hotchkiss magazine: fairfield farm and food
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16 H O T C H K I S S M A G A Z I N E
Growing a New Kind of Education
B Y D I V Y A S Y M M E R S
Up on the[Hotchkiss] Farm:
few rules apply when you’re wan-
dering around the Hotchkiss Farm
– still known formally as Fairfield
Farms – but the most important is
to close the gates behind you. The
280-acre School property off Route 41, where open
meadows are dotted by clumps of white oak, hickory
and maple trees, is home to some 50 head of cattle – a
benign and shaggy-coated mix of Devon, Devon-cross,
and Hereford and Hereford-crosses that belong to local
farmer Allen Cockerline.
Poised between Lakeville and Sharon, 260 acres of this
gorgeously diverse blend of forest, wetlands, upland
fields, and pasture were acquired by Hotchkiss in 2004, a
generous partial gift from Jack Blum ’47, a former
trustee, and his wife, Jeanne, who raised Black Angus cat-
tle here for 27 years. In 2010 the School purchased the
remaining 17 acres, a tract that included the Blum fami-
ly’s stately, white-columned home and three sturdy out-
buildings. With dramatic views of the iconic twin oaks
beloved of local painters and the Taconic hills cascading
north to Massachusetts, the farm is a spectacular setting
for events such as the annual Prep for the Planet day,
held for the third time in September 2011 and inspired
by Head of School Malcolm McKenzie’s remark, several
years ago, that “Prep for college is vital, but prep for the
planet is a more compelling matter, a matter of survival.”
For Hotchkiss preps, it’s an opportunity to spend a
day outside picking apples, beans, and squash, digging
potatoes, clearing trails, and in general experiencing a
place that’s becoming a pivotal part of Hotchkiss life.
“We’re getting better every year,” said Josh Hahn, assis-
tant head of school and director of environmental ini-
tiatives. “We’re more organized. We have more crops,
so the diversity of the produce is better. And these kids
are discovering where their food comes from, how it’s
processed, and where it goes. ”
“I think today, especially, it’s really important to be
able to grow food locally in an organic way,” said Maude
Quinn ’15. “And I think it’s really cool to be out here
and know that Hotchkiss is part of something like this.”
About eight tons of potatoes were harvested from the
Farm this fall, which is almost half the estimated 20 tons
consumed in the Hotchkiss Dining Hall during a typical
academic year. Students, faculty, and staff have been
feasting on squash and fresh greens, tomatoes and an
impressive variety of other vegetables planted, tended,
picked, and even pickled, by members of FFEAT
(Fairfield Farms Ecosystems and Adventure Team) and
six hardworking farm interns. Thanks to an agreement
with the School’s food service company as well as con-
tracts with a pair of humane, FDA-approved slaughter-
houses in Connecticut and Massachusetts, an estimated
600 organic free-range chickens raised on the farm will
A
Teaching Healthy Habits
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17F a l l 2 0 1 1
‘‘My hope for the farm is that everyone atHotchkiss will be ableto say that they had apart in providing thefood that they eat inthe dining hall.” —Maren Wilson ’14
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Teaching Healthy Habits
18 H O T C H K I S S M A G A Z I N E
be cooked and eaten at Hotchkiss this year, as will meat
from three grass-fed steers the School purchased from
Allen Cockerline; this spring, there may even be rice
from an experimental rice paddy.
“My hope for the Farm is that everyone at Hotchkiss
will be able to say that they had a part in providing the
food that they eat in the dining hall,” said farm intern
Maren Wilson ’14, in a passionate email at summer’s
end. “We are a big school so it is a huge goal. But the
internship program in the summer and FFEAT in the
fall and spring help so much in integrating talk about
the farm in classrooms and at lunch tables, and helping
advertise how sustainability and organic farming are
really important in the world today.”
