South Egremont — It was warm weather and bluebird skies at April Hill Education and Conservation Center on the morning of Thursday, September 21, as students from five different high schools descended upon the sprawling campus for a day of hands-on learning from a diverse range of women currently working in the agriculture and conservation spaces.
“Many of these professions and fields of work [represented today] are seen as male dominated, so giving people who are in high school at this time—thinking about where they’re gonna go next, and showing them opportunities they can pursue if they don’t identify as male is really important,” said April Hill Farm Manager Maeve Wilber of what ultimately inspired the second annual conference hosted by Greenagers, an organization that got its start as a small trail conservation crew.
“It just happened that boys and males were working on the trail crew [in the early days],” said Wilber, citing a shift in the ensuing 16 years since the nonprofit’s founding: Roughly half of the current staff is female, an evening-out of the proverbial playing field which serves to “welcome more people to the space.” In total, about 50 students from Mt. Everett Regional High School, Monument Mountain Regional High School, Pittsfield High School, Wahconah Regional High School, and Housatonic Valley Regional High School rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty in a series of workshops ranging from “The Basics of Wildlife Research”; “For The Love of Trees: Arboriculture and Wisdom of the Waters to Seed Saving”; “Intro to Cheese Making”; and “Becoming a Shepherdess.”
“Our farm director spearheaded this [conference] as a way to address the gender disparity that exists in the fields of agriculture and conservation and pull more young women into the work that we, along with others in the area, do to steward the land,” said Deputy Director Samantha Suters of Greenagers before the first of three workshop periods began. Before long, students were getting up close and personal with a shepherdess and her goat, learning the basics of making paneer (a cheese of Indian origin), and donning harnesses to literally hang from a handful of towering trees.
“I was excited to come here because I think it’s fun to be in nature and at school, [I] don’t really get that hands-on experience,” said Maddie Radhs, a senior at Wahconah Regional High School in Dalton.
Ella Walker, a junior from Wahconah, half joked that she only came for the goats before dialing her comment down to the real issue at hand: “There’s nothing at our school that’s hands-on like this,” Walker said, as a pair of classmates dressed in full arborist gear dangled in mid-air nearby—which is not to diss the work of local schools and, by extension, educators.
“The hands-on opportunities that students have when they come [to April Hill allow them to] use so many more senses, get involved, and step out of their comfort zone to do something different [than they would in the classroom],” said April Lesage, who teaches environmental science at Wahconah.
Just inside the lower barn, the activity at hand was more akin to chemistry than anything else, as a handful of first-time cheesemakers learned about the basic reaction that occurs when one combines raw milk and a coagulant under the proper conditions of time and temperature. “It’s kind of like baking,” said Amelia Conklin, of Sky View Farm in Sheffield, of combining similar ingredients—via roughly the same process—to yield myriad different results. Students’ eyes opened wide, in a mixture of curiosity and wonder, and the curds and whey separated before them.
“I didn’t know how cheese was made before [today], so that was cool. I thought it [required] a lot more ingredients and stuff, but it was easy,” said Elizabeth Wheeler, a junior at Wahconah.
“It’s so simple, [the cheese] just appeared!” a classmate added. After students tasted their cheese, albeit tentatively, Conklin offered up sips of the whey. “You can strain it and drink it—like a Powerade or Gatorade—[as] it’s full of electrolytes, a real pick-me-up,” she shared, citing other uses for the thin, yellowish liquid, from adding it to smoothies, using it in place of milk while baking, or feeding it to livestock.
Other professionals sharing their time and expertise with students included Angela Sirois-Pitel, Massachusetts watershed conservation manager; Maeven Broderick, a new climbing arborist for Harrison McPhee Inc.; Sunder Ashni, flower essence therapist and workshop facilitator at Minka Brooklyn; Sarah Monteiro, farm director at April Hill; and Marleen van Gulick from Beavertides Farm in Falls Village, whose origin story began when she was 16 years old and living in the Netherlands, longing for a connection with nature and the land.
All of these folks converging upon April Hill—part of the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans, the indigenous peoples of this land—was directly in keeping with the Greenagers’ mission: to inspire teens and young adults to develop deep connections to land, work, and community.
