Tag: From the Print

The six newly shorn lambs on the Antioch College farm huddled in the shade of their homemade hoop barn last week inside an electrified mobile fencing unit. About 20 yards away their feathered neighbors, 35 chickens and 15 ducks, clucked away in their own mobile yard, not far from the vegetable garden, a newly planted fruit orchard and a series of large compost bins. The activity on what is affectionately known as the Antioch golf course is just beginning, and it’s the heart of what Antioch College envisions for its sustainability program, one of the key components of the college curriculum.

Sustainability is a new program for Antioch and for the village as well, and it’s bringing with it marked change for what the community has for the past 90 years known as the Antioch College golf course — 30 acres of open field used by residents and Antioch School students for playing fields, pet walking and other recreational activity.

While the golf course is owned by the college and zoned educational, the college proposed at a Village Council meeting in July that farming with animals become a permitted use in that zone. What that zone will include in the future is yet to be determined, but the college is currently proposing the option of puting up to 1,400 pounds of animals per acre on the property (including poultry, sheep, pigs and possibly cows), for the purpose of educational practice and experimentation in food and land use sustainability.

The Village is still in the process of updating the zoning code and will consider the proposal at Village Council’s next meeting, Monday, Aug. 5, at 7 p.m., in Council chambers at the Bryan Center. Antioch Farm Manager Kat Christen and Glen Helen Ecology Institute Director Nick Boutis will be present to describe and answer questions about the college’s plans.

While the Village’s zoning update has driven the college to define what it envisions for the golf course earlier than expected, according to Antioch Chief Operations Officer Tom Brookey, the process has given the college an opportunity to broaden the dialogue with the community about the overall campus master plan. The college plans to hold a series of community meetings from August through November, incorporating drawings by Pittsburgh architects MacLachlan, Cornelius & Filoni, to communicate the plans with residents. And in August the college also plans to open a master planning board display in South Hall, where the public can stop by and study a map of the campus it envisions.

“We’re anxious to get our first thoughts out to see what everybody thinks,” Brookey said this week. “It’s a work in progress, but we want to just put out there ‘here’s what we’re planning; here’s the thought.’”

The farm

The Antioch farm was created chiefly as an educational learning lab for the college’s students, especially those interested in the sustainability curriculum. Christen, who started Smaller Footprint Farm, a community supported agriculture business, with her husband Doug in 2008, was hired by the Glen Helen Ecology Institute in 2011 to build and manage the farm.

The initial project included tilling a fourth of an acre just south of the science building behind the amphitheater to grow vegetables, fruit trees, and some native plants. The purpose was two-fold, to serve students in an academic manner and to serve the college kitchens with fresh, local food that would enable the college to walk the sustainability talk.

“We’re interested in sustainable farming here,” Christen said, which includes “practices that preserve or enhance water, soil and air quality…no synthetic fertilizers, only pesticides and herbicides approved by the USDA organic standards, and animal access to pasture most of the year.”

As the college has grown, so has the farm, which now has a half acre vegetable operation, a half acre food forest, including some fruit and maple tapping trees, medicinal herbs, and a large composting station used to recycle the food waste from campus (and including some manure from the Riding Centre to amend the farm’s soil.) Last year, the college also began raising 50 chickens and ducks for food, slaughtering two batches and keeping the rest for eggs. And this year the college added to the property six lambs, which it will slaughter in the spring for food.

The animals are kept in electrified pens made of flexible nylon fencing and moved every few weeks to ensure they get adequate access to fresh grass and bugs and to prevent overgrazing or overmanuring any particular area of the field, Christen said. The rotation of the pens is key to allowing the animals to live off the land in a continuous way, providing nutrients for the soil in the form of manure and then moving the animals to a new spot and giving time for the soil to absorb the nutrients and the grass to grow back. Such sustainable practices naturally alleviate the risk of bad odors and air and water pollution, according to Christen, who has seen the effects on her own Smaller Footprint Farm on Fulton Road in Miami Township, where she has raised goats and pigs.

