'There's a Need for Us'

Enlarge Image Image Gallery School trips to Duffield's Farm Market in the spring often include a wagon ride to the strawberry patch, and the children take home whatever they pick. Charles H. Harrison

When Jeffrey Pollock was growing up in Washington Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey, in the 1970s, the countryside was dotted with fruit, vegetable and dairy farms that once numbered close to 200. Now, a population of nearly 49,000 has obliterated all save one of those farms. The Duffield family – owners of that single holdout – and Pollock, the life science coordinator for the township’s six elementary schools, have partnered to ensure that children learn where food comes from and who produces it.

Washington Township is eight miles south of Philadelphia as the heavy traffic flows, and New Jersey is the nation’s most urban state. Yet, the partnership between the Duffields and the schools – called Student Farmers Grow and Give – was the only one of 27 community-school programs in the nation to focus on agriculture and compete for the 2007 National Civic Star Award jointly sponsored by the American Association of School Administrators and Sodexho USA. (The Washington Township program ultimately did not win the award.)

Eleven Duffield family members are actively engaged in farming the 170 preserved acres surrounded by housing developments and in running the Farm Market at the intersection of Green Tree and Chapel Heights roads. They are David, age 75; his sons David Jr. and Dan; his daughter Debbie; his daughters-in-law Tracy and RuthAnn; and five grandchildren.

In 1990, the occasional school field trip to Duffield’s Farm Market by children in pre-kindergarten through third grade featured strawberry picking in spring and hayrides in fall. Along about 1995 or 1996, Tracy Duffield says, teachers started asking if the Duffields could come up with something more to connect to the schools’ curriculum.

The “something more” started when Tracy created two large bulletin boards on wheels. The fact boards grew into the Learning Barn, an open-air pavilion that includes books about farm life, scarecrows to be dressed, jigsaw puzzles that depict farm scenes, and a small-scale version of Duffield’s market.