Organic Gardening Training Program
Dr. Martin Baumgart, Project Director, 605-867-5780
Leland Bear Heels, Director, Voc-Ed Department
Oglala Lakota College
Oglala, S.D.
(605) 455-2321

Among all the amazing sights in all of the American hunger and poverty movement, the circular Lakota Community Garden in a dry creek bed just east of the village of Oglala has to be one of the most unusual.

Here, college students from Bonn, Germany, work alongside Lakota students from Oglala Lakota College to create an all-organic garden that combines the most modern sustainable agriculture techniques with the "medicine wheel" from Lakota tradition. The two-year-old summer curriculum gives the German students hands-on agriculture experience and exposure to a culture than many of them never heard of; and perhaps more important, says Martin Baumgart, it's seeding the Lakota Nation with a core of trained organic gardeners who can go out into the community and teach their neighbors to build food self-reliance and pride.

This unlikely partnership started in 1989, when Prof. Weltzein of Bonn's agriculture school came to the Pine Ridge Reservation for a four-week visit and met with Leonard Little Finger, a member of the now-defunct Lakota Produce Growers Organization (which he and Tom Cook founded) and an advocate for health and nutrition programs. Weltzein left with the idea that the Lakota land, people and religion were ideally suited for organic gardening. The next year, he dispatched Baumgart, who had been finishing up his Ph. D. in biological plant protection and grasshopper control in Benin, Africa, to Pine Ridge to set up a program.

Now in its second year, the summer curriculum has attracted 16 Lakota students and 14 German students for a full-time 14-week course that runs from May through August, covering both field work in the community garden and individual plots along with class work on organic farming techniques and Lakota culture studies.

Using drip irrigation and various mulching techniques, the gardens are not merely instructional but experimental. They yield heavily, and the produce is put to good use, being donated to nutrition programs for elderly people on the reservation, thus completing another cycle of the medicine wheel by involving the students and the community.

Most important, Baumgart says, the lesson IS going out. Of last summer's eight Lakota students, seven are growing their own gardens this year. One is on the verge of commercial success by marketing his produce off the reservation; two of them, Jody Plenty Wounds and Steve Bear Eagle, are helping Baumgart teach this summer's course as his assistants.

"It needs time, time to get the community involved," Baumgart said. "We want people who can take over and train their own students. I won't spend my life here, ja? But these people will, and they can take it over."

If it survives, that is. At a time when Baumgart would like to expand the project to add community gardens in several other parts of the reservation -- at an estimated cost of $30,000 per garden per season -- the program has lost its funding. Baumgart and the college's Leland Bear Heels are writing grants.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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