The River Falls school farm has provided a hands-on learning opportunity that most schools cannot provide, and those lessons have been taught alongside a focus on sustainable practices in the field.

The farm is about 40 acres of land that includes 35 acres used for row crops and the remaining portion used for an array of fruits, vegetables and flowers. The school’s agriculture department is also getting involved in Earth Fest at UWRF, with students growing lettuce in their growing towers to be given out to attendees. The towers are inside the school, with special lighting and nutrient modules to allow growth of butterhead and romaine lettuce hydroponically.

“Those grow towers we’re growing the lettuce in, they’re a part of the sustainable agriculture goal because they are grown indoors with an LED light, and they’re not in the ground. A lot of people have concerns about there being runoff into waters that we’re using manures or fertilizers or anything. With that, it’s a contained space, so it’s not getting into those river waters, it’s not going into our drains,” senior Morgan Matheson said.

The school has 10 of the indoor growing towers, with both the lettuce and some cut flowers growing in them. They can control the environment in the contained units, providing a big advantage compared to the randomness of an outdoor environment. The students do it all, measuring pH, nutrients and light duration to make the plants grow.

“The consumer wants transparency with where their food comes from. I think a consumer will spend a little bit more knowing it was growing sustainably. We don’t use any harmful chemicals,” River Fall Agriculture Teacher Ryan Pechacek said. “It’s some of the greenest looking lettuce that you can get.”

Pechacek said bringing in lettuce from California or another far away state tacks on a lot of miles, meaning the lettuce will not be at its freshest when it hits the shelves.

Additionally at the event, students will be handing out trees and showing off the maple syrup they have been cooking down.

“Our goal as being part of Earth Fest is to promote sustainable agriculture, most specifically at our school and in our community,” Pechacek said.

The school farm as a whole has become a major opportunity for River Falls agriculture students and those involved in FFA.

“It’s really a place where students can come up and do their own things they can’t do at home,” Matheson said. “I live in town, so I’m unable to have bees without my neighbors freaking out at me.”

Some students have participated in paid summer internships on the farm. The internship entails selecting a project and completing a series of goals on that project. For Matheson, that project was the bees.

“I didn’t know a lot about it when I started, but it was good because it helped me learn a lot about growing plants,” junior Olivia Johnson, who grew watermelon for a summer internship, said. “I just wanted a way to be more involved in FFA, and it was one of the first things I really did in FFA.”

Another focus of the school’s agriculture department has been reconnecting students to agriculture.

“Trying to educate our youth on just how diverse agriculture is. The Wisconsin agriculture industry is $116 billion, so it’s an economy that is continuing to grow every year, and there are high-paying jobs. We need to continue to teach kids about feeding the world and doing it in a sustainable way. Agriculture isn’t going away. AI can’t farm for us, at least not yet,” Pechacek said.

The agriculture students put on elementary and community ag days, welcoming people to the school farm to show off what they do and provide a hands-on experience with farm animals, machinery and more. At the elementary ag day, students got to try apple cider from apples grown and pressed on the farm, saw a combine and pet a variety of farm animals.

“Seeing kids’ faces light up when they get to see something new. Obviously, for a lot of these kids, seeing tractors and animals and stuff like that, they only see that when they’re passing by a farm,” senior Parker Sabelko said. “You can tell that they’re genuinely enjoying when they’re asking questions. It makes me feel fulfilled because I grew up with machinery and stuff like that, so I guess it’s kind of second nature for me.”

The future is bright for the school farm. Pechacek said they are looking to build a syrup shack in the near future to provide a space to cook their syrup. The students already go through the maple syrup process from tapping the trees to bottling the syrup. Having the shack would increase the education opportunities, including bringing students of all ages to the shack to see the process themselves.

“Students learn best when they see things, when they work with their hands. It gives them alternatives to real life application,” Pechacek said. “As more and more kids become far removed from farms, they need to get involved in different ways of how they can relate back to agriculture… Since my time here, we have really evolved into that space. Down the road, I can see us having animals out there, I can see us doing a farm to table or school to table concept.”

There is already a food processing class in place that teaches students to preserve food.

“We’re taking primal cuts of a hog and taking the belly of it, which is where you get your bacon from. We’re cutting them up, curing them, smoking them to the proper temperature and then cooking them. It’s really cool for the kids to see the whole process,” Pechacek said.

Another future addition to the farm Pechacek is looking into would be constructing a general store to sell the farm’s honey, syrup, freeze-dried candy, produce, meat, herbs and more. They recently purchased 35 feeder pigs from the university, and high school and middle school students will raise them and eventually sell them.

“It’s just really cool having the school farm, because I know a lot of other schools don’t have that. Our school district as a whole is very supportive of agriculture,” Sabelko said.

“I can see us eventually doing that with beef, with chicken, with hogs and really having students take care of the animals,” Pechacek said.

For Pechacek, one memory sums up the value of the school farm. A few years back, a foreign exchange student from Canada studied at River Falls and spent time learning on the school farm. The student enjoyed the experience so much that they altered their career path, going on to study agriculture in college.

“It’s opening doors some students didn’t think even existed,” Pechacek said.