School District Education Center Plans Announced

An aquaculture lab. A thriving organic farm that would supply fresh produce for school salad bars, local businesses, and the community. An education center where students could learn about solar and wind power. The Encinitas Union School District plot in Encinitas Ranch is potentially fertile ground for all of this, and much more.

Scott A. Murray, an organic farmer for 38 years and leader of Slow Food San Diego, has worked with architect Jerry Miller to create e.a.t., Encinitas Agri-Ecology Training, a conceptual proposal for the vacant 10-acre site off Quail Gardens Drive that the school district aims to develop with facilities money from Proposition P, the bond measure passed last year. Murray presented the concept to the district’s school board at its Sept. 20 meeting; the board directed Superintendent Tim Baird to explore a one-year license agreement with Murray to farm the land, with the goal of approving the deal at the October board meeting.

“Initially, we started thinking about just growing produce for our main kitchen that would then end up on a child’s lunch plate,” says Baird, who adds that the district has been holding on to the property in case a new school would need to be built in the future. “But we realized that a number of our schools have expanded into learning outside the classroom, and we have some incredible school gardens. So we started looking at [the site] as a learning campus and that really opened it up.”

Murray, who has developed school farms and curriculum plans in Fallbrook and San Pasqual, has given the project a slogan: “Fostering Sustainability Through Education.” Teaching children to lead an environmentally conscious lifestyle is just one of the benefits of the site, Murray says. Students could have access to fresh food and learn scientific concepts through lessons at the farm site. He adds that the U.S. Department of Labor projects that 40 percent of new jobs created over the next 20 years will be in agriculture—and since machines play a prominent role in big agriculture, he estimates many of those jobs will be in organic, sustainable operations.

“I’m interested in the future of agriculture,” Murray says. “We all eat. There’s hardly anything we all share, but we all share the need for food on some level.”

Murray, who started working on the project a few months ago, says that if the board approves the license agreement, he could start farming on the land after about a month and providing some produce in three months. The site still has several stages of development and bureaucratic processes to go through, so Murray envisions simple row farming for now, with unused district portable buildings being repurposed as classrooms for the site. Eventually, the learning center would take up about three acres of the site, with the remaining seven devoted to farming.

The concept calls for the district to receive some produce from the site for school lunches. More produce could be sold at a farm stand on site, and some could be sold to community partners. (Murray offers Seaside Market and Rimel’s Rotisserie as examples.) Because the Proposition P money doesn’t cover program costs, it’s envisioned that produce sales could be used in that regard. The site would also benefit school; campuses with gardens could sell their own produce at the farm stand. Murray adds that extra compost and plants at the district site could be given to individual school gardens.

Baird says ultimately the site would be an asset to the overall Encinitas community. In addition to earmarking space for the city's long-talked-about community garden, the farm/center could be part of an educational hub thanks to its proximity to the San Diego Botanic Garden and the San Dieguito Heritage Museum. “This could be an incredibly cool destination point,” he says.