Layers of Growth: From Soil to Leadership at Branch Hill Farm

How is a gardening plot like a pan of lasagna? It’s all in the layers. At Branch Hill Farm, a conserved farm and woodlands in Milton Mills, the farmers use the analogy of a layered pan of noodles, cheese and sauce to explain how placing a new coat of compost on top of the previous years’ gives the soil a rich and varied supply of nutritients.

But, there’s another kind of layering happening at Branch Hill this summer. Layering of experience from generations of farmers, like teenage farm hands, college students with several summers of field work and seasoned farmers who run the operation. Together they create a rich, knowledge-laden “experience compost” that leads to plenty of produce, but also personal growth.

Izzy Papa, an Agriculture and Food Systems major at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, identifies with the middle layer. She is eager to work outside the classroom and put her education into practice through an UNH Extension internship this summer. On a recent day on Branch Hill Farm, Papa, Class of ’27, had finished leading the younger farm hands through the morning’s harvest – snap peas galore! – and was weeding a patch of Egyptian walking onions prior to the noontime break.

“Something I struggle with in school is sitting in a lecture for two hours,” Papa said, noting that she had no such trouble while working in the fields. “This is definitely a dream job.” 

Papa has impressed the leadership team at the farm with her passion for working the land, learning from those around her, and for sharing that understanding with younger people, according to Brianna Arnold, educational programming coordinator at Branch Hill. Arnold said that Papa’s role is simultaneously one of mentor and protégé – and one which she is “marvelous” at filling.

“There’s a lot of moving parts” on an educational farm, Arnold said, and Papa has proven herself capable and dependable. She can lead the young crew through the morning harvest, for example, enabling  the more experienced farmers to attend to other tasks.

“It doesn’t work if one person is holding all the knowledge, all the systems,” Arnold said. The operation at Branch Hill Farm pursues twin objectives. The property both produces food for the community, while also providing educational opportunities for people to learn about local and sustainable foodways. “Izzy plays a major role.”

Papa has formal education and previous farming experience, but this internship gave her the chance to apply that knowledge in a leadership role. Or, as she put it, “The balance of being a confident instructor, while also developing a relationship with each of the teens.”

Key to her success in that, she said, has been the mentorship of the farm leadership, which she described as “intelligent” and “present.” Papa said the internship has given her humility and confidence, and has fed her “desire to learn how to be a leader while receiving feedback on how to do that… I love working on the farm, I especially love the people I’ve met working on the farm.”