The density of the animal population will vary as the college grows and continues to define its needs, but the more flexible the zoning is, the more easily the college can maneuver, Christen said. Though she couldn’t say how many animals the farm eventually hopes to host, because the operation aims to be diverse, there will never be as many of any one kind of animal as the density limits suggest, Christen said. In technical terms, Christen is proposing that the upper limits for animals be up to 1,400 pounds per acre, with additional per-acre limits of two pigs, or 1.4 cows, or 17 sheep, or 35 chickens. And given that only a third of the farm is slated for barns and grazing pens, the animals could be confined to less than 10 acres, with a minimum 100-foot buffer from any residential properties. (See the concept map).

The farm also serves a host of other needs on campus, according to Tom Brookey. According to the campus master plan, the golf course will also be home to the main geothermal wells that will heat and cool the Antioch gym, the science building and other buildings without the use of fossil fuels, as well as a solar array in the northeast quadrant to supplement the college’s power needs. The college plans to use the northern corner of the golf course for annual garden and hoop houses, the western quarter for animals, and a long narrow section from north to sound for food forest and orchard. The plan also includes keeping an open field just north of the Antioch School, as well as a hay field and open space along Allen Street.

The zoning

Earl “Pete” Hull recalls a time in the 1940s when villagers regularly kept chickens, horses, milking cows, and pigs in the village. Hull lived at the corner of High and Davis streets next to a Mr. Thompson, who raised chickens and a couple of pigs for annual slaughter. Garnet Williams had pigs too, which he took to Mr. Berley’s house on Walnut Street to be butchered. And Cassius Bell on Marshall Street had a work horse he used to haul barrels of waste for a living. According to Hull, though the homes were relatively close together, the smell of even the pigs was only really strong when it rained.

“When it rained it stunk up the neighborhood because it made the manure rot quicker,” he said. “But it didn’t last long.”

But residents did complain regularly, he said, and since the 1950s the Village has outlawed large farm animals within Village limits, except on land zoned for agricultural use, including the Glass farm and a few other open fields at the northern edge of the village, according to Village Manager Laura Curliss’s reading of the code. Now with the zoning code update, the Village is proposing to eliminate agricultural zones within Yellow Springs altogether, Curliss said.

The Antioch farm lies within the educational zone that encompasses the college campus. Under the current Village Zoning Code, animals are not a permitted or a conditional use in the education district. But in the current draft of the updated code, the Village proposes making farm animals a conditional use in education districts. However, because conditional uses require the property owner to reapply with a public hearing before Council for each land use change as it arises, the college had hoped to simplify the process by having its land uses, once and future, be defined and permitted. The proposal Council will consider this Monday is one that makes “farming with animals” a permitted use with the aforementioned maximum animal densities.

Animals under a weight limit of 200 pounds are currently allowed within the village. That regulation has allowed many homeowners around town to acquire chickens. And as long as the poultry provision doesn’t violate the Village’s nuisance law or elicit complaints from neighbors, chickens and other small pets are allowed, according to Curliss’s interpretation of the code.

Brookey wants villagers to be aware that though the college would like to define the provisions for the farm, neighbors and villagers will always have the force of the nuisance ordinance behind them.

“We’re trying be good stewards, and we don’t want to offend anybody, so there will be many protections for the neighbors,” Brookey said. “We want to let everyone know where we’re heading and what our long-range plans are.”

The neighbors

To date, most people Christen has spoken to are interested and supportive of the farm, and many families have visited the chickens and the sheep with great enthusiasm, she said. But talk about expansion of the current operations has many villagers thinking about how the farm could affect them and the village as a whole in the future.

Randi Rothman, whose home abuts the northern end of the golf course, is very supportive of the college and excited about its efforts to grow. And so far, the roosters she hears in the morning and the few sheep she sees in the field have been fine. But the idea of adding more chickens, cows and especially pigs to what is essentially her back yard has her a bit concerned, she said this week. While the current level of noise is mild and even melodious at times, a larger group of animals could threaten to raise a cacophony unsuitable for the lifestyle she and her family signed up for when they purchased their home over a decade ago. And the smell that pigs can produce would not be welcome, she said.

“My initial impression is I don’t mind waking up to roosters, the sheep are very cute, and the garden is lovely,” she said. “I think pigs would be a problem.”

Other concerns she has are about what the animal excrement could do to the groundwater and the fly population, and who will be responsible for consistent, long-term care of the animals.

