FEATURE
The Land Speaks…Through Food
A program participant searches for prime American elderflowers. Purposeful work is part of an intentional, authentic, food-related experience that speaks to our conservation efforts. Photo by Alison Domzalski.
Enough time has passed that the collective memory of Long Branch Farm as a working educational farm has largely faded. Few people remember that in 1972, Neil McElroy, once secretary of defense in the Eisenhower administration, and his wife Camilla generously donated their 535-acre farm and their herd of registered black angus cattle to Cincinnati Nature Center (CNC) with the vision for a working farm that taught people about the sources of food and fiber. Hikers on the trails at Long Branch can still spot the vestiges of the 1960s beef operation in the form of concrete water tanks, old fencing, and cattle handling pens. Long Branch opened as a livestock-centered educational farm under the Nature Center’s banner in 1973.
In its heyday, the farm education program hosted school field trips, summer camps, and events, offering rich hands-on farm experiences. As an educational farm, Long Branch was vibrant—it was filled with energy and life. It provided a venue for wide-eyed children to collect warm eggs from under cackling hens, stare into the eyes of a draft horse that weighed nearly a ton but was a gentle giant, to brushing the shiny black coats of angus cattle as they steamed in the winter sun… even the smell of “barn” spoke of life. Long Branch was a place where children would eat vegetables they’d never eat at home because they helped to harvest and prepare them with their own hands.
In the early 2000s, agriculture was removed from the state of Ohio’s education standards, which indirectly prompted school field trips to drop dramatically. The high expense of maintaining all those much-loved farm animals became too high. Finally, on a cold November day in 2005, Long Branch ceased operations as an educational farm.
As the dust cleared and I came to terms with the closure, I began to understand it wasn’t the Long Branch Farm as a place that I most missed… I missed “farm” as a verb. It was the unique visitor engagement that I most missed. As I walked the trails, it was clear that this place, a site that had been farmed for over 200 years, had more to say.
Over the ensuing years, a broad array of quiet tinkering and experimentation was occurring in an effort to reinvent what “farm” might mean for Cincinnati Nature Center. From experience, I knew that integration of purposeful work, food production, and immersive experiences that fostered deep connection to a place through food are known to draw in and delight visitors.
As the Nature Center decisively moved toward native plant education, the path towards “farm” as a verb pointed clearly towards native edible perennial trees and shrubs as well as foraging. We’d had long-standing interest in maple sugaring programs and pawpaw hunts—there are many more native edible species and each one bears cultivation and engagement opportunities.
While an ungentrified 1940s beef barn is one of the few buildings available, the bulk of our experiences are unbound by confines of a building. We prefer to take “farm-to-table” one step further by putting the table in the farm. Photo courtesy of Jason Neumann.
Leaning into “farm” as a verb
We’ve been quietly teasing out the future expression of Long Branch by leaning into its farm personality. When most folks hear the word “farm” in Ohio, they think of massive fields of row crops like corn or soybeans or cattle grazing on rolling hills. But at Long Branch, our purpose is very different—the goal is to make the land more botanically diverse for wildlife and people through our interaction with it. We’re still abiding by the McElroys’ vision to teach people about the origin of their food but we’ve reinterpreted it in a new way.
Farms are innately participatory…and Long Branch still beckons us to interact with it, to get dirty, and to learn by doing. It offers ways to get involved through “hands on the land” conservation projects, immersive make-and-take foraging experiences that celebrate native plants, applied how-to classes related to improving your own yard for you and wildlife, and more.
To grow for volume and time efficiency, we are “agriculturalizing” native species, gleaning techniques from agroforestry, regenerative farming, permaculture, and holistic orcharding. Growing en masse allows us to space, train, and prune trees and shrubs for more intensive production and ease of harvest, while also assuring there’s no risk of overharvest of wild populations.
The first American persimmon trees and elderberry shrubs were planted in 2013, immediately drawing playful ridicule from other staff. Comments like “nice sticks, Jason” and “what are you going to do, harvest fruit from those after you retire?” were common remarks but the trees and I persisted.
