powder made from burnt chicken feathers. Rojina showed me a photo on her phone of how that’s done, over an open flame.

They have ducks, which used to roam the garden beds eating insects. Parker has recently become certified in Good Agricultural Practices so his class can begin providing produce to the school cafeteria, so the ducks are now fenced in to keep them from fertilizing the garden.

The students are proud of the animals, but Pawan also displayed pride in the compost bins, which utilize animal manure, La Terza’s coffee grounds, and Sleepy Bee food scraps.

Managing it all takes a lot of work, and some of the students get paid to do it. “I’m not running a labor camp here,” Parker says. They can get paid by Hamilton County Youth Employment to work in the garden after school from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Groundworks Ohio pays for work eradicating invasive plants, as well as some farm work, and some students work at Our Harvest farm or Tikkun Farm, both in College Hill. Some of them get to the farm before school, even before Parker does. “It takes some responsibility,” Hunter says. “These are things that are actually alive that we need to take care of.”

“They’ve learned self-efficacy and the element of care,” Parker says. He hopes they’ll maybe take up careers focused on caring, jobs with a life purpose. The seniors among the students I met were headed for college next year, including Berea College (with its free tuition) or possibly the University of Cincinnati.

Larger Life Lessons

Not everyone in the high school band becomes a musician; not everyone who learns calculus uses it in a job. But high school is where you learn about yourself and what you love. If the ag program piques a student’s interest, there are many professional opportunities in the overall sector of agriculture and agricultural change. For those who want to continue studying sustainable agriculture in college, they could make connections to Central State, an HBCU in Ohio with a strong ag program, or to Ohio State.

A career as an actual farmer is hard to envision if you don’t have land already. And farming may not appeal to families who would like their children to rise higher in life, to not go back to the land.

But the people who own and manage the land in the U.S. are 88.9% white; of them 14.8 % are women. Most are over the age of 55. That means that farming is missing out on the skills and experience of a large part of the population. There is a growing movement for Black Americans to take back some of the land they’ve lost through racist policies, bringing farms and nutrient-dense food back to Black neighborhoods. There is a growing number of immigrants owning farms, not just working on them.

“We’re teaching about food sovereignty, food justice, food access,” Parker says. All of these are issues of importance right now. It would be so great to see some of these students help pull agriculture in the directions it needs to go: sustainable use of resources. Healthier food. Diversity of experience and background among farmers. That movement needs leaders.

Meanwhile, there’s coffee to roast and chicks to raise, not to mention all the other things high school students do. And wherever these students go, there will always be a little bit of farm dirt under their fingernails. n