Green School Farms Story

My name is Gary Fehr. My farm, Green School Farms, was founded with a vision to help Nebraska schools offer locally and sustainably produced food in their food service programs. We offer technical assistance to schools to help them source and promote healthy food to their students.

We don’t just grow for schools, we also sell sustainably raised produce to the community through many different channels such as this website, CSA, farmer’s markets, and wholesale. The path to the present day was a long but fulfilling one.

In the early 2000’s, I was living a typical life as a software engineer, working a desk job and enjoying life. I never gave much thought to my food or where it came from. Living in Colorado at the time, my wife and I began attending the local farmer’s market. It was festive and a fun outside activity, and although I grew up in town, it prompted nostalgic memories of farm experiences I had as a child in Nebraska. As we continued to visit the market, it piqued our curiosity about food, and we started to learn.

Learning things like how it is produced, how production methods affect the environment and our health, issues about food security, long-term effects of chemicals used in conventional agriculture production, and the economic trap that agrochemical corporations use to profit off the backs of farmers.

But we also learned about encouraging alternatives that address these issues in the forms of sustainable, regenerative, and organic systems. The philosophies behind these approaches awakened something in me that felt right and true. At some point I realized I was feeling a calling to participate in this as a livelihood. Rather than just attending a market, I wanted to be more centrally involved, and so I began a gradual but deliberate shift in my career. I learned as much as I could about what it took to start a small sustainable farm. I began to volunteer in sustainable agriculture organizations, and to meet like-minded people, to take classes, to help on farms, and do an internship.

My farm has been in production since 2015. Although I have come a long way and learned a tremendous amount, I feel an even bigger respect now for regenerative agriculture than I did when all of this was just a romantic idea of leaving a desk and working outside in the fresh air. It humbles me now to know how much one needs to know to produce healthy food – dealing with weeds, pests and fertility in a wonderfully complex ecology of a sustainable farm. A farm where the automatic response is not to simply dump another chemical at the problem and trust that the corporate “experts” have proven its long-term safety to our world, our environment, or our own bodies. A farm where the philosophy is to work with Mother Earth rather than dominate and control her.

These are some of the promptings that have brought me to where I am today. I look forward to serving you and partnering with you as we improve our world.