Now protected by deer fencing, those once-ridiculed persimmon trees are bearing fruit, along with many other species, within two native perennial polyculture plots. These perennial plots are farmed in a way that is life affirming for both people and wildlife. The plants within are primarily North American natives and are grown in polyculture, a way of cultivating many species together in the same space, similar to how vegetation layers co-exist in the forest.
We’re also wild tending several species. In wild tending, invasive plants are removed, and self-perpetuating native plant populations are encouraged, amplifying what’s naturally present. When done well, these populations look like they’re wild. We wild tend pawpaw, wild blackberry, and wild black raspberry.
Annual June American elderflower harvest. Participants learn by doing as they harvest and process prime elderflowers. They depart with an in-process “summer in a bottle” make-and-take European-inspired elderflower syrup that extends their experience. Photo by Alison Domzalski.
Our foraged and farmed native plant work has spawned Foragers Fest, an event drawing upwards of 500 people each September. Foraging-related talks are offered as part of the event. Photo by Noah Jones.
A focus on visitor experience and interpretation
Unlike a typical farm operation in which the crop is the product, from inception the primary harvest for this new iteration of Long Branch has always been visitor engagement. Whether through purposeful volunteer work, immersive learning experiences found in a broad range of “make-and-take” programs, our higher-end Taste of the Land meals, or beer brewed with native edible plants in collaboration with a local brewery to create a “conservation in a glass” experience, it’s all about using native edible foods to help visitors build relationships with nature.
A visitor-centric application of interpretive approaches has served to distinguish our operation. Food is a highly relatable connector; since we all eat, food can be considered a universal. Food experiences are highly sensory, with all senses engaged, especially taste. Food is intimate—the food we eat becomes part of our bodies. We utilize food for memory making in interpretive programming. Recent studies have confirmed that food memories are powerful because they involve very basic, nonverbal areas of the brain that can bypass your conscious awareness.
We use food experiences within this new farm operation to engage the whole person. We engage:
The hands: By intention, our approach is inherently participatory…the visitor experience is crafted around doing. In a culture where many people work in front of screens, program attendees enjoy being immediately put to work physically. As a byproduct, we’ve found that when people who don’t know each other have their hands busy, destemming elderflowers or helping to make Aronia jelly for example, they let their guard down and naturally start to talk to each other. It’s not long before everyone is smiling and feels in community that harkens back to cooperative work that has brought humans together throughout our history.
The heart: People find joy in our full spectrum harvest to food approach. “Farm” appeals to nostalgia; many program attendees share stories of their grandparent’s farms or, since we use international recipe inspirations to add culinary interest to many of our Ohio native species, bring up stories of global travel. We also find that foraging and harvesting serve as a form of nature meditation, calming participants and leaving them with a feeling of connection to place.
The head: Since program participants do as much of the work and recipes are as “from absolute scratch” as possible, they learn through firsthand experience. There’s no abstraction when they experience all the steps from identification to harvest to cooking and eating. We ensure they leave with a well-rounded understanding of how the plant we’re harvesting ecologically fits into the broader natural system, that plant’s place in human history, and lore related to the species. In addition to memories, we aim to provide an extension of experience in the form of a take home item after each program. When that jar of persimmon jam comes out of the fridge or that bottle of blackberry liqueur is pulled off the shelf, it prompts a “remember that time at Long Branch…” moment.
Staking a willow grove for future basketry classes. Cincinnati Nature Center’s foraged and farmed native plant operation provides a plethora of opportunities for volunteer engagement (considered part of our spectrum of visitor engagement). Photo by Jason Neumann.
“Farm” and food as highly missional mouthpieces for conservation messaging
The most significant application of an interpretive approach that helps set our reimagined farm operation apart is the use of interpretive revelation expressed as conservation messaging. Using those tangible harvest and food experiences as a firm foundation, we can equip program participants to reach for intangible “big ideas” from conservation practices, clearly providing a “so what?” that speaks to a greater purpose. Often, participants can taste what we’re talking about.
