Youth Farm Project
The Youth Farm Project was founded in the spring of 2010 by a “scrappy and excited group” from the Ithaca community — including Three Swallows Farm, the Full Plate Farm Collective CSA, Lehman Alternative Community School, and the Southside Community Center — who planted crops to prepare for a group of 25 teens to spend their summer working and learning on the farm. Today, the YFP is a farm-based social justice education program that is on Gayogono: no land and is currently owned by and shared with the Ithaca Waldorf School, a land filled with cleared fields, hedgerows, old apple trees, and lots of rocks. The farm uses soil-focused growing practices that are within the scope of organic farming.
The Youth Farm Project (YFP) is entering its 14th year. Since 2010, we have grown from a summer agricultural work-training program for teens to 3-season programming that includes elementary to college-aged young people and families, and centers the voices of youth in agriculture. Each year, we welcome over 1,000 people to the farm to connect with the land in various ways. Whether a child is collecting chicken eggs for the first time, a college student is learning to plant garlic, or teens are discussing food security while trellising tomatoes, experiences at YFP mobilize the next generation of leaders towards loving actions for climate justice and cultural change.
We recognize the importance of empowering radical young leaders, especially in rural and under-resourced areas like Upstate New York. In the context of the climate crisis and the heightened economic and mental health challenges that youth and their families experience in the Covid-era, it is more important now than ever to support and empower youth leaders.
We currently farm land generously shared through a free-lease with the Ithaca Waldorf School using soil-focused growing practices.
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Work Days - See website/social media for dates for monthly Saturday open volunteer days.
https://www.youthfarmproject.org/volunteer.html
BIPOC offerings - see website/social media for dates and times. Includes seed starting, beekeeping, and food preservation workshops.
Foraging - Email request to: youthfarmproject@gmail.com
Tour info - please send an email to: youthfarmproject@gmail.com
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This is our offering to the community: delicious vegetables, herbs for cooking & medicine, and flowers to decorate your homes and shrines. This U-pick is open in the summer and fall 2022 for low-income folks and BIPOC folks to harvest from. This garden is a place for community education and access to the plants. The ability to move in this space as you want in search for joy, play, plant wisdom, and nourishment are welcome.
Our Community U-Pick Garden is open to all Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of color as well as low-income white folks.
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Take 96B south towards the town of Danby, away from Ithaca. Turn left on Nelson Rd. You will see a yellow house on the left and the Ithaca Waldorf School followed immediately by the farm's barn on the left-hand side.
TCAT Rt. #65
The YFP’s Summer Teen Program remains a core part of the farm’s mission: to bring youth together across social and economic backgrounds to understand the relationship between the land, food and social justice. The work of the YFP draws from the legacy of activists who have fought for liberation for Black communities and other communities of color.
“BIPOC youth have the power to shape culture and shape their environment,” says Astrid Castillo, YFP co-director and director of education. “In the curriculum, and in the mission, we’re constantly trying to make folks understand how food justice is tied to liberation, how food has been used to oppress communities for many years, and how it can help us feel our own sense of agency. That’s our mission, to bring healing in the land, and to help us realize our own power.”
The farm is centered around empowering BIPOC youth, through the summer program as well as other initiatives including a social justice immersion after-school program. But “anyone is welcome to come and frolic,” Castillo says.
Contact the Youth Farm Project
24 Nelson Road, Ithaca, NY 14850