A Destination and a Classroomeyond its increasingly visible role providing organ-
ically grown food for the School Dining Hall, the
Hotchkiss Farm is also where art classes can practice
plein air painting, poetry classes can find inspiration,
environmental science classes can explore terrain that
includes rare grassland bird habitats, and American
history classes can reflect on the fact that this was once
part of a land grant from King George III. For the past
two years, the School’s human development teaching
assistants have organized a nutrition seminar, and there
are other courses in the works that will look at every-
thing from genetically modified food to food-borne ill-
nesses. When completed, farm trails will add an esti-
mated three to five miles to the six or more that already
traverse the Hotchkiss Woods, resulting in an even
more welcoming nature experience/destination for stu-
dents, faculty, staff, and neighboring town residents.
One particular stretch of field between the big red barn
and a screened gazebo that Jack Blum built for his wife
has already lent itself to tented gatherings of all sorts,
from an end-of-year staff and faculty retirement cele-
bration in June to a 99.9 percent farm-grown Trustees’
dinner in September. At a faculty wedding in August,
“The cows came right up and watched,” said Head of
the Visual and Performing Arts Department and
Instructor in Art Charlie Noyes ’78, with a laugh. “The
Farm has become a part of the fabric of the School.”
In the spring of 2008, it was a different story. As
B
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19F a l l 2 0 1 1
Noyes puts it, when he said farm, “no one knew where
it was.” But by then Allen Cockerline, owner of
Whipporwill Farm in Salisbury and a longtime purvey-
or of healthy, grass-fed beef, had been brought on
board to help manage the property. He and Noyes were
old friends, and he encouraged Noyes to get involved
with planting crops. “It really was an organic process,”
Cockerline explained during an educational day at the
Farm held for faculty and staff last summer. “There
were early discussions of what can we do? How can we
grow food? Then we sank the plow into the ground and
said, ‘All right, let’s do it!’ ”
Enlisting the initially reluctant help of the School’s
climbing club, a co-curricular activity he coached at the
time, Noyes took them out to the Farm to plant squash,
pumpkins, beans, and potatoes, all crops that are simple
to grow. At the same time, he sat down and wrote a
proposal for a new co-curricular activity – the Fairfield
Farms Ecosystems and Adventure Team, or FFEAT.
The following fall he and the kids who had signed up
for FFEAT spent days cleaning out the Farm’s barn,
since its concrete floor made it ideal for storing potatoes
and apples in what they hoped, erroneously it turned
out, would be a rat-proof root cellar of sorts. Deer had
already decimated the beans and pumpkins. And when
it came time to harvest the potatoes, Noyes sent three
girls out to check how they looked. “Yeah, yeah, you
already showed us where they are,” they assured him,
and off they went, only to come back empty-handed.
“They couldn’t find the potatoes,” Noyes remem-
bered, laughing. “So we all trundled back out to the
field – and this was a teaching moment, because the
vines had withered at that point, and because we don’t
use fertilizer or weed killer, it just looked like a weedy
field. I said to them, ‘If you stand here, you can see
there’s kind of a row,’ and they said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ And
they started to dig, and they pulled up a potato, and
you’d think they’d found gold, they were so happy.” He
laughed again. “They all started digging and they were
filling the bottoms of their T-shirts with dirty potatoes.
When I asked them what they were doing, they said,
‘We’re gonna eat them! We’ll bring them back to the
dorm and have a feed!’ ”
The excitement of that moment was as unexpected as
the realization that the students didn’t know potatoes
grew in the ground; admittedly, plenty of city-bred
adults don’t know, either. It’s only in the last decade
that the organic and locavore farming movement has
gained momentum, fueled by ‘slow-food’ gurus such as
Alice Waters, who spoke at the School in 2009, and The
Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, who has a
house in nearby Cornwall. The knowledge disconnect
between the process of growing food and the con-
sumers who buy it has narrowed considerably; even
Wal-Mart sells organic, locally grown produce these
days. In the three years since FFEAT was founded, stu-
dent awareness of where their food comes from has
similarly grown in leaps and bounds – as has the
School’s use of Fairfield Farms. “We now have five
acres under tillage and we could expand easily and
double that. That’s a lot of food,” said Noyes. “This
year we’ve partnered with Sodexo, our food services
company, to streamline the farm-to-table process, so
we’re getting homegrown food to the School more effi-
ciently. That means most of it is going to the Dining
Hall – so kids are eating what kids grow.”
