Episode 1 - Welcome to the Farm Educator's Roadmap - My Story & Why I Started This Podcast
Hey there! Welcome to the Farm Educator's Roadmap, a brand new podcast that will be diving deep into farm education through interviews with those in the thick of it - farm educators. I'm Christa Hein, and I'll be your host. I've spent the last 30 years building and teaching farm programs. On this show, I'll be introducing you to other farm educators, exploring the roads they took in their farm education journeys, and exploring the programs they offer in their communities. If you want to be inspired by the diversity of farm programs happening around the world, or get tips on how to build or expand your own programs, stick around! I'm so excited for what we're going to share with you!
Since this is our very first episode, I thought I'd focus this first show on telling you about my journey as a farm educator and how I got to where I am now, the owner of a farm education business that serves over 70,000 people a year through over 400 programs annually in my community. I want you to hear about my path so you'll know what experiences I'll be bringing to the table, and how I can help you map out your own path in farm education.
I was not a farm kid. I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland with a small fenced-in backyard. My journey into education started accidentally in college because I had no idea what I wanted to major in. So I took random classes that interested me - environmental geology, anthropolgy, psychology, even folk dance. When I applied for summer jobs in-between semesters, it seemed that my random coursework were right in line to make me the perfect fit for a summer camp. And even though I applied to be a regular old cabin counselor, I lucked into being offered the job of Nature Director at YMCA Camp Tippecanoe because of my environmental classes. I didn't even know how to identify poison ivy when I started, but I was an earthy girl and I couldn't wait to learn! I loved hiking and being in the woods, so that summer, the earth became my teacher and I found myself in a way that only a camp can give you the time and space to do. Those 1,100 acres became the best school for teaching me what I wanted to do next, what lit me up - playing and exploring in the woods with kids!
In the seasons between summer camp, I started working at a residential environmental education center called Nature's Classroom, where schools visited for 3-5 day field trips. We had all types of schools and students visit - little kids and their very first experiences in nature, smarter-than-me middle schoolers, and inner city tough kids who hadn't ever stepped foot in the woods before - let alone at night. (One of my favorite memories was of one of those tough kid transformations - but that's a story for another day). Nature's Classroom immersed me in teaching about the earth and filled me up, in almost a spiritual way.
I remember the night hikes so vividly, some kids were so timid at first, but slowly opened their senses. Those times laying out in an open field, all looking up at the endless sky, me pointing out the stars and telling their stories. I was learning along with them each day.
Those camp experiences are some I wish everyone had. They led me to discover my passion for teaching. And I gotta say, I was pretty good at it. Kids wanted to be in my group. I was just weird enough and shirking of the rules just enough to make my hikes and classes an adventure.
But my career timeline certainly wasn't straight. With seasonal jobs there's a beautiful ability to come and go. And so I did - next getting a job at our state's science center as a presenter and a traveling educator, driving a big box truck full of science equipment and setting up each day in a different city and school, performing in front of audiences of up to 300 - all solo! It was quite a change from nature hikes! I was teaching about chemistry and the human body in the traveling shows, training volunteers on the experiment stations at the start of each day. On the weeks I was back at the science center, I worked on the earth science floor, leading shows in the planetarium (what an amazing experience that was!), and teaching about natural phenomenon like tornadoes by shooting pencils across the room in a tornado cannon, as science centers like to do. But the best part of working on the earth science floor was that it also contained the street of yesteryear. It was an actual street built inside the building that changed as you walked - the surface of the road changed, the buildings changed, the teachings changed, as we walked forward in time.
Now I need to pause here and tell you a little about my family history because it's important to my story. My dad was an immigrant from Germany, his family fleeing an encroaching front line when he was a young boy. They were so out in the middle of nowhere that my oma went blind in one eye after a farm accident because getting to a doctor quickly with their horse and wagon just wasn't an option. They made their own clothes - the village working together to grow and process flax that she would spin into thread and weave into cloth. They were from-the-earth, make your own liquor and cheese type of people.
So when they settled in Cleveland when my dad was a boy, their big backyard was turned into most of the food our whole extended family would use - berry bushes, fruit trees, honeybee hives, and a huge garden that everyone worked together. There were so many canned goods! They'd smoke meat and make cheese, and work the way everyone did at the time - with their hands, fixing each other's houses, helping in each others gardens, and cooking and preserving food together - and having big polka parties.
During my childhood, it was just the way my family was. I honestly didn't pay it much attention other than loving to dig in the dirt in our small backyard while my mom planted flowers or after my dad rototilled our own garden. And always rushing to pick the blueberries before they grew through the fence becoming fair game to the neighbor boy.
