A farm can be a place for the kind of learning that’s hard to find in educational institutions. Combining her work in both farming and networking with Education for Sustainable Development, Ann Marie Weber explores how collaboration among regional actors and transformative learning processes can drive structural change toward sustainable food systems. She runs a small farm near Marburg (Hesse, Germany), where she grows vegetables to make hot sauce, chutneys and other preserves – not for market, but to help create a space for people to connect with their own agency, food and nature. In conversation with Louise Kelleher.
Your farm is not only a place to grow food, but also an alternative learning space. What is education for sustainable development, and what form does it take on your farm?
Education for sustainable development (ESD) essentially means adopting an attitude to the world that is life-affirming. In my practice this involves designing educational programmes, experiences, spaces for reflection, and opportunities for action in which people can feel somehow connected – with the vegetables, the ground, the sky – and empowered. How can we behave in a way that serves life, in a world full of contradictions? How can we tolerate this ambiguity and still keep doing what we believe is right?
Broadly speaking in ESD we equip people with the skills and tools they need to help shape the world. It’s a kind of political education.
On my farm, it all revolves around food. Harvesting and cooking together, and experiencing this sense of connection, is always at the centre. The topics are in the background – sustainability, regenerative agriculture or other political issues. My focus is on fostering a loving relationship with nature that nourishes us, and in doing so – and this is getting more and more important – finding peace with our human species once again.
I feel that people need this healing space, not only in this connection with nature, but to behave in a different way and not feel guilty. You miss opportunities if you get stuck in feeling guilty. It’s not about being wrong or right; it’s about knowing your attitude.
Why are such alternative learning spaces needed?
In our modern lifestyles there are hardly any places left where we can see ourselves as part of our ecosystem, where we can directly experience the impact of our actions.
I think on a farm you have this on a small scale. A farm offers us all these opportunities to experience self-efficacy, to reflect on what it feels like to leave a mark – without judgement either way. In agriculture, working for life can also mean taking life. It’s part of life and must be understood so that I can fully embrace the world and my being in it.
We need these places; we have lost them. People are looking for it in the gym or yoga or spiritual spaces but this is so grounded. And nourishing – food for the body, but also the soul, calming the mind.
How many visitors come to your farm? What is the impact?
Right now I’m working 30 hours a week outside the farm in networking projects. There’s not that much time to have groups on the farm. I have a maximum of 6 to 10 groups or workshops per year. If it were easy to earn my living like this, I would shift immediately! Also I’m a bit shy to take money from people for this space, because it’s not mine. I created a space, yes, but it belongs to all of us, it’s a commons. I can’t sell it.
In some years I think I only grow these vegetables to have this space for people to come and eat. When I see people wandering in this field and harvesting vegetables, the wonder in their eyes, then I know why I do this work.
Outside the farm, you do work as a facilitator, creating space for discussion between political actors at local and regional level. How does this work fit with your role as an educator?
First, the work on my farm keeps me going. If I didn’t experience this immediate sense of impact and co-creation with other living beings, I probably wouldn’t be able to continue with my other job in networking and facilitation. Working with the soil gives me positive perspectives on life, and I can integrate the frustrating political work into a healthy whole. That helps!
Then, as an ESD practitioner, I’m aware of the need for safe spaces where I can reflect on my actions without judgement. I offer this safe space to all stakeholders, including administrative staff and politicians. That’s why we design our participatory formats to create safe spaces for exchange that are as non-judgmental as possible. It’s not easy, especially in this charged atmosphere when it comes to climate change. To be mindful of the contradictions and constraints we all face. I don’t want to smooth over the contradictions and constraints because they are there, and we have to be aware of it while sitting together, being nice to each other, with this knowing, with empathy. Just look outside – in nature there’s no judgment! This is what I do in my educational work, and I’ve brought it over to this other field.
What are the main challenges or obstacles you face in your work overall?
Right now, on the one hand it’s the issue of funding. Local governments in Germany and probably all over the world are groaning under the burden of climate adaptation, declining tax revenues and so on. And because of the shift towards conservatism, funding for ESD is collapsing. So we need to be especially careful here to support one another within our local networks so that social, cultural or sustainability issues aren’t pitted against each other; after all, they go hand in hand. Maybe it’s a chance to find new allies.
Another challenge (and I really like this one) is to listen closely to what truly moves people. In my observation this has changed since the pandemic, and I see a need that I can’t quite grasp yet. But we definitely need to adapt our traditional methods and concepts to this need that people have right now, if we want to continue to connect with them. I think I’m on the right track to figuring it out.
What are the next steps you have planned?
First, listen carefully. Listen to people, keep observing, and see this financial crisis as a solution.
And I really want to continue offering my space as a place where connection – or reconnection – can take place. In Joanna Macy’s deep ecology work, she calls it “work that reconnects”. Right now I’m shifting my focus further and further away from ‘content’ and towards our human connection with nature. A healing project; a human re-nature project, a kind of re-indigenisation in our western world – that’s what I’m trying to do: having more rituals, connecting with the circle of life, with springtime and summertime. Spiritual grounding.
Ancient archetypes of agriculture are, in a way, healthy models of how people can play a formative role in the landscape: caretaking, seeding, harvesting, resting in wintertime. And yes, it’s also where the pain and political complaints come from – when we see how industrialisation in agriculture undermines these archetypes. I want to hold space for both: the possibility for people to see themselves in these healthy archetypes AND the necessity of resisting practices that are hostile to life.
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