A Homecoming of Sortshere’s definite synchronicity in the fact that the
house Hotchkiss acquired in 2010 was built in
1905 by Albert B. Landon, the husband of Carrie
Bissell, who was Maria Hotchkiss’s aunt. In the 1700s,
the land surrounding it was the core of a 7,000-acre
tract deeded by King George to Captain James Landon,
who in turn conveyed 170 acres of what became known
as Tory Hill to the Bissell family. (A loyalist, Landon
lost everything in the Revolution.) Both Maria
Harrison Bissell Hotchkiss and her brother Charles H.
Bissell, a future School trustee, were born in a house on
T
Opposite: Students enjoysome downtime at thefarm, attracting mild inter-est from resident cows.
Top: Charlie Noyes ’78gives instruction to mem-bers of FFEAT (FairfieldFarms Ecosystems andAdventure Team).
Above: Erin Markey ’11shows off an example of thefarm’s robust crop.
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20 H O T C H K I S S M A G A Z I N E
Tory Hill Farm, also known as Home Farm. Before her
death in New York City in 1901, Maria visited Charles
frequently, and her funeral service was held there and
was “largely attended,” according to records, “the fac-
ulty and students of the Hotchkiss School being pre-
sent in a body.”
When Charles Bissell died, his will included the wish
that his “farm of land with the buildings thereon, con-
taining one hundred and seventy-five acres, more or
less, on Tory Hill, in said Town of Salisbury” to the
Maria H. Hotchkiss School Association “to create in
said school an Agricultural Course or Department
where, under scientific direction, the various branches
of farming or dairying, fruit culture or other kindred
agricultural subjects can be both practically and scien-
tifically taught.”
The Blums, too, were avidly committed to conserv-
ing the land – and Jack Blum, as a former commission-
er of the Connecticut Department of Agriculture,
hoped that Hotchkiss students would “work and study
on the farm and become educated, engaged, and pas-
sionate stewards of the environment.”
It’s finally happening. For the past two years
Hotchkiss has sponsored summer farm internships, and
Kurt Hinck ’08, now a sophomore at Gettysburg
College, and lower-mid Maren Wilson ’14, are veterans
of both summers. For Wilson, who arrived not knowing
what to expect, it’s been an opportunity to master skills
like weeding, seeding, harvesting, and tending fruit trees;
even welding portable chicken coops and raising the
birds – a breed known as Kosher Kings – in “the most
healthy and organic way possible.” Hinck, who was co-
manager this year, had worked on a farm in Millbrook
every summer since his lower-mid year and volunteered
for the Farm’s first spring planting as a senior in 2008.
He’s still amazed by the progress that’s been made. “Just
that little five-acre plot, we buried them in squash last
year. We had too much. The potential is awesome.”
This summer the program was expanded from three
to five days a week, and Wilson said she “smiled all the
way home” because of the enormous tasks accomplished
by the group, which also included Tavo True-Alcala ’11,
Sandie Knuth ’10, and Nancy Palmer ’11. Supervising
them was Serena Whitridge, a Millbrook School (“I’m a
traitor, sorry!”) and University of Vermont graduate who
worked at Growing Power, a nonprofit urban farming
organization in Milwaukee before coming to Hotchkiss.
“It’s exciting seeing the potential of what it is now and
then dreaming of the future, of how much more food
can be produced,” she said, noting that one of their more
ambitious projects is building hoop houses – portable,
passive solar greenhouses that extend the growing season
by allowing winter planting.
They also help boost soil fertility: the Farm’s
Stockbridge clay loam, while a “great grassland soil,”
can be tricky in wet years with crops, “corn, soybeans,
that kind of stuff,” according to Allen Cockerline, who
works closely with students. The kind of tender-hearted
farmer who takes care to ensure his cattle lead idyllic
lives with ends that are as swift and humane as possible
(the three steers he sold Hotchkiss were sent to a
slaughter-house that runs on principles established by
animal advocate Temple Grandin), not long ago he
took a group of faculty and staff on a tractor tour up a
narrow grassy road and down to a small, experimental
rice paddy, where a Japanese variety already successful
in Vermont was planted last spring. “Who would have
thought we’d be growing rice?” he asked, with a grin.
