Young Farmer Starts Program

Homesteading and farming is the future, and so we have created a program to share this insight. The Young Farmers Badge Program is designed to educate young people by offering them experience in ecological farming and learning homesteading arts, all while encouraging healthy nutrition-based eating.  The goal is to resurface traditional, real-life learning…a more grounded, yet adaptive form of education. We implement these efforts by motivating young people to earn beautifully crafted badges. In our home program, at Meadows Bee Farm in southern Vermont, we teach over thirty different subjects at three levels each. We created numerous lessons plans involving multiple activities to cover badge work requirements, where students will spend approximately 5 hours of work to perform numerous challenging tasks to earn these merits. We are constantly expanding and evolving our educational techniques to have a larger impact, wider outreach, and stronger inspiration.

The Young Farmer Starts Program has been specially designed to jump start this educational effort for others to implement, anywhere in the world. Starting off with six elemental level one badges, Agroecology, Annual Gardening, Artisanal Cooking, Herbal Medicine, Livestock & Farming, and Sewing. This provides a layout of framework, accompanied by corresponding literature, tools, and consultation needed to bring educational programing to any farm, homestead, school, or home.

We have worked hard to find out what works best, and now we want to share these methods with passionate farmers and educators all over the world.