SHARE YOUR FAVOURITE | WP PRAIRIES PASTRIES CONTEST - ENTER TO WIN! Program puts students on the land

The One School One Farm project connects urban children with rural landowners while helping to restore natural habitat It’s fitting that Elizabeth Bekolay’s initiative, One School One Farm, obtained its charitable status on Earth Day last month. Connecting urban students with rural landowners is a passion of hers and what better day to celebrate? The biologist, who teaches at Saskatoon Public School’s outdoor school south of the city, said the idea to make these connections came to her in “a vision.” She was a kid who always wanted to be outside exploring nature. As an adult, working as an outdoor ecological educator, she pays close attention to biodiversity and ecosystems. “Since about 2005, I’ve been studying prairie remnant systems pretty intensely,” she said. The food system, while obviously necessary, has also been the cause of lost native prairie. But how to bring that habitat back? In 2018, she established a board and began planning for pilot projects. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed them, but in spring 2021 the first two went ahead. They include students from Victoria School and Walter Murray high school and landowners that Bekolay said heard about the project and volunteered to participate. The projects focus on establishing either bluff plantings or prairie strips on land that the landowners have decided need vegetation. They aren’t necessarily farmers. “We’re calling them land stewards,” Bekolay said. “They have land and they want to do something that benefits nature. “They have to give in order to receive. They have to give their time to the class, to give a tour of the area, a bit of a history of the area. They plan together with the students what they’re going to do to increase biodiversity and sequester carbon on the site.” The plantings include native species of trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers. The idea is to draw beneficial insects and pest predators to the area. “When we started, we kind of just let the students and land stewards go for it,” Bekolay said. But then drought hit and there was a huge learning curve as participants saw which species survived and which didn’t.