“But it’s credible. It’s viable. And we’re doing it.”
Modeling Self-Reliancearther up on Farm property there’s a beaver swamp
where Charlie Noyes hopes to put in observation
decks. There are trails that need to be built, marked with
signage, and maintained. New crops are being planned
(this year, the Farm grew black beans for the first time)
along with new and larger storage areas to hold the pro-
Above: Members of theprep class harvest potatoesat the annual Prep for thePlanet Day in September.
F
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Below: Students work atPrep for the Planet Day,before sitting down to ahearty farm-to-table lunch,with food from FairfieldFarms.
dishes whose enticingly labeled contents included
“tossed salad with tomatoes from the Hotchkiss Farm”;
“herb roasted potatoes with potatoes and rosemary
from the Hotchkiss Farm”; “braised greens with collard
and kale from the Hotchkiss Farm”, and braised barbe-
cue brisket from Alan Cockerline’s grass-fed cows.
Even the fresh cider was pressed by the kids from
apples they’d picked that morning. “It was a great expe-
rience,” said Serena Sommerfield ’15, seated contented-
ly on a hay bale near classmates Gloria Odoemelam,
Kahiya McDaniels, and Maude Quinn.
It’s only the first of many. “Our focus is on how
these kids can create their own futures,” points out Josh
Hahn. “Producing energy with the new biomass plant,
building soil and sequestering carbon, and growing
food – this is all part of the creative, regenerative, entre-
preneurial, problem-solving mindset. The Farm builds
context for the content we teach in the classroom. Even
if we only produce enough tomatoes for a month or
half the potatoes we consume all year, we’re modeling
not just being consumers, we’re modeling self-reliance.
And that’s really the thrust of each and every environ-
mental initiative the School promotes.”
duce that’s harvested next year. There’s already an
emphasis on food justice, with the Farm participating in
local food banks and similar outreach, including educa-
tional displays right in the Dining Hall.
“A lot of my kids are saying, ‘OK, this is all well and
good, but what about the people who can’t afford
organic?’ ” explained Noyes, who sees the Farm’s poten-
tial for integration into the life of the School as limitless.
“One of Josh Hahn’s missions as environmental coordi-
nator is to weave in curricular elements – not just envi-
ronmental studies and science courses, but also the arts,
languages, math. Every program, whether co-curricular
or curricular, will be built on the four R’s: responsibili-
ty, relationship, relevance – which is absolutely essential
– and rigor.”
In September, after a morning of hard but exhilarat-
ing work for Prep for the Planet day, the prep class was
treated to a farm-to-table lunch prepared by Andy Cox,
the new manager of the School’s dining services. A far
cry from the packed sandwiches of yore, there in the
Farm’s red barn, not far from where the latest batch of
fast-growing Kosher King chicks peeped contently
under warm lights, a long table was covered in chafing
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22 H O T C H K I S S M A G A Z I N E
A Passionate ‘Farm to Table’ Chef
B Y K R I S T E N H I N M A N ’ 9 4
The Dining Services’ Andy Cox:
ast summer, as Andrew Cox prepped
his family’s move from Boston to the
Lakeville area, he realized there’d be a
few adjustments to country life – like,
the lack of mail delivery in his new
town of Copake, NY. All things considered, however,
the 33-year-old chef was ready to escape the urban jun-
gle and spread out in a landscape primed for his dream
project: building out a local food system.
Cox, who hails from New Haven, came of age as a
cook at the beginning of a national culinary awakening,
just as socially-conscious consumers began to press for
more sustainably- and humanely-sourced whole foods
at their favorite groceries and restaurants. He’s staffed
stands at farmers’ markets and worked the soil beneath
his ingredients. The food he serves his own family
comes from small growers who eschew hormones and
antibiotics, pesticides and fossil fuel-based fertilizers.
