Elsewhere, a troop of goats roam. The goats earn their keep by clearing fields for planting. “You set a group of goats into an overgrown field and it's remarkable how fast they will clear it, even the poison ivy and poison oak,” says Geraci, who seems to have a knack for making the animals come when he calls. He already has bee hives producing honey and plans to add fish tanks as well as some dairy cows and start cheese production in the near future.

In addition to its growing activities, Great Kids Farm offers vocational training and extended internships for high school students and young adults.

The vocational training is part of a planned “agri-hospitality” program that will train students to identify business opportunities in the farm to fork chain. The program manages Great Kids Café, located in the school district's central office, which serves dishes made with ingredients grown at Great Kids Farm.

The Café is central to a two-year externship program kicking off this January that will have students working at both Great Kids Farm and Great Kids Café, eventually moving up into quasi-management roles in the program in the second year. Another project, slated to open next year, is the first agro-hospitality high school in the United States, a kind of charter school with 300 students who will learn to operate across the farm-to-fork supply chain, trained in both organic agricultural techniques and in hospitality and culinary skills.

“I don't want to create an army of french fry jockeys,” says Geraci. “There are plenty of places you can learn to do that. I want to create cooks and chefs with real career opportunities.”

A Community Incubator

Great Kids Farm also serves as an incubator for school and community garden projects, another Geraci passion. School groups come and learn how to grow crops and then take transplants back to their schools and start gardens there from them. They then maintain those gardens and even serve some of the products in the school, illustrating every step of the traditional food supply channel for children whose only context is the cans, bottles and shrink wraps at the grocery store. Currently, 40 schools in the district have begun such school gardens and Geraci's goal is to have one in every school.

Great Kids Farm also seeds community “hoop houses,” greenhouse operations designed to fit into urban areas to grow fresh produce for area residents.

“I'm on the mayor's task force to develop and build a food system in urban agriculture in the city of Baltimore,” Geraci explains. “We're reclaiming a total of about 30 acres in the city where we'll build portable greenhouses for food production, rather than waiting for Safeway or Whole Foods to build grocery stores in neighborhoods where they're never going to build. So why not bring food to the food deserts? Why not build entrepreneurial models where young men and women can carve out a little piece of business and have these alternative farmers markets in neighborhoods where yuppies don't go.”

Great Kids Farm also serves as a test field for potential additions to the district menu. “The farm can't supply all of our needs, of course, but we use it to plant different crops that we then have the kids try. So for example, they'll tell us they like this variety of turnip or collards. We can then go to a farmer and say, ‘Put in 80 acres or this or 100 acres of that and we'll buy it.’ Or, farmers come to us and tell us the kinds of things that grow especially well around here, and we try those. In the end, it's good for us, good for the kids and good for the farmers.”