NEW for 2024, 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.

A new iteration of past farmer trainings, the Horn Farm’s signature Regenerative Grower Training Program offers 22 weeks of hands-in-the-dirt learning on how to grow nutrient-dense food in ways that support a healthy ecosystem and foodshed.

This 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, involving trainees as much in design as in planting, caretaking, and harvesting practices. As a result of tending crops throughout the program, trainees receive a weekly crop share (CSA).

This intimate and season-spanning experience is valuable for anyone interested in exploring a future in small-scale vegetable production as well as anyone interested in learning growing skills for the purpose of homesteading, gardening, and feeding themselves and their community. Through this work, we can provide ourselves with healthy, free, and reciprocal food and medicine while connecting on a deeper level to the landscape in which we live.

Foraging is an invitation to foster deeper relationship with the natural landscape, exploring not just wild foods and medicines, but the ways in which people have interacted with and depended on local plants for millennia

In 8 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.

This program provides foundational knowledge for those interested in beginning (or deepening) their path towards building a relationship with the land, incorporating wild plants into their everyday life, and gaining the knowledge to confidently share with others

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.

The Land Steward Training Program is designed to train the next generation of land stewards.

This four-month learning experience focuses on deep ecological literacy and practical skill-building to inspire versatile, compassionate, and activated caretakers of impaired natural landscapes. Some program participants are exploring a career in land stewardship, while many others are homeowners, volunteers, and community members looking to improve ecology and nature-connection in the spaces they call home.

All participants walk away with foundational and practical knowledge suited for a lifetime of continued learning and earth care, enriching our community’s capacity for restoring faltering ecosystems, rebuilding lost habitat, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and reawakening our sense of belonging on the landscape.