Cox put in stints for chefs who shared his beliefs in
Oregon, Chicago and Boston. Then he joined the ranks
of corporate food service, where he has helped improve
sustainability practices at Sodexo in particular. Cox
recently left his post as Sodexo’s executive chef at
Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government, where he served locally-sourced repasts
to the likes of Condoleeza Rice and Al Gore, to take
over as Sodexo’s general manager of Hotchkiss Dining
Services. Cox says the School’s farm was a big lure to
Lakeville. But his rapport with Josh Hahn, director of
environmental initiatives, and John Tuke, chief financial
officer, was equally important.
“I could see we were all on the same page in terms of
achieving more sustainability,” says Cox. “We all see
eye-to-eye on the challenges we have, but also the
opportunity to really be a leader in the industry.”
What will the 21st-century dining hall look like?
Here, Cox expands on his philosophy and plans to
innovate in Lakeville.
Q You’ll have to tell me how a former physicsmajor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteended up in culinary school.
A I studied physics for more than a year, but then I
switched majors several times. Eventually my parents
suggested a leave of absence. I moved to Chicago and
did some telecoms engineering. A friend came for the
summer, and since I got out of my union job early
every day we wound up cooking dinner every night.
Before she went back to the East Coast she put me on
the mailing list of every culinary school in the city. I got
laid off after 9/11, but they gave me re-training money.
I ended up enrolling at Kendall College.
L
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‘‘The farm manager andI want to grow all thefood that we need andwe’re looking at thosecosts now. We mightsucceed with potatoesby next year.”—Andrew Cox
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24 H O T C H K I S S M A G A Z I N E
Q You must have done some cooking as a kid.
I actually became a vegetarian in college and wound up
having to cook for myself a lot since my fraternity was
not very vegetable-friendly.
Q Do you eat meat now?
A Yes. I gave it up for four years because I was moral-
ly-opposed, not to killing animals but to eating the
highly-processed commodity meat that’s everywhere in
our society. The first time I ate meat again, a friend had
gone deer hunting. I thought that I might as well start
back up with the real stuff. We did a rack of venison
with a cherry and pinot-noir reduction.
Q You eventually landed at Blue Ginger, theBoston-area restaurant owned by celebrity chefMing Tsai. But your formative education in sea-sonal cooking came much earlier?
A Yes, while I was at culinary school I went to intern
for a Kendall alumnus who had a farm-to-table restau-
rant in Ashland, Oregon. The menu changed every day
based on which growers showed up at the back door. I
visited a lot of farms, and I volunteered at one that did a
lot of our greens.
Q How did that influence your outlook as achef?
A When I went back to Chicago I was only willing to
work in restaurants that served local food. There were
basically only three at the time; I just bothered the chefs
till I got a job. I ended up at a very refined restaurant
with a chalkboard that listed every ingredient and what
farm it was from. The chef quizzed the waiters con-
stantly on the sourcing — he was that passionate about
making sure people knew where the food came from.
Even after I moved into corporate food service, that
philosophy was still what influenced me the most. I’ve
tried to take advantage of every opportunity to push
people toward using local food and reducing waste.
Q Why is local food better?
A You can’t know what’s happening on a farm halfway
around the world, and it’s pretty easy to green-wash
with certain labels. With local food you can find out
what farmers are putting into the soil – if it involves pes-
ticides, petrochemical fertilizers, insecticides. You can
learn what they’re doing with their water management.
You can find out if they’re paying their workers a living
wage. Your food is going to be healthier, you’ll know if
it’s better for the environment, and you’ll respect it a lot
more. You’ll know you’re helping to stimulate the local
economy and developing community.
Q I understand Hotchkiss just bid out itsfood-service contract for the first time in morethan a decade, and though the School decidedto continue working with its previous contrac-tor, Sodexo, you were an important part of thewinning package, along with a set of sustain-ability standards that the company wants toimplement.
A The program is called A Better Tomorrow, and it
has 14 metrics that we work toward. Some of them are
measurable, that we’ll look at quarterly or annually.