“Will there be milk cows? Because milk cows need to be milked!” Rothman said. “It’s a big responsibility to run a farm, and it seems like Antioch has so many needs to get back on its feet … I hope it wouldn’t turn into an extra burden for the college.”

Another golf course neighbor, who wished not to be named, agreed that the current level of vegetable gardening and a few small animals is rather charming, especially as part of the college’s resurgence. But it is a change she hadn’t expected when her family purchased their home not too long ago, and she feels a little uneasy with the current level of unknowns about the farm.

Acknowledging that the golf course property belongs to the college, she still hopes that the neighbors can have some input, and that the community won’t have to give up the entire open field for the farm.

“We have no idea what they’re going to do. We saw that they’re allowing cows and pigs — that’s a bit difference from chickens and goats,” she said. “We didn’t anticipate living next to a large working farm … I would like to feel that the community and the neighbors at least had a say, even though it’s not our property, but we all have to live together and work together.”

Several other neighbors said they didn’t know much at all about the farm, its purpose or Antioch’s intention for the future of the property. And they would feel more comfortable, they said, if there was at least an invitation to talk about it.

“It should be a conversation with the Antioch School, YS Kids Playhouse, the neighbors, and the community,” Rothman said. “The golf course has sort of belonged to the village and been a multi-use space for years, and the change will affect that use.”

What students have gained

The farm’s other significant neighbors are the Antioch students, who, according to Christen, love the farm.

“Students say, ‘it’s really cool, I harvest greens in the morning, put them in the sink to soak, and by lunch I was eating them,” she said.

According to first-year student Sam Cottle, who co-oped on the farm last term, the college also incorporates the academic program into the living laboratory by, for instance, focusing one of the interdisciplinary global seminars on food. Throughout the course, students study how different methods of food production impact the world economy, hunger, politics, energy and the environment, then they go out and practice the sustainable kind of food production that’s good to the community, the earth and the human body. Students feel empowered by the opportunity to practice the values their sustainability program preaches, Cottle said.

“We can walk out and see what we’re talking about — the fact that we can bring in 40 pounds of beans in peak season with zero food miles and zero chemicals, that is very cool,” Cottle said. “It benefits the environment, it benefits the students, and it gives the chef something cool to work with.”

Cottle said that much of the proof of the health of the organic farm is in the food itself, which tastes and feels leagues better than the commercially-grown food he was used to eating back home in Perrysville.

“I’ve never eaten this healthy in my life,” he said.

Environmental science professor Linda Fuselier uses the farm as a lab for soil composition studies, the anthropology class experimented with an ancient variety of corn, and philosophy professor Lewis Trelawny-Cassity took students out to plant while discussing Decartes’ idea of plants having souls, Cottle said. And students themselves have used the farm to make and test biochar (a porous soil amendment made of pyrolized biomass), tap maple trees for syrup, and experiment with medicinal herbs, Christen said. And the students in professor Sara Black’s visual art and 2–D design course plan to design and build a barn on the farm.

“It’s an exciting experiential opportunity for students, which has been a long-time Antioch mission,” Christen said of the college’s tradition of mixing classroom academic theory with practical applications. “The main purpose of the farm is an educational learning lab.”

If one of the key components of an effective education is giving people the tools to make positive change, then Antioch College, Glen Helen and the host of conscientious villagers here are in a strong position to help save the environment. Yellow Springs is what Antioch environmental science professor Linda Fuselier calls a “perfect storm of opportunities in science education.” And she hopes to leverage the local resources to mount a campaign to get rid of the invasive species of honeysuckle bushes that have been taking over the Glen like a plague for the past five decades.

To support these efforts, Fuselier recently acquired a $50,000 grant from the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement to use over a three year period toward both curriculum development and community action related to the honeysuckle problem. In partnership with the Glen and the Marianist Environmental Education Center in Dayton, the aim is to educate both students and community members about the loss of biodiversity caused by the proliferation of honeysuckle in the Glen and get them involved in a reforestation project to reseed the Glen with native species.

Recently in the basement of the Antioch College science building, Fuselier, a botanist, has been tending beds of baby spicebushes, sumac, goldenrod and sedge. The native Ohio plants are understory shrubs found in the older growth part of the Glen. But the parts of the Glen that were farmed before they were incorporated into the preserve lacked a strong showing of native plants and were more vulnerable to invasive species, especially ones such as honeysuckle, which changes the soil’s natural microbial content and has a lilopathic effect like poison to many native species.

