The Ecological Restoration Certificate provides a comprehensive experience in compassionate earth stewardship. The skills and frameworks explored are useful for practitioners seeking professional development, volunteers and community members assisting local conservation efforts, and landowners looking to revive ecological health at home.

Over three full-day hands-on workshops, participants will dig into the practices and lenses for partnering with nature to mend degraded ecosystems and create healthy, resilient habitat for wildlife. Topics covered include assessing site conditions, taking inspiration from nature, planning and implementing restoration projects, and building a sustainable practice for a lifetime of impactful earth care.

The Ecological Gardener Training Program was launched in 2022 in partnership with Elyse Jurgen of Waxwing EcoWorks. This program focuses on rebuilding biodiversity and other ecosystem services in human-managed and human-impacted spaces.

Over four months of weekly classes, participants dig deep into native plants, plant communities, and regional landscape patterns that inform the design, creation, and stewardship of biodiverse native habitat gardens supporting the well-being of people, wildlife, and the ecosystem services we depend on. Some program participants are exploring a career in ecological landscaping, while others are seeking to enhance pollinator and wildlife resilience through home-scale lawn conversion, rain garden installation in community spaces, and wildlands restoration. Beyond a practical basis for bringing ecological gardening to the spaces they live, work, and play, participants walk away with a deepened sense of place and connection to local landscapes.

The Horn Farm’s signature Regenerative Grower Training Program offers 33 weeks of hands-in-the-dirt learning. Students explore ways to design and grow diverse and abundant crop systems that support a healthy ecosystem and foodshed.

Meeting Tuesdays and Fridays from February to October, this season-spanning program emphasizes low-tech, human-scale methods suitable for home gardening or small market garden production. While annual plants are covered in detail, this program also incorporates perennial vegetables, herbs, and agroforestry systems, familiarizing students with ecological design principles while teaching non-chemical propagation, planting, caretaking, and harvesting practices. By tending crops during the growing season (May-October), trainees receive a weekly crop share.

The RGTP is an immersive and expansive experience. While suitable for people with small farm aspirations, the program also welcomes land owners and community changemakers seeking skills in self-reliance, subsistence gardening, and serving local food needs.

Foraging invites us to deepen our relationship with the natural landscape. While tending and harvesting wild foods and other goods, we restore touch with our ancestry: rekindling the many regenerative ways people have interacted with local plants for millennia.

In 10 weekly sessions over the transition from spring to summer, participants explore diverse ecologies–moving from “weeds” to trees–while learning about foraging safety and ethics, plant identification, harvesting, processing for food and medicine, and ethnobotanical relationships tethering plants and people. Guest instructors enrich the experience with special topics like mushroom foraging, medicinal herbs, nature journaling, and more.

Serving both first-time foragers and experienced wildcrafters, this program provides a well-rounded experience in building a lifeway around wild foods. Students hone the observation skills, tools, and empowerment needed to reawaken our inherent kinship with the ecosystems we’re embedded in.

Taught by Mark Gingrich of Gingrich Apiaries, the Horn Farm’s Beekeeper Training Program explores beekeeping from its scientific underpinnings to implementing a hive at home.

The program is designed for two years of monthly engagement. In the first year, participants learn the basics of honeybee biology and hive tending through classroom sessions in the winter followed by in-person hive inspections at the Horn Farm during the warm seasons. Year one culminates with each participant having the option to transfer a bee colony to their home property.

Following the same trajectory as the first year, participants in the optional second year revisit program content in a new light: now managing their own hive at home. This continued engagement allows new beekeepers to ask emergent questions, troubleshoot, and remain connected to the class community.