Local purchasing, energy reduction, and health and
wellness all factor in.
A You didn’t come in thinking that feedingkids healthier food would be easy, did you?
My wife reminded me that she’d gone to a prep
school, and everybody hated the food. She said, ‘The
kids are gonna hate the food no matter what you do.’ I
Below: Chef Cox makes anafternoon visit to the Farm
and gets some just-pickedproduce from a student.
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25F a l l 2 0 1 1
guess there’s only room for improvement; that’s how I
see it. I hated brussels sprouts growing up, until I
learned to cook them properly. I think Hotchkiss kids
would eat beef tongue if it’s cooked well.
Q So where do you start?
A My first focus is on cooking real food well, from
scratch. There’s stuff we’re serving that I myself would-
n’t eat, like frozen strawberries in syrup. We have a full
bakery and a Culinary Institute of America-trained
baker, but we’re buying pre-made scones and throwing
them into the oven. Items like those need to be looked
at across the board. We’ve done away with large, sauce-
laden portions of meat at lunch. We’re trying to stick to
lighter sandwiches. We started offering an organic oat-
meal bar every morning with various toppings. Do we
still serve Cap’n Crunch cereal? Yes. But the oatmeal bar
has been really well received. You just can’t take away all
the fat and sugar at once.
Q How do you ramp up the locally-sourcedofferings?
A We have some now from Connecticut and
Massachusetts, but I’ll be working on getting even more
into our system. There are a lot of factors involved; it’s
complicated from the standpoints of food safety and
pricing, as well as transportation. Mainly I’m trying to
figure out things like, how many carrots do we go
through in a year? Can we grow them here at the
Hotchkiss farm, harvest them at their peak, process and
then store them for use them all year-round?
Q Wow. How much Hotchkiss-sourced foodare we talking about?
A The farm manager and I want to grow all the food
that we need, and we’re looking at those costs now. We
might succeed with potatoes by next year. If we can
grow 18 tons of potatoes, that’ll save us money. My
long-term goal is to put a processing plant-slash-kitchen
on the farm.
Q What about meat?
A There’s a lot of red tape there, and I’m trying to break
through that now. In the case of our beef, it’s basically all
commodity. It’s full of hormones and antibiotics. Can we
afford to switch all our beef to grass-fed right now? No.
But when we start saving money in other areas, including
energy and waste, that will help. I’ve just set up an
arrangement with a slaughterhouse in Massachusetts so
that we can raise our own cattle, slaughter and serve it. It
turns out there’s even a local farming family with a stu-
dent at Hotchkiss who has a number of steer, and they’re
willing to sell to us. First I have to set up processes to be
sure everything meets USDA regulations and Sodexo
product-quality assurance.
Q You mentioned energy savings. What kindof shape did you find the kitchen in?
A Oh, man. The bakery has lights that are on 24
hours a day, because nobody knows where the light
switch is. I’ll walk by storerooms with lights on when
nobody’s there. I think we could install motion sensors
there for savings. We also have seven walk-in refrigera-
tors, four reach-ins, and three walk-in freezers; it’s too
much. We use one refrigerator just to store oil that gets
used on one of the buses. It doesn’t need to be refriger-
ated! I’ve already talked to the mechanic and he’s going
to just start taking these containers. We’re paying for
water and energy where we don’t need to be.
Q Are you starting to hear about some of yourchanges from students?
A I’ve gotten some comments about the fact that we
don’t have dessert every night any more. But we have
fresh fruit available 24 hours a day. Malcolm asked
what we could do with stuff from the farm, to highlight
it there. We ended up with carrot cupcakes and a cream
cheese frosting.
Q Mmm. That reminds me of a Hotchkiss tra-dition known as “a feed.” Have you heard of it?
A No.
Q It involves late-night gluttony. I’m guessingyour influence won’t be felt there as much.
A I’m not sure about that. But you never know.
Left: In the School’s pastrykitchen, Cox shows somegarlic twist rolls for theevening’s dinner.Purchasing from localgrowers, energy reduction,and health and wellness areamong the dining services’sustainability standards.
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