The Glen has perennially organized volunteer groups to pull honeysuckle, garlic mustard and euonymus, and last year received a grant from the Nature Conservancy to restore 2.5 miles of riparian zone along the National Scenic River that runs through the Glen. But in many areas of both the north and the south Glen, the determined invasives have gotten ahead of the removal effort. And even where invasives are removed, something new must replace them in order to stave off a new honeysuckle onslaught.

“You can’t do forest restoration without planting,” Fuselier said. “You need to remove the honeysuckle and get native plants established and hopefully beat the honeysuckle.”

Fuselier taught at Minnesota State for eight years before coming to Antioch last year for the college’s second year of operation. As a SENCER fellow with the Center for Science and Civic Engagement with a background in ecology and evolutionary biology, Fuselier has long been committed to teaching science that involves civic engagement. And she found that Antioch College had historically cultivated that kind of education on campus and within the surrounding community. So as soon as she got here, she jumped right in to get a small grant from the Llewelyn Foundation inviting both students and local senior residents to a series of academic workshops on how a restoration of the Glen would work and what techniques could be used for successful seed propagation, including how to break seed dormancy. The group then applied the lessons and began propagating the native bluestem grasses, papaws and joe-pye weed under lamplight in the science building basement and recently restored college green house before being planted in both the Glen and at the college farm.

In some ways the NCSCE grant is an extension of the first grant, in that its goal is to engage both students and community members to use information to enact some good. This time, Fuselier will work with the Marianist Center, Glen extension naturalist Jennifer Lang and the Glen’s Outdoor Education Center naturalists to engage the dozens of grade school students the Glen sees each week at school camp in the forest restoration project. The effort will start in the fall, with the planting of a demonstration garden at the trailhead behind the OEC main lodge.

“The Glen does so much already with Antioch College back on line — this is a perfect time to pull all these things together,” Fuselier said.

Other NCSCE grant recipients include Brooklyn College of CUNY and the Gateway National Recreation Area of the National Park Service (New York City), New Mexico Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at the University of New Mexico and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (New Mexico), Paul Smith’s College and The Wild Center (New York State), Raritan Valley Community College and New Jersey Audubon (New Jersey), and Saint Mary’s College of California and the Lindsay Wildlife Museum (California).

Fuselier and Lang will attend a conference with the other grant recipients this summer before launching the program here. The Marianist center has been practicing hands-on restoration ecology for over 25 years, integrating woodland restoration into environmental stewardship workshops. In the future, Fuselier hopes to reinvolve the seniors in the replanting project as well.

“This is a good opportunity to get a bunch of groups involved in one project,” Fuelier said. “People think that plants are there, and they just grow. But sometimes they need a little help.”

Five Antioch students were allowed to continue taking summer classes three days into the session after an agreement was worked out last Thursday between students and administrators over overdue room and board fees. The action, after intense college community dialogue, brought to resolution the first instance of a significant student protest at the revived college.

The agreement followed a late-night meeting attended by 69 of the 96 students on campus, who rallied behind a handful of students burdened with mounting debts from fees — about $8,800 per term before need-based discounts.

At issue was a deadline imposed by the college in June where students who had outstanding balances and hadn’t agreed to a plan to repay within six months would be barred from taking summer classes, which began July 9. That deadline to have a repayment plan was later extended to July 12, allowing all students to attend summer classes for at least the first week.

Ahead of the agreement, Antioch President Mark Roosevelt flew back early from a family vacation in Nantucket, arriving at 4 a.m. Thursday morning to spend much of the day discussing the matter with students.

The agreement — drawn up by a small group of students working overnight on Tuesday — extends the deadline to arrange payment to the end of the term in September, creates a financial task force of students, faculty and staff and proposes other ways to promote financial literacy and improve the financial situation of students.

Before it went to administrators, the student proposal was supported by the campus governing body Community Council, or ComCil. To ComCil President and second-year student Elijah Blanton, it was an intense week, but the outcome was seen as a positive example of students, faculty and administrators working together to solve a problem.

“I’m proud to be an Antiochian today,” Blanton said after the student plan, which he helped to draft, was approved. “It’s one of the problems created in Antioch’s beautiful rebirth and we’re coming together as a community to solve it.”

