In its first year, Greendale Couch Organic Farm has already made good on its plans to serve as a community and educational hub.
The organization held its first educational program at the facility this summer, with more programs and community events in the works.
Greendale Couch Organic Farm is a nonprofit research and educational organization on a 128-acre property located at 11480 Twinsburg Warren Rd. in Hiram.
The Greendale Farm was first established in the early 20th century. It was the most productive dairy farm in the state of Ohio in the 1920s, until it went bankrupt in the 1950s, at which time Alfred Welling Couch bought the farm. Couch was an organic farming pioneer who used the estate to educate students and the community about the principles of growing organically, eating healthy and living holistically.
After Couch passed away in 2002, the property was ultimately put into a trust and largely went unused for several years. It wasn’t until 2023 that Greendale Couch Organic Farm trustees decided to renovate the farmhouse and restore the property to use as a research-based educational facility with a focus on developing ecological community-based approaches to sustainable living through hands-on research.
Greendale Couch Organic Farm Trustee Dennis Taylor said Couch would be excited to know his farm is being used for educational purposes.
The restoration and renovation of the farmhouse and property are still in the works, but that didn’t stop trustees from creating a summer-long educational mentorship program that included the farm as the backdrop for a research-based field day for area students and teachers.
Greendale Couch Organic Farm, in partnership with Hiram College and Case Western Reserve University Gelfand STEM Center, held its first Collaborative Research Opportunity Program (CROP) this summer for area high school students and Hiram College students. The program took place from the beginning of June and ended the last week of July at Hiram College.
CROP is a summer research program that offers undergraduate students near‑peer mentoring opportunities with area junior and senior high school students. The program engages students in scientific inquiry, sustainable organic practices and community‑centered problem-solving.
The program included the organization's five-day Roots, Rivers, and Reclamation (3R’s) Summer Institute, designed to give participants real-life field day experiences at Greendale Couch Organic Farm and Hiram College’s James H. Barrow Field Station. During the institute, the high school students boarded at Whitcomb Hall and Miller Hall at Hiram College.
The 3R’s program and CROP are the first programs developed by Greendale Couch Organic Farm.
The 3R’s Institute was modeled after the Learning Streams International program that was developed by Taylor, a former Hiram College professor, along with colleagues from the University of Akron and Kent State University. It ran most years between 2007 and 2023 at Hiram College.
The seven-week CROP program at Hiram College helped prepare undergraduate students for the 3R’s Institute, where they’d be mentoring high school students and their teachers.
“We met with the college undergraduates, usually once or twice a week, and we would talk to them about how to mentor high school students and teachers and talk to them about the best way to go about teaching and learning about what we know about the science of learning from the brain and how to put that into action to get students engaged,” Taylor said.
On July 29, students from schools including John Marshall High School, Hathaway Brown School and Lakewood High School took part in a 3R’s field day at Greendale Couch Organic Farm. The students were split into three groups, each one focusing on specific collaborative research.
“That day, there was one group that was going down to the stream and assessing the stream, so they could use one of the Ohio bio monitoring protocols for streams,” Taylor said. “High school teachers were working with near-peer mentors. There was another group that was looking at the house itself and looking at the history of the house by looking at pottery shards that were found and the architectural details of the house. And there was a third group that was looking at trees that are in the area and how to identify trees and know the invasive trees from the non-invasive trees.”
Taylor’s guest assistant, Sebastian Dunn, attended the field day to fly drones with the students and teach them about their various uses, such as how to spot invasive plant species and how to survey farm land. Near-peer mentor Sebastian Terry was in charge of teaching students how to identify invasive tree species.
James H. Barrow Biological Field Station undergraduate environmental scientist Sean Gerity led a research group at Silver Creek on the perimeter of the farm’s property to teach students how to analyze a stream by using the headwaters habitat evaluation index, which assesses waterways on a variety of physical metrics to get a general estimate about how well they can support aquatic life.
“One of the three main factors that we were looking for at the stream was the size and distribution of substrate size classes, so what is the average size of the little pebbles or sand or silt, and material covering the bed of the stream,” Gerity said. “One of the other metrics was bankfull width, which is basically assessing the max width of the stream when it’s at its most full state, but not at a flooded state. The last metric was maximum pool depth; that’s going to be pools that are less than 40 centimeters in depth but more than 10 centimeters in depth. Those are generally the depths you want to be finding in quality primary headwater streams.”
While at the stream, students were able to use a gravelometer to determine the size of the substrate on the stream's floor, such as the size of sand, gravel and cobble. The end result was to teach the students how to assess a stream and log that information into a standardized worksheet that can be easily understood.
Students also encountered living organisms at the stream.
“One of the really interesting things we were able to find was one of the students ended up finding two-lined salamander larvae that still had their gills on them, which is basically one of the best indicators you can have of a quality stream,” Gerity said. “This means it’s a high-quality stream, which means it isn’t exposed to overly stressful amounts of pollutants and runoff causing increased turbidity, which can cause problems with fish that need clear water that can impact their gills.”
The following day, students and staff visited Frohring Forest and Silver Creek stream at James H. Barrow Biological Field Station to learn about the research that field station staff does at the forest and to explore the cold-water stream.
Frohring Forest is an old-growth beech and sugar maple forest and, at over 100 acres, it’s one of largest remaining uncut beech-maple forests in Ohio.
Jessie Lanterman Novotny, a staff scientist at the field station, said beech-maple forests can’t just grow anywhere; they require a high level of precipitation that the area offers, as well as the proper soil.
During the field day, Novotny shared details about old growth forests and beech leaf disease, as well as taught students how to determine a land's history by assessing ecological transitions.
The group started at the field station and walked through fields and forests to the stream.
“Walking from there down to the stream shows the history of the past two or three hundred years of Ohio, since European settlement,” Novotny said. “When we walked through, we saw active farm fields on the right and then it transitioned to what used to be farms that weren’t there anymore and were growing back into forests. Then we walked through a secondary growth forest area that used to have cows grazing in the woods, so it had undergone a lot of change, and then we walked into the old growth forest, and the stream at the bottom is where we ended up.”
Kyle Kutinsky, a forestry teacher in Kent, arrived at Frohring Forest early to set up a Good Rigging Control System to give some of the more daring students the chance to be hoisted into a tree to see what the forest floor looks like from high up.
“The big thing is we want to get the kids up in the canopy to kind of give them a different perspective,” Kutinsky said. “Everybody looks up at a tree, but it’s different when you’re in the tree looking down.”
Ascending and descending into the forest’s canopy is a skill set that is used at the field station to study the various layers of the canopy, which Taylor said changes as a scientist ascends up into the arboreal cover.
What's next
Greendale Couch Organic Farm trustees are planning another Roots, Rivers, and Reclamation Summer Institute and CROP research experience for next summer, but they’re also currently working to expand the 3R’s program to include a fall teachers seminar and a winter program for students and teachers.
Greendale Couch Organic Farm is also making progress on the restoration of its farmhouse and property and is in the process of relocating and erecting a 150-year-old granary donated by David and Sigrid Anderson. The granary is expected to be erected in the coming months. It will be used for lawn equipment, tools and storage. The Andersons also donated a historic barn that Taylor said will be dismantled and relocated some time next year and will serve as a community center and educational space.
Taylor said the program was a success and fun and learning was had by all.
“The whole purpose of our program is to help people understand their relationship to the land by looking at the science behind it,” Taylor said.