Sugar Roots Farm Outdoor Classroom

Small Center Engagement

The Small Center team worked with the staff and partners of Sugar Roots to understand the site, mission, challenges and everyday work of the farm. The team designed a flexible outdoor teaching space that can easily be converted into an outdoor kitchen when Sugar Roots is ready. The structure is sited to serve as a drop off and welcome spot for visiting schoolkids and a farm stand for the Saturday open farm days.

Despite COVID restrictions the design team was able to engage with visitors and volunteers on the farm and led a series of activities with schoolgroups who visited the farm over the Fall of 2021. This engagement directly fed into the design process and the continued feedback of the staff shaped the final design.

Partner Organization

Sugar Roots Farm’s mission is to build food sovereignty and community resilience in the gulf south with sustainable farming as the foundation. They aim to teach and practice intentional land stewardship to ensure that future generations will have the skills and resources to grow and eat nourishing, fresh foods.

Their vision helped provided guidance for the design, and served as a filter for making decisions about materials, placement, and overall strategies of the outdoor classroom project. That larger organizational vision includes:

Self-reliant and interdependent communities, rural and urban, using food and farming as a building block

Localized economies with equitable and fair distribution of land, skill/knowledge, and resources

Engaged communities acting in the local and global food system, understanding how it works and how we work together to make it work better.

Agriculture in harmony with the earth, in which we raise animals, grow medicines, fruits, and vegetables, with little to no disturbance to our ecosystems.

Outcome

The built classroom space at Sugar Roots Farm is a raised concrete slab with integrated drainage that anchors a large steel and wooden roof structure. The roof provides a large shaded area for classes and directs water to a cistern and a bioswale to alleviate the localized flooding. The structure includes wash stations for the farm’s produce and large counters for teaching canning and cooking classes. The space is bracketed by a storage area for kitchen equipment and supplies and an educational wall with fixed signage and a chalkboard for class activities.

Educational signage is also placed around the expansive farm to extend the teaching moments and visual connections throughout the site. The project also includes a rope screen and handrail detail which softens the entry and provides some protection – a reference to recent urban-ag project Farmacia.

During fabrication the studio team spent considerable time working through the carbon footprint, sound implications, and long term adaptability of several different material and detailing options. You can learn more about the final project here.

Collaborators

Sugar Roots Farm

• Brooke Bullock
• Kendall Winingder
• Ashley Locklear
• Anika Wasserman
• Emily Hiatt
• Cloud Henderson
• Valeria Emmett