S3 E2: The UW Farm with Eli Wheat

In this episode of FieldSound, we meet Eli Wheat, an assistant teaching professor in the University of Washington’s Program on the Environment, an environmental studies program housed within the College of the Environment. Wheat is passionate about sustainable farming, and our relationship as humans with the land and food we consume.

Wheat, who is also a core faculty member in the UW School of Public Health’s Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health program, brings a unique perspective as both a farmer and a scholar. He is helping to bridge the gap between academia and agriculture, inspiring the next generation to care for our planet.

Wheat’s teaching laboratory is UW Farm, which began as a student organization in the early 2000s and has grown to encompass three locations across the Seattle campus. Students from many UW departments and majors are able to get out and experience food production in an urban setting.

Beyond the campus, Wheat owns and operates SkyRoot Farm, a 20-acre certified organic animal and vegetable farm on Whidbey Island. SkyRoot’s farming practices are based on an ecosystem approach to land management in agriculture, and they grow mostly vegetables — plus keep a small herd of goats.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Transcript

00;00;02;25 - 00;00;18;23
Sarah Smith
From the University of Washington College of the Environment this is FieldSound.

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Sarah Smith
Eli Wheat is an assistant teaching professor in the Program on the Environment and Environmental Studies Program housed within the University of Washington's College of the Environment. Wheat is passionate about sustainable farming,

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Sarah Smith
The human relationship with the land, and the food we consume.

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Sarah Smith
with the unique perspective and real world experience as a farmer

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Sarah Smith
Wheat is helping to bridge the gap

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Sarah Smith
between academia and the field

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Sarah Smith
and inspiring the next generation and caring for our planet.

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Eli Wheat
I don't really think of myself as a researcher as much as a teacher, right? So I do a small amount of research, but most of my work is in in just sort of excellence in teaching and helping inspire kind of a new generation of students kind of go out and do things in the world.

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Eli Wheat
you know, I'm constantly talking about things like, you know, how could it, you know, what would it look like if we actually really took care of our soil? What would that kind of care look like? Well, how do you make that work? You know, and a profit driven model of agriculture, Right. So having a practice ground where I can explore how does that work is pretty.

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Eli Wheat
That's pretty great. Yeah.

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Eli Wheat
we engage with students to look at our human connections with agriculture through hands on learning opportunities at the UW Farm.

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Sarah Smith
The UW farm began as a student organization in the early 2000s, and it's grown to encompass three locations across the Seattle campus.

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Eli Wheat
I think about the farm is kind of like it's like a laboratory, only it's like actually alive with like living things in it.

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Eli Wheat
And it's a pretty phenomenal laboratory to be able to share with students and the farm on our campus actually has three locations, so we have kind of a rooftop rooftop garden at McMann Hall, and we have a really dense sort of urban setting. And what I think of as the front yard of Mercer Court, right where

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Eli Wheat
are surrounded by these like very tall buildings and unusual challenges of being in the urban environment.

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Eli Wheat
So like, you can't just like walk up to the garden beds, like the gardens are terrorists. So you have to like walk up and down steps with like buckets of compost and things like that. So really thinking about vertical, the vertical space of that unique landscape, and then also the different microclimates, right, that get made by the built environment of these sort of high rise apartment space.

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Eli Wheat
Yeah. So that's really a really special sort of opportunity, right, for urban culture to get into. And then we also have kind of an area that's like a more wild type farm, right? Where I would think of that as sort of like the main center of operations of the campus farm kind of out on the edge of the campus.

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Eli Wheat
And that's growing space now that's close to two acres

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Eli Wheat
And, you know, students from across the campus in many different departments and majors are able to get out there and really just have some hands on experience in production and food.

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Eli Wheat
And

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Eli Wheat
one of the things that is is quite impactful to me is to think about

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Eli Wheat
when one of the spaces in which I think we consistently undervalue humans is in the work of agricultural production and in history,

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Eli Wheat
the history of agricultural production is is wrought with human rights abuses.

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Eli Wheat
And those human rights abuses are ongoing. And so it's really powerful for students to have the opportunity to think about the physical labor, the skill set that's involved, and

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Eli Wheat
this is real work. And it isn't just physical work. And when I think about my life on the farm, like

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Eli Wheat
totality of who I am, gets to be on the farm in this really special way, right?

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Eli Wheat
So that like my mind and my body, even like sort of the Eli spirit, all of those things are engaged on the farm and that's a that's a really special place for learning for our students.

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Eli Wheat
you know, thinking about the value of our time and our labor.

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Sarah Smith
Beyond the classroom,

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Sarah Smith
Wheat owns and operates Sky Root Farm, a 20 acre certified, organic integrated animal and vegetable farm on south would be island.

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Sarah Smith
On their website, Sky Root Farm explains that their farming practices are based on an ecosystem approach to land management in agriculture,

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Eli Wheat
we grow mostly vegetables on our farm and certainly the main economic engine of the farm is vegetables.

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Eli Wheat
But we also have gosh, it's like it's maybe it's like two acres now of orchard landscape there. So we just like a lot of young orchard trees that sort of set up in a in a vision that's a little bit inspired by permaculture.

