Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing “Sowing Change” series about urban farming.
In the face of rising temperatures, food insecurity and dwindling green space, Stephen Lucke is planting more than just seeds in urban San Antonio, he’s planting solutions.
As the founder of Gardopia Gardens, an urban agriculture nonprofit, Lucke is transforming homes and businesses into thriving gardens, and classrooms into living laboratories. His team not only grows food for local residents but also educates more than 75,000 students through garden-based learning programs that have improved test scores and sparked curiosity in sustainability.
With support from a USDA grant, Gardopia is expanding its impact beyond San Antonio, showing how the next generation of growers can be nurtured from the ground up. The nonprofit recently received a United Way grant to improve fifth and seventh grade math scores through a curriculum called “math in the garden.”
The goal, Lucke said, is to preserve farmland, educate young farmers and create a sustainable local food system.
The Packer: What was your original inspiration behind Gardopia Gardens and how has that mission changed since you founded it?
Lucke: My sophomore summer, I took an introduction to nutrition course and learned about the health epidemics impacting San Antonio, how it is one of the least healthy cities in the nation, and how childhood diabetes and obesity was leading Generation Z to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.
If the health care system was not the solution, because if it was, we’d be healthy already, right? With that, and then coming to graduation and not going to medical school, I had to decide what I was going to do with a degree in biochemistry and understanding that food is medicine.
Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, [is quoted as saying], ‘Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.’ So I thought, if the guy who started Western allopathic medicine is saying that food will heal us, then I need to learn more about nutrition.
[And I realized] the best nutritionist would actually be a farmer, so I needed to learn how to grow food. That’s what took me down this wormhole of garden-based learning and urban agriculture.
You train community members in drought resistant and heat tolerant growing methods, which obviously would be vital in South Texas. How do you tailor your programs to address the specific climate challenges that you have there?
I’m a certified organic farmer, so we use 100% natural processes.
You need to have healthy soil, and healthy soil retains moisture. It allows for the dissipation of heat. It reduces evaporation. There are so many benefits of healthy soil, and so that’s what we teach everybody that we work with — adding compost, adding organic matter.
From there we do drip line irrigation, which is 90% efficient and is the most efficient way to water spaces that are maybe an acre. So if you have 100 acres, they’re doing overhead and flood irrigation a lot of times. But for what we’re doing in urban agriculture and community gardens and farms, drip line is super effective.
And the last thing is mulching. So, we do a lot of mulching, protecting the soil, protecting the drip line, so that all of that moisture is able to stay in those zero-to-12 inches where most of our fruits and vegetables are growing with their flesh roots. We also collect rainwater. That’s a really good way to reduce your water use, while at the same time improving the quality of your water because of the nitrogen, and it doesn’t have things like chlorine or calcium that build up in a lot of our hard water.
Then there are shade structures, like hoop houses that can really help in the summer, reduce some of the UV rays.
What sort of feedback or results have you seen from the students and the schools involved in your garden-based curriculum?
We have had great feedback and support from the community since we began. It’s very natural for us to put our hands in the dirt; kids just want to be dirty, right? And so as we become adults, more and more, we get away from that, because we weren’t built in or raised in a society that connected us to our food — and the farms, a lot of times, are on the periphery.
If you don’t grow up on a farm, rural or in the country, then you’re not necessarily going to be exposed to that. It’s almost innate in humans to want to be connected to nature, and food is nature.
The kids love going outside, getting out of the classroom because they’re underneath the fluorescent lights for multiple hours a day. It’s almost like a second recess for them, where they get to go learn and harvest fresh food. The chickens are always the most popular thing out there. Adults are eager for this information too because they can remember their grandma or their aunt or their uncle who kept a kitchen garden.
Because most people now have lawns, and concrete and subdivisions have taken over farmland, I would say the population aged 24 to 55 is just hungry to learn how to grow their own food and reconnect to the land.
Tell us about the grants and how they’re going to help scale your work.
We received two USDA Farm to School grants. So we’re thankful for the USDA and their support. Unfortunately, with the change in administration, there will be no more Farm to School grants. That was one of the cuts, so we’re the last cohort for a while. The current USDA Farm to School grant is around edu-tainment and making videos of our curriculum. So we have slide shows and worksheets, and we’ll be turning those into fun, learning, engaging videos.
The one that we’re currently working on, which should be ready in the fall, is going to be a video series that can be distributed statewide in Texas and eventually, hopefully nationwide. Right now, we’re aligning it to TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills).
Prior to that, we started a farm program at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy: Primary, that includes about a two-acre garden and farm with chickens, row crops, greenhouse irrigation, rain garden, rainwater collection, all that type of stuff.
Those were our two USDA Farm to School grants.
We recently received a United Way grant from the United Way of San Antonio in Bexar County, and we received a successful students grant to improve fifth and seventh grade math scores, working with the students here at Young Women’s Leadership Academy.
You’re using farming to teach math?
Yes, the National Science Foundation helps create a curriculum called math in the garden. It’s applying arithmetic to learning, from weighing to counting to measuring. How much soil do I need? How many eggs have been harvested? What’s the cost of those eggs? What type of packaging? It goes on and on and on because you can use math in so many ways in farming.
Moving forward, what is your onward vision and purpose?
We want to see the preservation of land. We want to see farmland stay farmland. In this city, it’s hard to get even an acre. To get 10 acres, that’s even crazier. One hundred acres probably doesn’t exist. But San Antonio and Texas, we’re in a good situation. There’s a lot of land, and that’s one of the reasons a lot of people are moving to Central Texas and South Texas, because of how much land we have. So we want to connect young farmers and aspiring farmers to education, resources and land.
The average age of a farmer is between like 58 to 62, depending on the source, but to be able to create a younger generation of farmers who are using sustainable, regenerative practices that take care of the land, produce food, create jobs … that is our hope, to show that San Antonio can be essentially a flagship city for what urban agriculture can look like, and then the region of Texas and Central Texas can be a flagship of what a local and regional food system looks like.
There’s an opportunity for Texas to become more self-sufficient and essentially insulate ourselves from natural or man-made disasters. And I don’t like to talk about gloom and doom, but with climate change and increasing temperatures, we’re going to have less arable land. Texas just shut down our last sugar cane farm because we’re running out of water here in Texas, and so many people are moving in, and the drought is really tough on the Rio Grande River.
So I want people to be healthy, and I want them to be sustainable. I think about the year 2100 and wonder what is our planet going to look like? What are our communities going to look like? We all eat; food is tied to everybody, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Black, you’re white, you’re rich, you’re poor, everybody eats food. And that can bring us to the table, literally and figuratively, so bringing communities together to break down some barriers. And again, it starts with education, because kids need to know from the time they hit elementary school.
And it’s going to take land preservation, so we can start establishing these micro and small farms in these regions — because there’s not a ton of small farmers, and a lot of the smaller farms have gotten eaten up. Because we do have land access, I think we can reestablish small farming as a viable career for people.
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