A Farm Camp for Children

article image
PHOTO: MARIE BREZNAU
A typical day at Taproot Farm Camp: Tom supervises a group of youngsters loading a seed spreader.

A few years ago, my husband Tom and I left the rat race of urban Detroit to start an organic farmstead situated a full 180 miles west of that Michigan metropolis. We constructed a new barn, replenished the soil with green–and animal–manure, started raising both livestock and produce (our cash crops include beef cattle, sheep, pigs, hay, grapes, strawberries, asparagus, and a few “ordinary” vegetables), and in general tried to live in harmony with the land around us.

Tom was proud of our hard-working outdoor ways, but he wasn’t content with ’em; he kept thinking back to the children he’d been teaching in Detroit. And the more he thought about those young folk–about the television they watched, the processed food they ate, and the noisy violence of the world they lived in–the more he wanted to share our new rural life with some school-age urban children.

Well, Tom Breznau finally decided that he just wasn’t willing to “bury his head in organic garden soil,” so he went into Detroit and approached the staff of Taproot (a private, inner-city elementary school) with a proposition: Would they be willing to help support a farm camp as part of the school’s ongoing curriculum?

The educators were enthusiastic (to say the least), and before long a deal was struck and the Taproot Farm Camp was formed. Tom and I began that first year of TFC with three five-day programs, but those sessions were such rousing successes that we had to expand. We now run seven week-long camps every year: three in the fall, one in the winter, and three in the spring.

A Week at Camp

  • Published on Nov 1, 1979
Online Store Logo
Need Help? Call 1-800-234-3368