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Eli Wheat
a marriage of like road crop agriculture and permaculture ideas in an orchard.

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Eli Wheat
And then we also have a small herd of goats. We have, depending on the season between 20 and 30 goats, our guts are kind of good that come from I believe they're originated from New Zealand, they're called Kiko goats and they're quite, they're quite robust to the Pacific Northwest environment and they're mostly meat goats, so. you didn't eat our guts, which is like, you know, one of the things that's hard about farming.

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Eli Wheat
Yeah.

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Sarah Smith
Yeah. But like you said, you talked about relationship and sort of connection with your food and that's, that's part of it.

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Eli Wheat
Sure. Yeah. And like, that's actually an amazing thing because, you know, for many people, their parents didn't grow up on farms, but their grandparents did. Right? So you need to ask like, you know, grandparents, great grandparents, you know, it takes two or three generations back to get to that space of like a meaningful connection.

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Eli Wheat
we think of our farm as a regenerative farm, which means that what we're trying to do is regenerate the living systems of the farm, so really grounded in ecosystem function and, and principles of ecology in general. And I think in a generative farm, like it's not only regenerating sort of ecosystem function, but it's also regenerating sort of human communities in this way so that, you know, in the in the history of humankind, our relationship with food has always been a really central piece of what we do.

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Eli Wheat
And in modernity, we've actually managed to get kind of farther and farther away from a deep and meaningful action based relationship with food. But in a regenerative farm system, the idea is that, you know, people might be able to come back into that relationship,

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Eli Wheat
And.

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Sarah Smith
Recently,

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Sarah Smith
Wheat and his students have been unexpectedly and successfully experimenting

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Sarah Smith
with marine derived nutrients from kelp at the farm.

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Sarah Smith
Connecting the dots between marine and terrestrial food production.

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Eli Wheat
my.

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Eli Wheat
You know, my Ph.D. is in oysters. And so I did all my doctoral work, you know, in the intertidal zone and really thought about myself as kind of a marine agriculture, just thinking about, you know, when you see a field of oysters in the intertidal and it looks not that dissimilar from like a field of corn in Iowa, right?

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Eli Wheat
This is oysters as.

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Eli Wheat
Far as you can see. And so I've always been thinking a little bit about like, well, how can I bring my work now as a terrestrial farmer back in line with, you know, some of my own sort of passion and academic history. And I care for the marine environment. And, you know, sometimes the world just works in these unusual ways.

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Eli Wheat
I happen to be in my office, gosh, like four or five years ago now, maybe six years ago. And I was just sitting there and there was a woman talking about how they were about to harvest like all their kelp, and they had all this like kelp, and they didn't know where it could go. They were like going to have a problem because they had to harvest it but didn't have a place for it to go.

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Eli Wheat
And I, like, you know, kind of wanted out of my office and I was like, Are you serious? Like, you can't find a place for this kelp. Go like.

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Eli Wheat
Why don't you bring it to my farms?

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Eli Wheat
And the it turned out the kelp farm was actually only about seven miles away from where our farm is located. And so they harvested the kelp and brought it on a barge. A lot of kelp, I believe they're like

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Eli Wheat
poundage of some £14,000 of cabins. Of course, it's wet, so it's yeah, it's it's a lot.

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Eli Wheat
But it was huge to huge. Dump truckloads of kelp and we brought there and was just like a great big pile. Yeah, I can do this. Well, it turns out I was teaching a that summer a course on agroecology which is sort of the, the ecology of agricultural systems. And so I had all this Marine drive nutrition that had come from the kelp.

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Eli Wheat
And so I brought the class out and we sat around the pile and we talked about what can we work with, what's useful, give me test about this. And so we, we set up that just, you know, it was a small class, like ten or 12 students and it was a summer class. And we worked really hard, I mean, for two days straight, just moving this heavy camp and we set up plots, we set it up in like one meter.

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Eli Wheat
We created a grid and it was like every grid space in the grid was a meter by a meter square. And so we treated some of the squares with kelp and some without kelp. And then the students were interested in know what happens if you cover up the kelp? What if you cover it with, like, plastic? So it it doesn't like it's not getting pecked at by like birds or other organisms, but it's like totally covered up.

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Eli Wheat
What if you cover it up? But there's a lot of air exchange, so you cover it up with like a impermeable layer of something. And so we had all these different treatments and, you know, and that was basically the class. And then I assigned the class to basically make up the data, like because.

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Eli Wheat
The class was going to end before we could.

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Eli Wheat
Get any meaningful data back from this experiment. And so they all wrote these like hypothetical papers where they like, imagined what their data would be. wow. And it was quite fun for them, like a really interesting kind of creative project

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Eli Wheat
Right. So, you know, so it was a class and then it was the winter and, you know, I got busy doing teaching at YouTube and I didn't really come back to the experiment, which was out in sort of a back field on our farm. I didn't come back to look at that until the following summer, but in the following summer I had a different class, different group of students come out and, you know, it was actually amazing.

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Eli Wheat
You could stand back at the field, at the edge of the field. Yeah. And you could see with your eyes the difference. You could see like a dramatic difference in like, so the grass that it had, the kelp was like, greener and taller in these meter by one meter blocks.

