Commonwealth Honors College student Peter Merzbacher '11 proposed the startup of an educational urban farm in conjunction with several institutions in Springfield, Massachusetts, including Square One Daycare, The Young Women’s Christian Association, Student Prince Restaurant, Gasoline Alley Foundation, Massachusetts Career Development Services, Northwestern Mutual, and New England Farm Workers Council.
Related Links
Sowing Sustainability
Honors fellowship underwrites urban farming experiment in Springfield
Pete Merzbacher ’11 thinks deeply about the ills his generation faces, such as climate change, the disempowerment of entire communities, energy dependence, and the trouble with food produced on a massive scale. His research into these areas led him to propose the startup of an educational urban farm in conjunction with several respected institutions in Springfield. “I think city people, especially young people, should understand where food comes from and how connected our well-being is to what, how, where, and why we eat,” says Merzbacher, “but I also want to provide the means of food production that can feed thousands of people.” With all the vacant and underused land in Springfield, Massachusetts, Merzbacher is confident that this goal is realistic in the very near future. “Give me compost and seeds and I’ll give you an urban garden—it’s that easy,” he says.
Merzbacher’s proposal, The New Growth Initiative, won the National Collegiate Honors Council’s first-ever Portz Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, and now his ideas are literally taking root. With a $5,000 stipend, Merzbacher has begun installing community gardens around Springfield and conducting research to see how he can tie together community development and urban sustainability with urban farming and early childhood education. Integrating social entrepreneurship into the New Growth Initiative has led Merzbacher to start a small business, called New Growth, aimed at empowering and educating people using urban gardens and farms.
“My goal is to identify problems related to making this type of program work on a much larger and decentralized or neighborhood-size scales,” says Merzbacher. Through developing and implementing model programs in the field, he aims to answer questions such as: what self-reinforcing problems might this project best address, how can New Growth can be financially sustainable, and who are the critical players required to make urban agriculture work for the city?
In awarding Merzbacher the fellowship, the committee, “praised the credentials you presented to bring this project to completion,” says Patrice Berger, history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and chair of the fellowship selection committee. Merzbacher is well suited to the issues at play in Springfield, having designed a major in Globalization Studies through UMass Amherst’s Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration (BDIC) program. His course work focuses on the relationships among globalization, community development, and sustainability. To gain real world experience, Merzbacher has supplemented his studies with internships at the Square One Day Care in Springfield and the Franklin County Community Development Corporation in Greenfield.