By way of example, one of our popular offerings is our annual make-and-take Italian cherry leaf liqueur (properly called Amarenillo) class for which we use our native wild black cherry leaves at the end of the growing season. Participants learn about ethical harvesting (be careful of the buds—next year’s leaves are inside) before they pick their requisite amount of leaves for their take-home jar. They’ll sample finished, aged liqueur noting the marvelous bitter almond flavor.
From a botanical perspective, that bitter almond flavor signals the presence of cyanide (don’t worry, it breaks down during cooking), a defensive compound that prevents the cherry tree’s leaves from being eaten in excess by caterpillars. This segues into a quick sharing on host plant specialization (much as monarch caterpillars evolved to get around the alkaloids in milkweed, so too have other species of caterpillars evolved to get around the cyanide compounds in cherry and closely related trees) and the fact that our native cherry tree hosts 456 known species of caterpillars, mostly moths. In fact, it’s number two in importance—only oaks host more known caterpillar species (557).
The thing to remember is the species that feed on cherry are largely different from the species that feed on oaks—add those two together and you have 1000 different species of caterpillars. Since “caterpillars are the hotdogs of the bird world,” as Dr. Doug Tallamy says, “they’re protein filled tubes of protein that kids (baby birds) love to eat.” The more caterpillars that are around, the more available food there is for baby birds… and everything else.
Since a great portion of our membership of around 18,000 households owns property, our foraged and farmed native plant polyculture programs speak to our “Plant Native” initiative and are aimed at encouraging them to plant more native species to feed native wildlife.
With creativity, a humble barn that still serves as a working space for farm and conservation projects can be transformed by leaning into “barn charm,” naturally speaking to history of place. Photo courtesy of Jason Neumann.
Our highest-tier offering to date is our immersive Taste of the Land dinner. (Note: Inclusion of Pringles segues into a historical tie to our Long Branch site; Neil McElroy, who donated Long Branch to Cincinnati Nature Center, had been a Proctor and Gamble executive who spearheaded development of the Pringles brand). Photo by Carole Barnhart.
We don’t make jam, we make meaning
While recipes and cooking techniques are well received, it’s the holistic, purposeful point of view that food-related interpretation of conservation messages offers that has helped Cincinnati Nature Center bring new life to a long-closed livestock-based educational farm and differentiate us from other nature centers. We’ve termed this unique, hyper-local, place-based approach “meaning-laden eco-agritourism.” It’s become our “brand” of programming, and, to our administrators’ delight, allows us to charge more for related programmatic experiences.
Considering that this land has been farmed for over 200 years, it’s gratifying to know that the “farm” in Long Branch Farm doesn’t speak to a has-been like some subdivision that’s named for the farm that was there. This land is being cultivated in a reimagined way. At Long Branch, “farm” is still a verb. The land speaks…through food.
Author’s Note: I reached 30 years in the field of interpretation last year, largely in the employ of Cincinnati Nature Center. This article presents an example of what blending deep experience on the land, a passion for agriculture, and a love for the crafts of interpretation and visitor engagement can create. This project is my career capstone.
We utilize more than 50 species in our operation, including:
Polyculture grown
- American persimmon
- Pawpaw (orchard spaced)
- Black chokeberry (Aronia)
- Wild plum
- American elderberry
- Native passionfruit
- Goldenseal
- Jerusalem Artichoke
- Groundnut
- Serviceberry
- Staghorn sumac
- Cutleaf coneflower (sochan)
- Cup plant
- 3 sisters (corn/beans/squash)
- Mulberry
- Spikenard
Wild tended
- Blackberry
- Blackcap raspberry
- Pawpaw (2 acre wild grove)
Wild tended
- Spicebush berry
- Acorns
- Goldenrod
- Sassafras
- Black walnut
- Wood nettle
- Wild grape
- Ramps
- Mushrooms, numerous species
- Many others…
