Garden at Houston school draws visit from agriculture official

WARNER ROBINS -- There are several goals for Westside Gardens at Westside Elementary School, and they all start with students and seeds.

The garden uses 16 aeroponics towers, where vegetables and herbs are grown by students and watered on a timer.

"We use it for the students. They plant it, they maintain it and then they harvest the vegetables," Westside principal Cynthia Hammond said.

Once the lettuce, cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes and other crops are harvested, they're used in the cafeteria, and parents also take home samples. Other produce from the plastic towers, which stand about 8 feet tall, is provided to local businesses in exchange for a donation.

"And the funds that we get will help us sustain our garden," Hammond said.

That system caught the attention of Department of Agriculture representatives, including Audrey Rowe, its food and nutrition service administrator. She was in the area visiting schools, which included lunch at Macon's Alexander II Magnet School, and she made a point to stop by Westside Gardens.

Rowe was impressed by the towers, which were provided by Ellis Jaxon Farms and Americans for Schools, but there was far more on her mind.

"What's even more important is kids can see their food being grown," she said.

With that experience in hand, trips to the grocery store are different as students know exactly what the process is for food to be produced. They can share that knowledge with their parents and involve the whole family in learning.

"It becomes part of the student's lifestyle," Rowe said.

The students have enjoyed learning through a hands-on model, school officials said. Kenneth Hammond's second-grade class was working in the garden, decked out in safety goggles and makeshift lab coats, when Rowe and district representatives arrived on Thursday.

"We learned about the garden," Connor Coulter, 8, said. "We can pick stuff and we can grow stuff out here."

Teachers can also incorporate lessons from the garden in math and science classes, but the value of the program extends beyond the students growing the food, said Sean Kumar of Ellis Jaxon Farms. He described America as a "nation in crisis," with 16.8 million hungry children across the country.

"It's not only for these kids," Kumar said of the garden. "It's important for America."

A native of India, Kumar said that other countries are facing an even deeper issue, but he saw no reason that America couldn't erase its hunger problem. The gardens at Westside and Northside High School were meant to "prove a point," which is that no great space or resource commitment is needed to create sustainable sources of food for the community.

"Child hunger is an easy problem to solve, and it's easier to solve than we thought," he said.

To contact writer Jeremy Timmerman, call 744-4331 or find him on Twitter@MTJTimm.

This story was originally published October 15, 2015 at 5:27 PM with the headline "Garden at Houston school draws visit from agriculture official ."