It’s 6 p.m. on a winter Monday, and the nearly 40-acre property behind McIntosh Middle School called The Farm is shadowed in the cool dusk. A cow calls an inviting moo and chickens cluck in the distance. Crickets have begun their nighttime chorus. Plenty of students are still on campus in the waning light, some tending to the animals they’re raising for the Sarasota County Fair auction, some waiting for a 6:30 p.m. 4-H meeting, and some just hanging out, kids being kids.
The Farm is a Sarasota County Schools initiative, launched last year, to increase agricultural literacy among today’s students. Kate Traugott, often called “Farmer Kate” by students and faculty alike, is the farm’s manager, overseeing the $8 million, 39-acre agricultural complex, which includes livestock barns, greenhouses, a teaching kitchen, pasture land and dozens of acres of wild oak and pine hammock.
Traugott earned her farmer title while running a community supported agriculture (CSA) enterprise from her five-acre homestead in Myakka Valley Ranches called Season of Sun. (A CSA is a farming model in which community members pay for a share of a farm’s harvest.) She was also the farm-to-school coordinator for Sarasota County Schools before taking her new role as the farm manager. Notably, she trained with Alice Waters, the famous Berkeley, California, chef who launched the farm-to-table movement in the 1970s, as well as the Edible Schoolyard Project, which has been teaching students how to harvest and grow food for more than 30 years and is now in 5,800 school kitchen-and-garden programs nationwide…