Managing the Farm

Financial Support

Sources of funding from within Carleton

Model for Carleton Farm: Dacie Moses House

Manager: Julia Uleberg Swanson

• She manages the student workers and residents. Directs the student workers. Bridges the work and ideas of student workers and residents from layover of workers and residents from year to year.

• Ideally, the manager of the farm should be a local farmer.  The manager of the farm should work with other local farmers for advice and support.

Residents/Student workers: Has two house residents and a couple student workers

• The residents hosts and plan the events and the workers do the cleaning and gardening.

• We thought using an interest house like Farm House would be good so that they can integrate the rest of Carleton-students, faculty into the Farm by hosting events

Department: Under the Dean of Students. What department will are farm be under?  Biology? Geology? ENTS?
Interest/Support Committee:  Dacie Moses has a committee made up of the residents, the manager, and people whom cared about Dacie.  The Carleton farm should have a committee of students that lived in the farm interest house, the manager, supportive farmers and community members, professors involved with their academic curriculum that had the farm component.

She says that starting small is good because you can always build up. With our farm, it doesn't have to start off big, but can start small.

She suggest talking to Mike Kotchevar-head of student workers and Nancy the Arb director.

            Michael Kotchevar, Assistant Director of Student Financial Services, agreed that Dacie Moses House would provide a good model for our farm. He stressed the importance of having a supervisor who could organize student workers and serve as an advocate on our behalf. There are several steps we would need to take as a group if we wanted to use student workers on the farm, assuming that we would not have a complete proposal until next fall.  In October, Fred Rogers sends notes to all the department heads asking them how much money they need for the following year, which includes things like office supplies and salaries for the staff. The departments calculate how many student workers they believe they will need and how many hours a week each one will work. So, after we have a supervisor, we would need to calculate how many workers we would need and total the amount of money they would make for the year. In February, the board of trustees has to approve the budget, which includes all the money needed for student workers.
            Although we won’t have enough information to calculate this number for this October, requests for additional funds can be submitted until May. So if we had a viable plan ready by the springtime with enough support from the school, we could ask for additional funds instead of waiting for next October. There are a couple key questions remaining in thinking about using student workers on the farm.
 - Who will act as a supervisor? Should we work through a department, or use the Dacie Moses model?
- If student workers will keep the farm running, can we be sure that there will be enough students around during the winter and especially the summer to keep it going? (Mr. Kotchevar estimate that there are roughly 200-225 students who stay during the summer and about 125 who stay during the winter)

Alumni Outreach

Contact alums in agro-related fields

Connection to Curriculum

How Geology ENTS & Biology will benefit

A Carleton Farm in the Northfield Community

A symbiotic relationship...

Farm Management

The role for staff and student workers