Compass Green: Sustainability Classroom on Wheels

Biointensive farm­ing, which makes up the Compass Green cur­ricu­lum, deliv­ers an aver­age of four to six times the pro­duc­tion value of the US aver­age yield. These meth­ods can be applied in the city, in a back­yard, or on a plot of land. “Regardless of people’s sit­u­a­tions, we tell them, `If we can do it in the back of a truck, you can do it in your own home,’” Cutter said.

“We did this so that we could put together some­thing that was really unique, kind of new and kind of sexy,” Cutter con­tin­ued, “some­thing that would grab the atten­tion of some­body who didn’t already give a hoot about sus­tain­abil­ity and which would also be a great con­ver­sa­tion piece—not to men­tion it’s a good demon­stra­tion gar­den, illus­trat­ing the dif­fer­ent prin­ci­ples that we teach.”

The truck had inter­est­ing begin­nings. “I was teach­ing a work­shop at Colorado College when I got a call from my old buddy Nick Runkle, whom I’ve known from the eighth grade on,” Cutter recalled. “He said, ‘Hey, Cutter, what do you think about tak­ing a box truck and turn­ing it into a mobile green­house?’ Nick and I have got­ten into all sorts of crazy adven­tures in the past and so I wasn’t com­pletely blown away by such an out­landish idea. I said, ‘Let me give it a cou­ple of days to think about. That sounds pretty wild.’ I hung up the phone and mulled it over for about half an hour, then called him back and said, ‘All right, buddy, let’s do it.’”

The Compass Green truck is now con­stantly on the move and aim­ing at its next des­ti­na­tion. “We try to sched­ule our tour really effi­ciently so that we’re basi­cally going from school to uni­ver­sity to school to com­mu­nity work­shop,” said Cutter. “We just decide which region we want to do and then we start doing cold calls. Also, the more places we go, the more peo­ple want us to come some­where. They say, ‘Oh, where are you guys going to be this month? I’ve got a friend who’s a teacher at this school, and I’m sure she would love your project.’ So word of mouth is also a big way for us.”

For schools, Cutter and his team spend part of the time in a class­room and part of the time per­form­ing demon­stra­tions on the truck.

It’s no mys­tery that the Compass Green truck keeps mov­ing down the road, con­stantly in demand. “The response has just been awe­some,” Cutter reported. “It def­i­nitely keeps us inspired as we go through the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of a young non­profit startup. We get all types of peo­ple, and their faces just light up; there’s a spark behind their eyes. They start see­ing that farm­ing is not some­thing that is infe­rior and tedious, as we cul­tur­ally can be led to believe, but is some­thing that can be cre­ated, that can be inspir­ing and that actu­ally mat­ters. I see this from five-year-olds that come into the back of our truck to peo­ple who are sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­ans say­ing, ‘You know, when I was lit­tle we had a gar­den and I’m going to start gar­den­ing again.’”

In that many of the areas Cutter is teach­ing in are strong­holds of indus­trial agri­cul­ture, he doesn’t polar­ize peo­ple. “There have been some farm­ers that have come to our work­shop who are inter­ested in tran­si­tion­ing to more organic meth­ods, and that’s been really cool,” he said. “The farm­ers are not the enemy. I’ve gone into schools in Iowa, and all the kids know about agri­cul­ture. Many of the stu­dents actu­ally have fam­ily involved in farm­ing; so I couldn’t look in their faces and say, ‘Oh, these farm­ers are doing ter­ri­ble things,’ because they’re not. They’ve come from gen­er­a­tions of farm­ing and they really want to feed peo­ple in the best way they know how.

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When you approach it hon­estly in this man­ner in talk­ing to the stu­dents, they under­stand that I’m not say­ing any­thing against the farmer. I’m talk­ing about these cor­po­ra­tions who really don’t care about grow­ing food or cre­at­ing a healthy prod­uct; they just care about mak­ing a buck. The kids under­stand that. They see that this model is really stran­gling agri­cul­ture, and they also see that there is aris­ing a sense of small-scale organic farm­ers that can really rem­edy this on an eco­nomic as well as a
health level.”

Cutter is cer­tainly no stranger to inter­est­ing enter­prises. At age 27 he has already lived as a monk in India, was employed on a schooner in Hawaii, and has worked closely with John Jeavons, a found­ing father of sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture. By the time he began his pro­fes­sional life, organic and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture was already in his blood. “I got inter­ested in organic food early on,” Cutter related. “I was lucky to have par­ents who felt it was impor­tant to eat healthy and organ­i­cally. A few years later I dis­cov­ered the grow­ing side of things—I was liv­ing on a sail­boat in Hawaii and used to come on shore once a week. I did a whole lot of wild har­vest­ing of dif­fer­ent plants that are native to Hawaii: bread­fruit, coconuts, bananas, avo­ca­dos and some of the veg­eta­bles they grow in the jun­gle. I also worked on an organic farm there one day a week to get the veg­eta­bles that I needed for that week.

“About a year and a half later I had an oppor­tu­nity that I took to work with world-famous agri­cul­tur­al­ist John Jeavons on his farm in Mendocino, California.”

Now, dri­ving that truck, Cutter plans to con­tinue mak­ing it all fun for peo­ple. “It’s not going to be hard­ship that pulls us out of hard­ship; it’s going to be joy that pulls us out of hard­ship,” he con­cluded. “And I have to say we are enter­ing a phase of hard­ship in terms of food pro­duc­tion and sus­tain­abil­ity. It is the joy of hands in the dirt and the joy of pluck­ing a fresh ripe tomato and pop­ping it in your mouth that is going to tran­si­tion us to a more sus­tain­able future. It’s not going to be the gloom and doom; it’s going to be the smile.”

To learn more about Compass Green, visit www.compassgreenproject.org.