Workshops and Courses
Using place-based, experiential education, our curriculum provides the practical and intellectual skills necessary to work with nature. Participants learn to apply these skills to their own places. Through the Institute's humanities cornerstone, participants cultivate the creative and critical use of their minds. They learn to determine what is appropriate for and feasible in their places. They will develop a strong sense of where they fit into agricultural history and what they have to add to it.
"Engaging in the chainsaw skills elements, with the support of faculty instruction as well as the emotional awareness of my classmates, enabled me to find grounding as I leaned into something that had provoked such preemptive fear. It made a lasting impact on me. I have incorporated into my various work spaces the chainsaw and forestry principles I learned."
—Emily Wade, Farm & Forest Institute Alum
Low-Impact Forestry Courses
The series of courses provides practical training in:
conducting a woodland inventory
selecting trees for harvest
tree felling with chainsaws
low-impact log extraction methods with a mid-sized farm tractor with forestry winch and draft animals
adding value to wood products such as on-farm milling of logs to lumber
using draft animals for timber extraction
Cooperative Economics, Thought, and Rural Leadership Courses
These courses, field days, and workshops highlight the culture of agriculture. Participants hone farming and rural leadership skills by blending economics, history, literature, practical and cultural arts, and good land management. Drawing from a lineage of agrarians (including Wendell Berry and those who most influenced him), participants learn how to connect the health of land and people through agriculture. This curriculum equips farmers–and the people who support them–to understand their places in agricultural history; use Wendell Berry’s writing and other agrarian literature and resources to advocate for healthy farms and forests; determine farm-based solutions that can pay for themselves; cultivate an agricultural economy of cooperation, parity, and democracy; and practice neighborly leadership.