But once I got to that street of yesteryear at the science center, it was like I was learning about my own family history with fresh adult eyes. I needed to learn how to spin wool so I could demonstrate it. The same way my oma had to out of necessity. It was a new pride in a skill relearned in my family blood. The street of yesteryear also had a papermaking studio, a tin shop, and a printing press. More skills I got to learn and demonstrate to feel connected to making things with my own hands. And best of all, I got to put on aprons and bonnets and immerse myself in the Little House on the Prairie persona I had grown up to on tv. I was in heaven.
That job had me at the science center one week and the next week on the road, living in hotels teaching the mobile programs. To make up for the extra time away, we were always given an extra day off the week we were back. I loved my job at the science center, but I missed being in the woods, so when I saw a flyer with a dorky hand-drawn dancing ant asking me if I liked kids and nature and wanted to lead nature walks, my obvious answer was a big yes! So on my days off, I started volunteering at the Stratford Ecological Center, a newly-formed farm and nature center, leading school kids on hikes around the farm and nature preserve. I knew how to teach in the woods. But the farm was a whole new world to me and I loved it!
The next year, the education coordinator decided to move out of state and his position came open, and I fell into a dream-come-true position.
I was only in my mid 20's so I truly don't know how I lucked into the position, but I breathed it in like it was the best gift I could have ever received. Since the organization was just 3 years old with only two other staff, I was able to grow along with it. I recruited volunteers and interns, managed all the field trip plans with teachers, way back in the days just before email was becoming a thing and when we had to drive down the street to Kinko's to make copies. I am Gen X all the way!
I remember that first late winter after I started at the farm, figuring out what it meant to be in charge of the children's garden. We had a greenhouse where I could start seedlings, so I spent days literally laying on the floor scouring seed catalogs and garden design books, making a big garden map and planning out my planting schedule. Then starting those first seeds in the greenhouse, learning how we made our own soil mix, watching my first sprouts grow. I couldn't believe I was being paid to plant and tend a garden. That garden taught me so much over the years! I built trellises and geodomes to grow plants on, I learned companion planting and planting by the moon. Since we were certified organic at the time, I learned organic pest control and soil amendments. And I got to eat and share so much amazing food. And it wasn't just from the garden. We had a sugar shack so I spent every February and March in the woods hauling sap and staying up late with the fire. I learned how to hunt for morels in the forest and found all the wild berry patches. We had an orchard and made apple cider every fall. We harvested and preserved peaches as the trees matured.
Now by that time, I had gotten married to my long-term boyfriend Chris who I had met my second summer working at Camp Tippecanoe. We had started a habit of working together after that first job, me later joining him at a vegetarian restaurant, him joining me at nature's classroom and then the science center, so it was no surprise that a few years later, he fell into a role at the farm too, eventually becoming the Operations Manager there and managing the preserve and all the buildings. When we had our first daughter, she was allowed to join us at work. I had a crib right next to my desk and I carried her in a sling as I led hikes. It was the perfect situation for our little family.
As the center grew, so did the goals I had for the programs. Being a camp girl, I wanted to start a summer farm camp. That first year was tough. I had to create everything from scratch - forms for parents, schedules, advertising, supply lists, activity instructions, and on and on. I've never been one to take the easy route, so we made solar ovens, handmade paper and natural inks, made cheese and pickles, had a sleepover under the stars and cooked meals with the campers, and so much more. My mom was my very first camp staff, helping me that first year, using her years of experience as a girl scout leader. I remember her staying on a cot in our small house and staying up late to help me prep the supplies each night for the next day's activities.
The most amazing part about working there was that everything I wanted to learn was the potential to add as a new program. I wanted to better learn spinning, so we offered an 8-part spinning series. With me as the center host, I took the series 3 years in row so that eventually, I became the expert. I wanted to learn felting, weaving with cattails, all about wildflowers, quilting - and so much more! - so I found instructors who could teach those, and I took the class over and over so I could learn it myself. One year, I wanted a bigger garden shed for the children's garden (I was using a tiny hallway in the chicken coop), so I hired an instructor to lead participants in how to build a straw-bale garden shed, using our feet to stomp together straw, water, and mud into plaster. It was so much fun and a structure I'm still proud of today. A couple of us wanted to learn how to can all the vegetables we were growing, so I offered a class and we learned together, ambitiously making pickles, ketchup, and apple pie filling that first year. I wanted to learn more about herbs so I found an herbalist to teach an herbal intensive series, then some of us from that first class started an herbal study group that is still running today.
I had been there about a decade when I decided to go back to school to finish my degree. But I wanted credit for my life experience and the work I had done so I found a college that would let me design my own degree around what I wanted to learn. I named my degree Holistic Ecology because I wanted to explore ecology through a lens that not only included people in the mix, but encouraged holistic relationships with nature. I wanted to learn about Deep Ecology, ecopsychology, about the relationship of humans and the natural world, and further explore how to facilitate that with both children and adults - so my professors designed classes and picked books that would teach me those topics. It was exhausting - working a full time job with a young child, while taking a full course load - but it was one of the best decisions of my life.
