Over the past 15 years, Earthdance Organic Farm School in Ferguson has evolved from humble beginnings on a single acre of leased land into a vibrant producer of all manner of produce, which can be enjoyed at such local restaurants as Bulrush and Vicia or purchased at Fair Shares CCSA, Local Harvest Grocery, and Ferguson Farmers’ Market. As the name implies, Earthdance also embraces a mission of educating the public about all things agricultural. Earthdance founder and CEO Molly Rockamann recently shared how things are going and what’s in store for the next 15 years.
Has your original vision for Earthdance come to pass? I did have bold ambitions! I envisioned a lot of different walks of life converging, and that’s happened in a beautiful way. So overall, yes, it’s pretty darn close. I did think things would happen faster, though.
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Earthdance did a lot of retooling and rethinking during the pandemic. What are some of the initiatives that came out of that period that you’re excited about? The Pay What You Can Farm Stand was definitely born out of the pandemic. It opened in July 2021. We converted an old tool shed—the first piece of infrastructure we built when we bought the farm—and repurposed it. We had more than 500 transactions last year. One in three of our customers share the same ZIP code as the farm (63115), and about two-thirds of our customers are North County residents. It’s exciting to see how we’re reaching our local community with it.
This year, we’re adding a lot of additional educational programming during Farm Stand hours. We have cooking demonstrations three times a month, story time for kids and families once a month, and pay-what-you-can yoga classes twice a month. Instead of charging people to do our apprenticeship program, we now compensate people to do the apprenticeship program. That’s one of the major [program] changes. Another major change is the Spring Training For Gardeners program, which started in 2021. Participants can do some classes online. That’s another thing the pandemic taught us: how much education we can successfully do online. We’re able to reach so many more people.
What do you envision for Earthdance in the next 15 years? It’s interesting to see—even this many years in—that people are still just learning we even exist. When we’re working with a slim marketing budget and a lean team, it takes a long time to get the word out. So in the next 10 to 15 years, I hope that a lot more people will have visited the farm and know what we offer and how they and their families can benefit. The other big goal is to figure out whether this model of farm-based education and community-based farming is replicable, and how can we help other groups run programming and start farms similar to this. There are so many people interested in farming as a career, and it’s really hard for them to make a go of it solo.
Our big mission is to advance food justice, and a lot of that is being responsive to our community and figuring out the food needs, farming needs, and how can we help. I’m hopeful for the educational piece of what we do: It’s exciting to imagine how many young people will be motivated to farm, garden, eat healthy, discover new vegetables and fruits, and how we can potentially change the health trajectory of young people. Today’s children are the first generation to have a lower life expectancy than their parents. That’s where we’ve gotten to because of our diet, but that can change.