Solutions vary

According to Blanton, solutions for financially-strapped students may include on-campus jobs and higher-paying co-op positions. The college could partner with a private bank to extend loans. And financial literacy among students could be improved. In addition to a teach-in held last weekend on financial issues, there will be a unit on student debt and financial literacy during the global seminar on education open to all students this summer.

The recent move by the finance department to more urgently collect unpaid fees stemmed from a desire to not let student debt build up and to make sure that students are annually filing federal aid forms, Roosevelt said.

“Any college needs to have a process to obtain dollars owed that have been agreed to,” Roosevelt said. The college deals with each student’s finances on an individual basis and very few students are not already on mutually-accepted payment plans, he said.

In addition to agreeing to the student plan, Roosevelt and other administrators apologized at a community meeting Thursday for poor communication that occurred over the previous weeks.

“I feel what has been asked on the part of the students is legitimate and the communication has not been robust enough,” Roosevelt said.

Antioch students, who Roosevelt said are a more needy group than the at-large college population, are already given financial support in the form of the Horace Mann Fellowship — a full-tuition scholarship for the college’s first four classes — and reduced room and board fees, which are based on need. The average Antioch student is charged roughly 50 percent of the $8,800 room and board fee, Roosevelt said.

Still, for some students, those discounts aren’t enough. One problem, according to Blanton, is that Antioch has yet to be accredited. As a result Antioch students cannot receive federal financial aid, which often includes loans that can be deferred until after graduation. Loans from private banks can be hard to negotiate, especially for low-income students without someone to co-sign, he added.

Though the decision to collect unpaid fees had nothing to do with accreditation, Antioch does need to function along federal aid guidelines in preparation for when the college does become accredited, Roosevelt said. According to Blanton, the college may be recommended for accreditation in November, six months after which students may be eligible for federal financial aid.

While students had been receiving regular room and board bills from the college, there were no consequences if they went unpaid. That abruptly changed last month, when the finance department sent a letter to students asking them to pay up, or they would be unable to take classes. Students were “paralyzed,” and some began packing up their dorm rooms, according to assistant literature professor Geneva Gano, in part because many didn’t realize they could arrange a payment plan with the finance department ahead of a July 1 deadline. Even when they learned that payments could be spread over the next six months, some still could not pay.

Coming together

In June second-year student Eros created an online petition on the website Change.org that garnered the signatures of 125 current and former Antioch students and other supporters. It asked the college to postpone its deadline and create more flexible payment options.

Wrote first-year student Eric Rhodes at the petition’s website: “While I am lucky enough to not be financially affected, the way things are being handled means that some of my best friends at the school and some of the most talented would be forced to leave. It’s hard for me to imagine what our college would look like without them.”

Students then went away on a short summer break. During that time the deadline to pay, or agree to a payment plan, was extended two more times, to Monday, July 8, and then to Friday, July 12. So when students returned to campus over the weekend of July 6–7, they quickly organized to push for an extension of the deadline. Even though at that point only five students were still unable to pay (even with a payment schedule) their fellow students came to their aid in what Blanton described as a show of solidarity.

“It was incredible to see everyone come together and support each other,” Blanton said.

According to Gano, the literature professor, the crisis event ended up being “a positive example of collaborative efforts,” and will likely result in a more open and conciliatory approach to student finances. Blanton also sees the bright side.

“It’s a really difficult situation to restart a college and we’re doing a really good job and this is an example of that,” Blanton said. “A huge reason I’m here is I get to restart a college. It’s like an extra class, but it’s consistently my favorite class.”

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On a recent visit to Antioch College, architects from MacGlachlan, Cornelius and Filoni, who have designed for dozens of schools in the Northwest, noted the unique level of integration between the college and the village of Yellow Springs. According to Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt, the visitors said “they had never been to a college as closely tied to a village as we are.”

From Olive Kettering Library and Curl Gym to Rockford Chapel, the tennis courts and WYSO, the spaces and services that are shared between the college and village are both deep and historic. And the tradition has worked so well for so long, that Roosevelt for one sees value in perpetuating the overlap.

“We’re a small college and a small village, and there are a lot of things it makes sense to do together — it would be kooky not to share these between the college and the village.”