I had never known learning like that before. It stretched me and gave me so much confidence in my self and my abilities. It reminded me how much I loved to write and how much I had to say. Because I was able to help design my learning, I included things I really wanted to do - like take a couple week-long sessions with author Joanna Macy learning this amazing thing called The Work that Reconnects, a deep way we can process both our love for the earth, and our grief for it, in the same circle. I explored author Steve Van Matre's Earth Education, an alternative to environmental education I had been inspired by and practicing for years, and I spent two weeks at a camp in Pennsylvania learning his Sunship Earth program. It gave me a more complete understanding of the earth than I had every experienced, as a middle school program! So I proposed to the board that we add it as a new week-long middle school program at Stratford. I wrote and was awarded a grant, and then meticulously recreated it at the farm. It opened me up to how much I was capable of - it was the biggest thing I had ever put together before. Then, as I created my degree project, I pulled all my experience and learnings together in a way that for the first time showed me what I had accomplished and created over the years and it grew into a 300+ page work of writing and pictures.
That step back into academia, and empowered by what I was able to create, were my first steps away from the farm. After 15 years as their Education Director, and approaching my 40th birthday, I started to think about my next steps. Did I want to spend the rest of my career there? Or was there something else I wanted to explore and build? The organization had grown and changed a lot since I started. Organizational growing pains are normal, but as the board, staff and farm "family" grew, my autonomy and happiness were shrinking, and I found myself starting to think about stepping away. I wanted the freedom of creating unhindered again.
I think sometimes the universe puts things in your path when it's time to move on. If all had been going well, I would have stayed there forever. But I was meant for more. I just didn't know what that was at the time. For the months that I agonized over the decision to leave, I started to see a new vision for myself. What if I became self-employed and started offering programs at schools. Working with schools for a couple decades had given me a lot of knowledge about what teachers wanted. And over the years many teachers had asked if we could bring farm programs to them. At the center, we had a beautiful property - doing off-farm programs just wasn't one of our goals. But maybe it could be for me.
I started following a business coach online and decided to travel to NC to do a 3-day seminar with her. By the end of those 3 days, my decision was made, and I started living her tagline "leap and the net will appear". I gave the center a months' notice and worked my butt off that month to create a business plan, design a logo, and write what would be my website, so that when I was ready to leave, I'd at least have the start of my next steps in place.
And so I left what had been my dream job to leap into the unknown with not a single client or reservation, but so much excitement for the possibility of being my own boss and creating my own learning again. And my business, Bring the Farm to You was born.
It was 2012 when I stepped into the world of entreprenuership and pulled out every ounce of my program creation experience.
My husband Chris, coincidentally, left the farm around the same time, stepping up into a property management role at YMCA camp, coming full circle to when we met at a camp 20 years before. He'd be building a greenhouse and helping them develop their own agriculture education site. I can't say it wasn't a bit terrifying to both be in transition at the same time, him now driving an hour to work, and me now working completely and utterly alone - when I had always worked in community - and trying to envision how I could pull in enough money to replicate the salary I had left behind.
But, ohmygosh, was it exciting! I was learning so much again - taking classes at the small business development center on how to start a business, learning from coaches, working on my marketing and envisioning what I wanted to represent and create, and writing curriculum, the thing I loved to do most of all - thinking about how I could best inspire connection.
The biggest part though was envisioning and creating a farm. We live on a small 5 acre past-farmhouse that was cut off from the big farmland around us when decades earlier, the landowner wanted to build a new house on another part of the property. So we're surrounded by farm, but just a little blip in the middle of it. What the previous landowners did leave us though was the big beautiful hand-hewn beam barn, the whole reason why we even bought the property decades ago. The barn though was rough - too far away from our budget to repair enough to house any animals other than the wild ones who had dug tunnels under it and were making it their roost and outhouse.
So we bought a small shed off craigslist from a guy a few miles down the road, and he hauled and dropped it in the field behind our house. We added a lean-to onto it, put up fencing, and bought our first two animals - orphaned angora goat kids who needed bottle fed constantly. They non-stop cried that first night so my daughter and I pulled out our sleeping bags and slept with them in the lean-to. Our farm family was beginning. We quickly added chickens and ducks, rabbits, and our first two lambs.
And I started to get some reservations. I built it as I went, buying, scrounging and building supplies to meet the reservations I had. I'm lucky that my husband is a carpenter because he was right out there with me, envisioning how I wanted to transport my animals, and then helping me make that happen.
