After nearly four years as executive director of the Montezuma School to Farm Project, Ben Goodrich is stepping down.
On April 1, Education Director Sorrell Redford will step in as interim director while the board looks to fill the position, a search they intend to “take time” doing.
“We want to make sure the application matches our mission and where we want to go,” said Greg Felsen, the board’s president.
Goodrich expressed his excitement for “the next chapter” of the project.
“I’m just one person in the lineage,” he said. “I’m excited for fresh eyes, fresh excitement. What will someone new come up with?”
For the past four years, Goodrich has used his “crazy knowledge of growing” to help advance the Montezuma School to Farm Project, which, put simply, “provides engaging garden lessons … to Montezuma County schools,” according to its website.
As it stands, they teach a range of students – three years old to high school – in the Mancos and Cortez school districts to unite “our local agricultural heritage with our growing future by engaging students,” its mission reads.
Goodrich described their approach as “three-pronged”: They aim to educate students on food production, nutrition and resource conservation.
Those three focus areas guide its curriculum, which Education Director Redford rewrote to ease comprehension.
It now reads like a “classic school lesson,” said Redford.
But it wasn’t always that way, and the project itself has grown and changed with time.
When the Montezuma School to Farm Project started 16 years ago, it was part of the Mancos Conservation District.
Goodrich got his start with the project in 2018 – on the exact same day as Redford – as a production manager, a role he summed up as “mowing grass.”
In January 2020, the project transitioned to its own 501(c)(3) nonprofit, as it had decidedly “outgrown” the conservation district, said Goodrich.
In fact, at the time, the project had a presence in schools in all three municipalities in Montezuma County.
Shortly after it became its own entity, the pandemic hit and soon after, in August 2021, its director left unannounced.
“And then I stepped in,” said Goodrich.
Ever since, it’s been the “Ben and Sorrell show,” he said.
Goodrich focused on the growing side of things, while Redford took the lead on education.
“In that first week, the first month, we dreamed up a perfect world of the organization,” Goodrich said. “I think we’ve checked a lot of those boxes.”
They wanted to create something “unique to Montezuma County, but also to create something that other schools could incorporate,” he said.
“The turning point” was when Redford rewrote the curriculum, he said.
“Instead of having 101 things we’re focused on, we dialed it back to three,” said Goodrich.
And in the name of “quality over quantity,” they reduced how many schools they taught in, too.
“We were stretched thin, so we scaled it back to just the Mancos and Cortez district,” said Goodrich.
“We hope to get back to Dolores, though,” said Felsen.
Redford said her approach to education is one “where the student, teacher and environment are all valued equally,” Redford said.
“We put an amazing amount of effort into that environmental piece,” she said.
Redford highlighted how kids who need typically support in most classes don’t need that support in garden class; in fact, they thrive.
Academics are woven into garden class; students are doing math, said Goodrich, as they count how many onions are planted in a bed.
“Historically, there’s an outdoor element to education,” Goodrich said. “Only recently we took it indoors, under fluorescent lights.”
“There’s a separation from nature,” Redford added.
Garden class is about “getting kids outside and interacting with the natural world,” she said.
“Kids are working with crops their grandparents ate,” said Redford.
Kids “work with the crops their grandparents ate,” growing things like winter squash, corn, chili peppers, tomatoes that have “regional and cultural relevance,” said Goodrich.
“And loads of herbs,” said Redford.
In addition to growing, they teach cooking and canning too, since “there are so many ways to interact with food.”
Redford and Felsen both underscored how Goodrich has “been involved in all parts of it, which is unusual for an executive director.”
“He transformed the middle school gardens in Mancos and Cortez into food-producing examples,” said Redford.
Goodrich remembered how, when the school in Mancos was under construction, he had salvaged what he could from the existing garden before they built over it.
For two years during construction, Mancos was garden-less. And then, “finally, the construction was done,” he said.
The land they were allotted to build a new garden was formerly home to a mobile home. There were forgotten tires on-site, and an old gas line poked out of the ground.
“I had never been so excited,” he said. “It was a challenge to see if it would work.”
Luckily, he said, it was a pandemic project, so he had plenty of time – with the help of AmeriCorps workers – to transform it. And to everyone’s surprise, that space is now a productive garden.
Goodrich said he’s staying in the area, at his home in Hesperus, and will focus on growing and tending to his own fields in Durango.
“I’m going to keep growing my ag skills,” said Goodrich.
He said that an agricultural skill set is akin to a yoga practice in that “there’s no finish line.”
“When you think you figure something out, you’re humbled and realize you know nothing,” he said. “It’s continuous learning.”
In the off season, he joked about writing romance novels.
“We’ll have a continued partnership with our romance novelist,” Felsen laughed. “AmeriCorps kids will go to his farm and keep learning.”
“But the wheel keeps on turning. We’re going to roll up our sleeves and dig in,” said Felsen.
If you’re interested in the executive director or productions manager position at the Montezuma School to Farm Project, reach out via email to Greg Felsen at gregory.felsen@colostate.edu or Sorrell Redford at sredford@mstfp.org.
