STONE BARNS CENTER FOR FOOD & AGRICULTURE

Food Ed., our food studies program, leverages the power of students and teachers to bring the drive for change into their own communities. The program goes beyond teaching students about cooking and nutrition, using food as a portal through which to explore critical issues in science, ecology, health, culture and justice, motivating them to become food ambassadors who understand that their food choices have meaningful impact on personal, environmental, and community health. Through our curriculum, students begin to connect ingredients to ideas; they gain the skills they need to both prepare fresh, healthy food and to advocate for a better food system. Teachers help students unwrap the intricacies of our current food system, acquire critical thinking and problem solving skills, and see themselves as agents of change.

Stone Barns Center receives more than 100,000 visitors every year. The Center offers a variety of public programs about food and agriculture including classes, tours, demonstrations, hands-on activities, lectures and workshops taught by experts. Topics range from growing your own food, to cooking with in-season ingredients, to planting pollinator-friendly landscapes, to backyard beekeeping, to stewarding ecological health and more. Stone Barns develops communications tools to extend the reach of our message to people across the country who are hungry for tools, tips and ideas to make smarter food choices. The goal of all of our public outreach is to connect people to what they eat and awaken them to the health and environmental consequences of their food choices.

Because Stone Barns is not just a farm—it’s a nonprofit education center, too—we can experiment with, test and develop new tools, methods, types of crops to be grown and animals to be raised. Our farmers are dedicated to continual improvement in pursuit of a truly resilient, sustainable farming enterprise. We continue to hone our practices, such as multispecies rotational grazing and heat generation from compost, to have the least environmental impact. We convene and partner with a wide range of experts, from universities to innovative business leaders and independent farmers. Our experiments lead to new methods, vegetable varieties, tools and models that other farmers can use and replicate.