We didn't have a pickup truck, so we fit our minivan with a hitch and I bought a small utility trailer and had a couple windows and fans installed. My dad built some travel cages for the animals. I used our old baby gates and bought more at yard sales as pens. Looking back on those early days, pulling my trailer with a minivan, it was rough. But it was working.
Each month, I'd have one or two more programs. I was hardly making a living, but I was doing something more important, I was building a reputation. I now had a professional logo and was working on my branding and marketing. I had to close my eyes when I said yes to spending $800 I didn't have to get my trailer wrapped with a professional design. But it was the smartest investment I could have made. Because now I was a driving billboard, and as soon as I pulled in to a school or a library, I was official and professional. It made me a real business.
Now I could go on and on about the last 13 years as the owner of Bring the Farm to You. Every year it's grown. Those first years, my daughter, only 7 when I started the business, was my helper. We got ourselves hats, and then tshirts to make ourselves official. I think those first repeating clients really fell in love with my daughter and kept inviting us back so they could see her teach. She was a natural, having grown up watching me.
I then started to hire friends and acquaintances to help me with occasional programs, and I started using interns. I had worked with interns for decades so it just seemed natural to invite college-aged students to join me. It took a couple years for the programs to grow enough to replicate my salary, and I used my husband as free labor for all of that, until the time that I could hire him away to join me full time.
We started to hire part-time teachers to help during the school year when interns weren't available. So many of our clients repeated from year to year, and word of mouth was spreading, so I was barely doing any marketing aside from our social media and newsletters. And each year we were growing. That is, until the pandemic hit and shut us down completely. I honestly wasn't sure if we'd make it through.
It's not in my nature to sit around and not work, so while the pandemic stopped our income, it didn't stop my work. It was then that I started envisioning this podcast. I recorded the first interviews in 2021 thinking I'd be launching it that year and was shocked that our business started rebounding as soon as schools and public spaces opened back up, growing back up to pre-pandemic levels in 2021 and almost doubling that the very next year.
We were growing so fast, and I now had new dreams of this podcast and training other farm educators, that we needed more help. I couldn't manage all the teaching, marketing, and client communications all by myself anymore. As fate would have it, one of my past interns showed up in my weekly linkedin update, saying she was back in Ohio and looking for work. I reached out and it turned out she was perfect for what we needed and became our first full-time employee. And we're still growing! Last month, we had 14 people on payroll. We offer 13 different programs, serving schools, libraries, assisted living centers, history and science centers, cities, parks and rec departments, churches, childcare centers, summer camps, and families, reaching around 70,000 people through over 400 programs annually, all at their locations.
That is such a very far place from where I ever thought I could be. As my farm education business has grown, others have noticed and have reached out, asking for advice, wanting to know how I got started, or sharing their dreams of starting farm programs. And remarkably, inquiries for our programs have come in from around the country - and even a couple outside the U.S. - asking if we can serve them with our programs, even though we're in Ohio and our website clearly says we only work locally. The demand for farm education is out there and people are searching for it!
So all of that is the inspiration for launching this podcast. I know there are communities all over the country and beyond that want farm education experiences. And I know there are people who want to create and grow farm education programs. I've learned from many business coaches as I grew my business, and it feels like now it's time for me to give back some of what I've learned. While I'm an expert at what I do, I'm not an expert at what everyone else out there in the field of farm education is doing. But I know how to learn best - by having other experts lead the way as I learn along with them.
So on the Farm Educator's Roadmap podcast, I'll be interviewing other farm educators, big and small, from around the country and beyond. Those working in big non-profits, and small farms sharing programs out of their backdoors, urban farms right in the city, and those starting programs from scratch just like I did. There are so many ways to share farm education. I have already learned so much from the amazing farm educators I've met so far as I've recorded the interviews I'll be sharing with you each week.
For this podcast, I'm learning as I'm doing, just like I have my whole career, taking the leap before I'm entirely ready. So while the interviews might not be as well-produced as you're used to, I hope you stick around long enough to learn from and be inspired by all the amazing educators I'm interviewing. I honestly can't wait to see what this podcast becomes and all the ways it can guide and inspire farm educators to create, expand, and innovate how we can share more farm experiences with more people. I'm so glad you're here!
Please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with fellow farm educators. Let's grow this community together!
Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at farmeducatorsroadmap to hear what's coming up and to learn more about the educators I'll be interviewing.
You can also join our Farm Educator's Roadmap private FB group to form real connections with other farm educators, ask for advice, and share information.
And if you're ready to build a farm education program that stands out and attracts clients, download my free guide, 5 Simple Steps to Growing an In-Demand Farm Education Program, and start building a farm program people can't wait to book! visit www.farmeducatorsroadmap.com/5simplesteps
Thanks for listening! Until next time, keep growing, keep making a difference, and keep building the life that calls to you! I'll see you in the next episode!
