BATH, Ohio – On any given day in northeast Ohio, a class of interns is immersed in hands-on instruction, learning to become tomorrow’s sustainable farmers. 

The interns are enrolled in the New Farmer Academy in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. On some days, they are in a classroom setting, but most days are spent working in a field, greenhouse or barn.

The program, the only one of its kind in the National Park Service was launched in 2018 by Countryside Food and Farms — another program unique to the National Park Service. Countryside is a nonprofit organization the park service established in 1999 to rehabilitate and lease the national park’s original farmsteads, under the Countryside Initiative.

Farmers in the farm-lease program operate under a long-term lease and, with park service support, use sustainable practices to grow livestock, fruit, vegetables and flowers.

The farms interact with the public, inviting people in for sheep-herding demonstrations and pick-your-own fruit or veggies. Some host weddings while others throw dinner parties with the farm’s organic produce in every dish.

Expanding Countryside’s offerings to include a more formal education has always been part of the original vision, said CEO Tracy Emrick.  Emrick worked side-by-side with the late Darwin Kelsey who launched Countryside, to get the farm program up and operational.

“The internship program was something Darwin always wanted to do, and when I came on board it was something I‘m very passionate about,” Emrick said.

The New Farmer Academy is not accredited — it offers internship, mentorship and career development. The internships help participants figure out whether farming is their true calling.

“This would be an opportunity to let them feel that,” said the academy’s Farm Manager Ginnette Simko. “Because it's one thing to say ‘I want to be a farmer.’ It's another thing to learn how to propagate and manage livestock and how to run and market a business”

Getting the program up and running wasn’t easy, Emrick said. Her staff looked for grants and applied for funding, but the program was getting no traction, despite lots of planning and good ideas.

Countryside had a small amount of reserve funds, so Emrick decided to take the leap and the New Farmer Academy was launched, with two interns and an apprentice working on-site with Countryside Initiative farmers.

“It just brings tears to my eyes because it was something that was always in the vision, but it was so hard to get going because it's so expensive,” Emrick said. “The first year it was a leap of faith. It was just, ‘Alright, we're going to start this. We've been talking about it for over a decade.’”

Since then, the academy has grown organically, and serendipitously.

Soon after the launch, Old Trail School, a private school for K-8th grades in the national park, offered Emrick use of a small neighboring farm to provide classroom space for the academy.

In exchange for use of the farm, Old Trail receives Countryside Initiative farm-grown, organic produce for the school’s dining hall.

The certified organic farm has about seven acres with two greenhouses. It also has an aquaponics facility, which involves soil-less agriculture fertilized from fish tanks.

The farm enables interns to learn in real time how to grow enough product for a large client, Emrick said.

“So they get to learn how to grow enough to serve customers. What's a 1,000-foot row look like? How do I know when to plant in the spring before the weather warms up?” Emrick said. “They get to learn greenhouse techniques, and they get to learn basically fourth-season growing.”

The internships pay $10.10 an hour, making it feasible to hire students who without some income would not be able to attend, Emrick said.

“We wanted to be building something that is available and approachable for everyone, so that it didn't matter where you came from, what your economic situation is,” she said. “It's a paid internship. It's not a lot of money, but at least it'll help if this is something you really want to try. So it helps to build equity.”

It was around this time that Countryside hired Simko, who was a faculty member of the sustainable agriculture program at Lorain County Community College.

Simko expanded on the curriculum, which includes ecology, soil science, plant propagation and food access, as well as business and marketing, the cultural history of agriculture in this region and other areas of study.

With her existing relationships with farmers across northeast Ohio, Countryside was able to extend its reach to include farms outside the national park borders.

From rural, urban and suburban farms, to livestock operations and greenhouses, interns have their pick of every kind of farming available between Cleveland to Akron.

The academy also gives interns a more direct pipeline to a job than a traditional education can, Simko said.

“There's not a whole lot of technical hands-on training out there,” she said. “This is all technical hands-on training.”

Before hiring the interns, Simko takes each applicant on a tour of the farm to gage their reaction, which helps reveal the true level of interest, she said.

“What I'm looking for, really, is somebody who has some idea of what they want to do,” Simko said. “It doesn't have to be a really fleshed out idea, but they have to have dabbled around enough to know that they're capable of working outdoors, they want to work outdoors and have the passion for this kind of work.”

This year, through grants and individual sponsorships, the academy accepted five more interns, growing the roster to eight students on mentor farms.

Students with little experience but a lot of desire stay at the academy farm for the first year, learning the basics of plants and farming, and how to ramp up production, Simko said.

“If you really fall in love with farming, and you come here as that novice, you get to keep developing that,” Emrick said.

Those with more experience usually spend more time in their first year on a mentor farm, as the education is customized to the intern, she said.

Interns spend up to 30-hours per week in class and on the farms, and scheduling is flexible, working around the needs of students with families or second jobs.

By year two, the students work almost wholly at the mentor farm that coincides with their area of interest.  From there, the education becomes even more targeted.

“As people get to the point where they've really developed a solid relationship with a particular farmer, then they really take them under their wing, work with them exclusively, in kind of an apprenticeship,” Simko said.

As time goes on, Emrick wants to keep growing the academy’s offerings, including adding more farms outside the national park.

She also wants the program to help graduates get settled on farmland.

“Hopefully by then we have some land-access processes and network connections that we can help get them to that land,” she said. “So that's our goal, just like [Countryside Initiative] was a land-access opportunity for first-gen farmers.”

In part three of this series, Spectrum News1 Ohio explores New Farmer Academy interns on-site at the Trapp Family Farm, one of 10 working farms in the Countryside Initiative of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.