WWU students grow thousands of pounds of veggies at City Sprouts Farm in the Birchwood neighborhood

WWU’s Ellie Duncan recently stood in a muddy half-acre in the Birchwood neighborhood and saw beyond the hunkered-down, over-winter gloom.

Tucked in next door to a Kulshan Community Land Trust housing development under construction, the urban farm plot would soon become a field blossoming with dozens of varieties of vegetables tended by WWU students and bound for the pantries of nearby residents. 

“I really love thinking about what colors are going to emerge in the summer, what we are going to do differently each year,” said Duncan, program coordinator for WWU’s Center for Community Learning. “Because we’re growing annual veggies, every year is a clean slate. We’re doing it all again, and there’s a lot of beauty to that.”

City Sprouts Farm, a program of WWU’s Center for Community Learning, produces four to five tons of produce each year, Duncan said. She expects about half of this year’s crop will be sold in a sliding-scale CSA (community-supported agriculture) program. The rest will be distributed through the WHOLE food pantry at Western as well as other nonprofit partners like Sea Mar Community Health Center and the Birchwood Food Desert Fighters.

Throughout the summer and early fall, the farm sends as much produce to the WHOLE pantry as students can consume, Duncan said, and they expect to send even more to the WHOLE pantry this year to meet growing demand. 

“Students really appreciate having access to fresh, local produce,” said Gina Ebbeling, who oversees the WHOLE pantry and the Basic Needs Hub. “Knowing students have helped grow the food is a bonus.” 

Managed by Duncan and student assistants, the farm is staffed by WWU students, including 11 interns who are working the farm this spring for academic credit. This summer’s student crew will include six apprentices who earn an hourly wage thanks to Western’s Sustainability, Equity and Justice Fund. 

“There was never a time where I felt like someone showed up to farm and left worse because of it,” said Alice Moe, an urban planning student who interned two quarters at City Sprouts, even though she had no previous farming experience. 

“Your labor, your time and your energy will bring value to these spaces,” Moe said. “That’s true for a lot of spaces, but definitely for City Sprouts.”

Over the course of a single growing season, the students grow up to 80 varieties of crops at the farm, including cabbage, beets, radishes, zucchini, garlic, broccoli, tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelon, apples, peas and herbs, along with corn, beans and squash, following the “three sisters” intercropping system invented by Indigenous farmers. “These have been grown together on this continent for thousands of years,” Duncan said. “It’s pretty incredible.” 

The crowded half-acre also includes a significant flower bed, a “respite for pollinators,” Duncan said. 

“They’re all 50-foot beds,” she said. “While we are a really small space, we’re demonstrating production farm principles, growing as much nutritious, organically grown produce as we can while also tending the soil.” 

But in addition to the vegetables themselves, the hours spent at the farm have a profound impact on students, she said. 

“There’s a lot of opportunity for students to come here and offer their interest and their care and their skills to the group and to the broader community,” she said. 

Originally from Kingston, Moe was drawn to the farm to learn more practical aspects of her studies in urban planning, sustainable development and food policy. Moe interned on the farm last fall, putting in the grunt work of the late-season harvest and preparing the farm for winter. Then she interned winter quarter, focusing on planning future farm projects. 

“The thing about an educational farm is, you’re always building off someone else’s work,” Moe said. “You’re always seeing the impact of other students.”

Working at the farm has informed her classroom work and inspired Moe to shape her future planning career around food policy, she said. 

“You can think about policy in a classroom all you want, but if you’re not understanding what it takes to be someone who grows food and have that interaction with food, you’re missing such a key part of it,” Moe said. “But being in a space where you’re growing food and you’re seeing people benefit from being fed – it’s just so connected.” 

And she’s not the only urban planning student who sees the farm as a living laboratory for classroom work. 

“This is such a tangible way to learn about really innovative ways of having mixed-use sites and meeting multiple community needs,” Duncan said. “There are a lot of challenges to urban agriculture, and I think there will only be more in cities like Bellingham where development pressure is as high as it is.” 

Between internships, apprenticeships, field trips, work parties, community events and other visitors, about 100 WWU students roll through City Sprouts each season, Duncan said. 

At the end of the day, many leave with bundles of veggies or handmade bouquets. Moe, for example, loves to make a meal out of whatever she brings home from a day at the farm – squash soup is a versatile favorite.

The farm itself is the product of intense community collaboration. It sits on land owned by Kulshan Community Land Trust, which has allowed the farm to remain as it builds permanently affordable, multi-family housing next door. 

“Affordable housing is incredibly important,” Duncan said. “I know they also value our work, and they want to make sure that this land is stewarded. I think we see a lot of potential future in this partnership.” 

Duncan started City Sprouts farm in 2018 with her friend Annah Young, she said. 

“We were always trying to focus on food access being really central to our work,” Duncan said. “We’re here in the Birchwood neighborhood, which has really significant food access challenges since the only grocery store here closed in 2016.”

When Duncan joined the staff of Western’s Center for Community Learning, she brought the farm operations with her. 

“It became this really incredible transformational learning experience for students to come learn small-scale farming skills and connect with other people working within our food system, to learn about food access challenges in general, and learn about all the community initiatives for food sovereignty and food justice,” she said. “And all the while, working with a small team outside, which creates some sort of magic of its own.” 

Duncan expects the farm’s next chapter to include residents from the Kulshan Community Land Trust housing development going up next door. Established as perpetually affordable housing, lots of families with children will probably call it home, and Duncan hopes many of them will want to join programs at the farm. 

“That’s an amazing potential, for kids to see where food is grown,” Duncan said. “That’s something special that we would love to be able to connect with.”