So while the college and the village collaborate to fund the new wellness center, the theater building and the Glen, there is one more horizon of integration the college has begun planning for. The issue of community housing on the college campus became public several months ago when the Village of Yellow Springs dug into the final stages of its zoning code revision. Antioch facilities manager Reggie Stratton appeared at several Village Council and zoning meetings stating the college’s need to include residential uses within its E-1 education zone.

The possibilities are wide open and the plans for housing won’t happen for another five to 10 years, Roosevelt said. But the idea, in its nascent conceptual phase, is that the college could in the future host an energy-efficient single and multi-family housing complex on its campus for faculty, staff, alumni and villagers who are as committed to the future of the college community as they are to their own.

The idea of creating an Antioch College village is the ultimate collaboration between the college and the surrounding community of residents. It’s also an opportunity for the college to have a continuing source of revenue and support. And though the target residents have yet to be defined, the community would ideally be composed of a mix of ages and include people who are looking specifically to become generative members of the community.

“We would offer something that’s the opposite of isolation, with healthy food, the Glen, wellness, the theater,” Roosevelt said. “This is offering people an opportunity to contribute and be part of something — because people have a yearning to be part of a community.”

Developing housing on campus would not be unprecedented at Antioch. According to Antioch archivist Scott Sanders, the college has a tradition of providing housing for its faculty and staff as a way of attracting the best minds to campus. The college established apartments for young faculty as early as the 19th century in Birch Hall and North and South halls. In the early 1920s, the college began buying homes within the Limestone, Phillips, West Davis and West Whiteman blocks for its faculty and staff. In the late 1930s, the college worked with Hugh Taylor Birch to purchase land for faculty homes south of campus as well, along Rice Road and President Street. The college also purchased homes in the village for student housing, such as the former Mills House (on Mills Lawn) and Greywood (now owned by Anthrotech).

But building the kind of campus community Roosevelt wants is different from the college’s previous models. And because it’s an undefined concept so far, “there is no language for it because it doesn’t exist yet,” he said last week. But Roosevelt knows what the community is not: a retirement community.

According to a 2007 article in the Journal on Active Aging, university-based retirement communities have been on the rise for 20 years and currently exist on over 60 campuses both small and large across the country, including Oberlin, Dartmouth, Penn State and Lasell College in Massachussetts. But those models stress the cultural advantages for seniors “in their golden years” and often include continuing care facilities, infantalizing their aging residents into passive, restful roles.

What Roosevelt envisions is something much more dynamic, for a wider range of lifestyles, including “next-chapter individuals” who are “at retirement age but have no interest in retiring,” he said.

This year is set to be a banner fundraising year for the college, which expects to bring in $21 million by the end of December. But that level of giving is hardly sustainable, Roosevelt said, and cannot be relied on to fill what the college anticipates will be a significant gap between costs and revenues. Once the college is functioning with 600 students, annual operating costs are expected to reach about $10–15 million, but anticipated revenues will likely only total $6–9 million. And judging by the challenges of many liberal arts colleges around the country, Antioch must prepare for a different financial model than it had in the past — one that involves a lot of resource sharing.

The location for campus housing has not been chosen, but the college does own vacant property all along the western side of Livermore Street at North, Center and South College streets, as well as the area behind the former student union building and along President Street. And if the union/Antioch Inn and the Sontag-Fels buildings are torn down in the next few years, there could be quite a bit more property available on the perimeter of the campus to use for housing that would benefit both communities.

Several organizations in Yellow Springs, including Friends Care Community and Home, Inc., have attempted to fill what they see as a need for senior housing in the village. Both Friends and Home, Inc. tried to develop a multi-family unit on the Barr property, and having run into road blocks, both entities are regrouping for projects elsewhere in the village; Friends on its Herman Street campus, Home, Inc. at an undisclosed location in the village.

While the college is sensitive to other housing efforts in the village, they haven’t forged any partnerships because they’re not sure just yet what they want to create. So while they focus on accreditation, building faculty and student numbers and renovating the core campus, the idea of housing has plenty of time to mature. Stratton knows that there is a lot to do before community housing comes to the fore.

“Our focus right now is accreditation because we need to get on solid financial ground for stability first,” Stratton said last week.