Campaign Background

We initiated the "Grow a Farmer" Campaign in 2009 to help fund permanent housing for apprentices taking part in the full-time organic farm and garden training program at UC Santa Cruz’s Farm & Garden. With the housing project near completion at the UCSC Farm, we’re now turning our fundraising efforts to much-needed program operating costs and moving ahead on long-deferred facility and farm equipment upgrades at the Farm & Garden.

Help us grow more farmers by supporting the Apprenticeship Program! The Apprenticeship self-generates most of its operating income through produce sales, plant sales, and program tuition and fees, but we depend on donations and grants to complete our annual budget.

Your donation will help us meet our operating expenses and ensure that this critical training program continues to thrive.

Growing a Hands-On Training Program
at UC Santa Cruz

The seeds of today’s food revolution were planted more than 40 years ago in Santa Cruz, California. There, an innovative English horticulturist named Alan Chadwick started the Student Garden Project and the 25-acre farm that together became the UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden and the site of a unique, hands-on training program. His apprentices helped pioneer the organic food and farming movement in California and across the country, spreading the word about how food could be grown using techniques that respected nature and conserved natural resources while yielding sustained, bountiful harvests.

Over the years the organic training was formalized into a six-month, full-time Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture that attracted participants from across the country and abroad. Now a part of the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems, interest in the program is now at an all-time high, with a record 187 applications received last fall for the 39 positions in the 2010 Apprenticeship.

Today, more than 1,300 apprentices have been trained in the organic fields, orchards and greenhouses at UC Santa Cruz, learning not only how to raise food and flowers, but how to make the food system itself more sustainable by addressing issues of social justice. They are today's organic farmers, market gardeners, urban agriculturalists, school garden teachers, and others working to promote local, healthy food in communities around the country. The Apprenticeship is the premier experiential education program of the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems, an innovative research, education and public service program at UC Santa Cruz.