STORY: Cultivating Whole Engineers through Partnerships with Local Farms

October 31, 2024

This summer, two Olin students spent their time engaged equally in agricultural research and hands-on farmwork at certified-organic Powisset Farm.

Arianne Fong ’27 and Eddy Pan ’27 worked on the project with Alessandra Ferzoco, assistant professor of measurement science, who is one of several faculty researching sustainable food systems, both on Olin’s campus and beyond. 

“This summer, we took the approach of prioritizing a daily and positive connection with the Earth and people that steward land for a living and for the benefit of our communities,”  says Ferzoco. “One way to help students to believe in the possibility of a just and sustainable future is for them to have experienced a reciprocal relationship with nature. It’s an old idea that I’ve come to learn through educators and thought leaders like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Leah Peniman. Farmers have a tremendous amount to teach us about sustainability mindsets.”

Located in Dover, Massachusetts, 100-acre Powisset Farm, owned and operated by The Trustees, encompasses a community supported agriculture (CSA) program with organic produce, as well as a farm store, teaching kitchen, culinary program, summer camp, and year-round public programming.

Fong and Pan spent equal amounts of time working on the farm—from constructing fences to fixing tractors to harvesting spinach in the rain—and doing technical work on challenges that the farmers at Powisset presented to them.

“The students were great about diving into whatever we were doing that day,” says mechanical engineer and Olin alum Aubrey Dority ’18, who is assistant grower at Powisset Farm. “Our flow each day is different, so they got a broad introduction to farming and how we operate throughout the season, and not just the ag tech issues we’re facing.”

“At Olin, we’ve been teaching human-centered design for a long time. There are many shapes of human-centered design practices, and the foundation of all of them are the relationships” says Ferzoco. “It’s important for students to have trust in what the farmers are telling them, as well as an awareness and some humility about the role technology can play in the farming world.”

When considering potential tech projects, one of the main issues facing Powisset Farm was documentation. They track 73 types of information that overlap into different systems, such as billing, expenses, food safety management, organic certification, crop planning, and more. Farmers can find this record-keeping particularly challenging because the physical work and rhythm of farming don’t lend themselves well to documentation.

“We use a lot of notes made on whiteboards,” says Tim Laird, employee and farm manager at Powisset. “These notes then have to be transcribed and entered into various spreadsheets, and there’s a lot of redundancy.”

Fong and Pan devised a prototype of an optical character recognition tool to automate digitization of the written data, which would be an enormous time saver for Dority and Laird. On the backend, the students also want to look at how to reorganize the structure of the information to reduce redundancies, as well as track additional observations throughout the year to help improve Powisset’s crop planning process.

“To me, this project was a success not because Arianne or Eddy left the experience saying, ‘I want to be a farmer now,’” says Ferzoco. “Rather, they felt like their role as technologists was important and valued in this ecosystem and the farming community. They’re invested; they’re already talking about recruiting younger students to continue this and other projects with farms.”

Ferzoco is currently looking for funding to hire more students to engage in this kind of hands-on farming work. 

“Our north star is remembering that the work we do—technical or physical—is to serve the farmer and the land,” says Ferzoco. “As we look at projects of different scales, there will be things that might not benefit from a technical solution, and we want to be deliberate and considerate in where we choose to apply technology. This is about teaching systems thinking and not viewing a technical prototype as the desired outcome.”