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Eli Wheat
it was amazing. And so from that experiment then, you know, COVID hit and so things got kind of derailed and continue to working with Sea Grant and Meg. Chad See, their Meg is the person who initially made that connection for us.

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Eli Wheat
And yeah, and so then we've continue that project. We eventually got a little grant to work some teaching about kelp into kelp production and aquaculture culture through this grant. So we taught a couple of classes and got students interested in more kind of more detailed research about things.

00;11;04;26 - 00;11;18;15
Eli Wheat
working with a capstone student in the program on the environment, Nathan Mock, and he came here to the head of Farm, and we set up some more research plots using a kind of similar format, but a little bit more rigorously.

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Eli Wheat
And also because they were at U Dub, it was easier for the, you know, the student community to check in on the plots. And that helped bring students more engagement with the research and like met my goal and space. Yeah because that's that's the ultimate goal is to get students involved in this. And so we did that for a full year of his senior year and he measured changes in the soil.

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Eli Wheat
And then also he measured changes in the growth of the grass in the plots with him, with our kelp. So we got some really good data there. But not only that, we could see because you could continue even on the farm, you could continue to see this response of like you put down the kelp, the grass is greener and and the blades of grass actually are a little thicker,

00;11;57;26 - 00;11;59;16
Eli Wheat
but they also grow much better.

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Eli Wheat
And so and so then from that experiment, we tried to do a little extraction of trying to figure out what is in the kelp. That's causing this growth response, because

00;12;07;00 - 00;12;17;19
Eli Wheat
the kelp itself doesn't actually have an enormous amount of nutrition in it. So is it is it one of the things that is a hypothesis that we're continuing to work with is that maybe it's a hormonal response, right?

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Eli Wheat
So that there's some plant growth hormone in the kelp that stimulating the grass production

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Eli Wheat
kind of gotten a lot bigger than that now in circle Collier in the in the Food systems nutrition and health program in the School for Public Health just won a really large USDA grant to explore this idea in a in a more in-depth way, working with several local shellfish farms to remove nutrients, sort of remove like nuisance seaweed from the top of the shellfish farms and to

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Eli Wheat
dry that seaweed and then to use to put it out on terrestrial farms. And so going to be working with Deva Farms and some local shellfish farmers to kind of explore that

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Eli Wheat
it's a really practical, bio regional solution to begin thinking about, Well, gosh, you know, we have ongoing issues with nutrient pollution in the Puget Sound. We have a growing interest within many different factions of the communities here in interest in growing marine algae and marine species that can be utilized for human food consumption.

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Eli Wheat
Right. So this field of mer culture is something that many, many people are very interested in increasing in the near-shore environment and their cultures, a way of recapturing some of those nutrients that are causing, you know, nutrient pollution in the sand, pulling them out of the sound, using them for human food. And those byproducts could then be used to help stimulate terrestrial food production as well.

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Eli Wheat
So yeah, it's a really cool project that could like stimulate economic growth in the sort of nearshore marine ecosystems and industry there, but also could be supportive to many small farmers in the region. So when I think about it's like a win win because students can get excited about it, it can help sequester carbon and long term storage in the soil.

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Eli Wheat
It can solve a problem in Puget Sound like all these things can come together to like help create a solution space. It's creative and, you know, regional

00;14;14;04 - 00;14;18;25
Sarah Smith
these UW farm experiences. Provide students with unique opportunities

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Sarah Smith
with lasting impacts

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Sarah Smith
that stay with them well beyond graduation.

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Eli Wheat
I think it's a really, really impressed thing that the students at YouTube are able to have this opportunity to work with the landscape of YouTube and help it be productive. Right. Because that's that is really special is exactly what you're just talking about. Like you hope that in the future you have this relationship with it, with a space where you can just grow some things.

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Eli Wheat
And I think about how much students get from the opportunity to be here on our campus and be engaged in helping grower things. Right In some of the things that we're talking about, students carrying our our trees. Right? So there's,

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Eli Wheat
you know, there's a heritage orchard that's going in right now at the head of farm. And those trees were put in by Austin is pursuing their own work in horticulture now.

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Eli Wheat
But like all firm like crafts that this didn't did like taking grass and different trees and

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Eli Wheat
and it's just so exciting Those trees

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Eli Wheat
are going to be on our campus, you know, for another 20 or 30 years

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Eli Wheat
That's such a special things.

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Eli Wheat
But lots of students have gone through the year to farm and been inspired by their work there, be it in science and relationships with soil to pursue sort of soil biology or just actually in the work of food production itself. So a lot of students have gone from the UTEP farm on to

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Eli Wheat
pursue their own interest in food production, and many of those students are now working on other people's farms and some of them are actually starting their own farms, which is really exciting to

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Eli Wheat
Right

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Sarah Smith
to learn more about Eli Wheat and the UW Farm, visit our website at Environment Dot UW dot edu.

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Sarah Smith
I'd like to thank our guest, Eli Wheat, for joining us. From all of us here at Field Sound. Thanks for listening. See you next time.