Student Innovation Plays Key Role in Growing This Island Farm
By Frank Carini / ecoRI News staff
July 30, 2026
PORTSMOUTH, R.I. — This classroom is different. More hands-on. More fun. You don’t have to stare out the window for what could be.
A farm on Jepson Lane, on property owned by Cloverbud Ranch and shared with the Slate Hill Cattle Co. and others, is both growing the next generation of environmental advocates and helping to strengthen Rhode Island’s local food system. The operation provides fresh produce for food banks, offers real-world career exploration, practices sustainable agriculture, and supports community resilience.
This is more than a farm, according to Sara Churgin, manager of the Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District; it’s a model for how education and agriculture can work together. She hopes to expand the idea to other nonprofits and public school systems.
In the past six years, the 5-acre farm, which backs onto Sisson Pond, has hosted some 700 students across the three Aquidneck Island municipalities of Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport.
The Portsmouth AgInnovation Farm was founded in 2020. The students learn about sustainability and food systems by getting their hands dirty. Besides helping to stock local food pantries, the food the students help grow will soon also support local school lunch programs.
Students dig channels to plant basil, fennel, and garlic. They water seedlings and organize supplies. They keep the chicken coop tidy. They also learn. A large shed at the front of the property doubles as a classroom, but most of the learning happens in the sun, in the soil, and by the pond.
AgInnovation Farm is a project of the Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District. Churgin has managed the District for the past 12 years. The nonprofit helps landowners in Newport and Bristol counties with natural resource issues, such as soil health, water quality, and pollution. Its mission is to promote and improve environmentally friendly practices that protect natural resources.
On the recent mid-July weekday that ecoRI News visited, a group of students from the Newport YMCA was working the land and being taught about food systems.
Before AgInnovation Farm was cultivated, the property was nothing more than fallow land. Paul Zurlo, owner of Cloverbud Ranch, a collaborative farm property, reached out to Churgin in December 2019 to see if the land could be put to better use. The Portsmouth resident jumped at the opportunity, even though she wasn’t sure what that use could or should be.
By chance, she connected with Margie Brennan, the science coach for the town’s public school students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
The farm’s greenhouse will go year-round this winter for the first time. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)
In 2020, as schools pivoted to remote learning as COVID-19 burned through life, Brennan sparked the curiosity of 25 middle school students — the group Churgin now calls the farm’s “founders” — when she created a virtual club to begin creating what would eventually become AgInnovation Farm.
She showed the online students a photo of the property and asked them what they would want a farm there to look like and what it should include. The students designed a layout using their art skills — an original sketch, now laminated, can be found in the farm’s makeshift classroom — and the farm remains a student-driven place of learning.
“The kids come up with the ideas and have to show why it is a viable idea, and then we go and find the money for it,” Churgin said. “So it’s been a very bit-by-bit process.”
During the academic year, middle school students from Portsmouth and Middletown visit the farm after school for one-and-a-half-hour sessions. Portsmouth Middle School is less than a mile away. Newport middle school students visit the farm on field trips.
The farm’s after-school and summer programs are designed to teach the students innovative ways of farming and how agricultural practices can be more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Part of the no-till farm’s mission is to help the students understand and recognize the importance of food equity. They also plant, weed, harvest, and plan.
For the after-school programs, the farm’s project-based learning incorporates content that is also taught in middle school classrooms. Brennan encourages the students to pitch ideas about what they want to incorporate onto the farm.
“Margie does all the education. Every program that we have, she does all of the curriculum for it,” Churgin said. “She creates the curriculum, and then she shows it to the people who are doing the Middletown program.”
The property features a community garden, where plots can be leased for $30 a year; a student-only garden and a pumpkin patch; pollinator gardens and a pollinator path that takes visitors around the orchard, where apples, peaches, and plums, depending on the season, can be picked; a year-round, 140-square-foot greenhouse new this year (before it wasn’t used in the winter) and a recently installed walk-in cooler beside it; a summer farm stand; a recently connected small ground-mounted solar installation; a tractor and two mowers; and chickens, which provide emotional and social support for the special education students who visit the farm.
Only about an acre of the property is used to grow food, with a few thousand pounds of produce harvested annually. Most of the tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, eggplant, asparagus, spinach, kale, squash, beans, and beets are donated to the Aquidneck Food Pantry and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Newport.
Some of the crops are also used to make a meal for the students to get a taste of what they have helped grow.
“We want to get the kids outside to understand where our food comes from, because, sad as it is to say, some kids think it comes from a grocery store,” Churgin said.
In early July, the farm’s first full-time manager, Michael Roy, was hired. It had been a part-time position. The farm is unofficially organic, as no pesticides are sprayed or chemical fertilizer spread.
The farm’s annual operating budget is about $200,000, according to Churgin, with the vast majority of that money coming from grants. The budget includes paying the farm manager and Brennan and a few other part-timers. The Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District pays a nominal fee to lease the land.
“It’s pretty amazing. Marjorie and I, we were one day just standing out here talking, and then we just paused and looked, and we were like, ‘Wow, we have grown this,’” Churgin recalled. “There really wasn’t like a strategic plan, you know. It was just flying by the seat of our pants. There’s much more planning involved now, but Margie is — I can’t emphasize enough — the heart and soul of this place. … We didn’t know each other beforehand. We’ve become very good friends through it. It’s our baby.”
