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Mandy Manna often points out that it takes about 10 jobs to produce one bag of potato chips.

Growers, harvesters, truck drivers, packagers and marketing people are needed to bring a single bag of chips to fruition, she says.

Manna, farm administrator of the Philadelphia School District’s Fox Chase Farm said many jobs are available in and adjacent to the agriculture business.

The 112-acre farm in Northeast Philadelphia sits on the border between the city and Montgomery County. During a recent visit there, WHYY News observed a boar, chickens, cows, donkeys and a group of goats, including their 2-week-old offspring.

About 30,000 students visit the farm each year, some during field trips. But other students, from kindergarten through 12th grade, are part of the district’s agriculture education program, which includes planting, growing and harvesting, along with making and selling produce and other items at its farm stands. Students also learn how to raise and care for livestock.

Some products are distributed to the school district’s culinary arts programs.

“Our goal here is to immerse our students, we are exposing them, we are engaging them,” Manna said. “We are allowing them to become empowered through all of the career opportunities that can be found through agriculture. Most people consider agriculture to be cows and plows. There is so much more about agriculture than just understanding the planting and the animals.”

Fox Chase Farm is owned by the city and managed by the School District of Philadelphia. It serves as an agricultural educational campus for the district. The farm is open to students from all public and private schools in the city and the surrounding counties.

An invaluable experience

Twins Marsha and Marcus Tibert, both 16 and juniors at Northeast High School, said they first visited Fox Chase Farm a couple of years ago, as part of the high school’s three-year, Career Technical Education program that focuses on entrepreneurship, sales and marketing.

They both worked at the farm stands at Fox Chase.

“Some of the things I learned I probably wouldn’t have learned if I wasn’t there,” Marcus Tibert said. “I learned how to read a receipt. I learned how to interact with customers. It’s very important to do your due diligence. It’s important to know your product.”

For example, customers wanted to know the ingredients of a product, how it tastes, whether you would recommend it, and its shelf life, he said.

Other skills he learned were how to use a credit card machine and how to properly provide a refund

“It opened up a lot of opportunities to learn,” Marsha Tibert said. People would ask her if purchases qualified as organically grown food and for the available flavors of hot sauces and herbal dips, which were all created by students.

Both Marsha and Marcus Tilbert want to major in business in college and would like to own their own business. The experience was invaluable, they said.

Big business

Agriculture in Pennsylvania is one of the state’s largest industries.

In a 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania boasted $600 million in direct farm-to-consumer sales, which ranked second to California’s $1.4 billion.

In Philadelphia, major players, like the School District of Philadelphia, hospitals, universities and corporations spend about $5.3 billion a year on food industry goods and services, according to a 2019 report by the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia.

About half of that is spent outside the city, said Harry Hayman, a food policy fellow at the Economy League and manager of South Restaurant on North Broad Street.

“It’s an opportunity lost for Philadelphia to keep the tax dollars, the supply chain and the jobs, ” Hayman said. “One of my projects as part of the Economy League is to figure out how to bring that back locally.”

Part of the answer is getting more young people interested and involved in the agriculture and food business, Hayman said. That’s one reason why Manna’s work at Fox Chase Farm is so important.

The students at Fox Chase Farm operate three farm stands where they sell the products that they grow there and other items, such as eggs, tomatoes, garlic, pasta sauce and tomato butter. Those stands are located at the farm, at school district headquarters and at Crossroads Accelerated Academy in west Philadelphia.

“The physical structures are being built by students in the facility maintenance Career Technical Education program at Lincoln High School,” Manna said. This allows students from other schools to be involved in the process.

Manna wants students to run the stands like their own businesses, in order to stimulate their entrepreneurial spirit.

“We are working with the schools to develop their own product lines. You might have goat milk soap,” Manna said. “Our goal is to be able to provide the raw product that each school will be specializing in and have their own scent of goat milk soap.”

The farm plans to launch five more stands soon.

In 2024, Nancy Walker, the state’s labor and industry secretary, and agriculture secretary Russell Reading visited Fox Chase Farm to announce a $250,0000 Schools-to-Work grant from the Shapiro administration for the Philadelphia School District to create apprentice programs related to agriculture that will lead to high-demand, good-paying jobs.

Also, the program hopes to team up students with mentors at agricultural businesses in the area, such as FMC Corp., a global agricultural science business based in Philadelphia. There are about 80,000 food-related jobs in the city, or about 12% of all jobs in Philadelphia, according to the Economy League.

According to Manna, that money will be used to create an apprentice program geared toward controlled environmental agriculture. The program’s goal is to help 24 students a year to earn certification in areas such as organic food growing, a high-demand skill in Pennsylvania.

“The whole atmosphere is controlled — ventilation, humidity, temperature,” she said. In the next few months, the school district will start to build indoor growing areas at vacant spaces at Mastbaum High School in Kensington and Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia.

The program will start by teaching the students the science of planting, growing and harvesting produce indoors — for example, how to create the ideal mix of nutrients, soil and water, along with the correct lighting, Manna said. One of the goals is to grow enough produce to stock school salad bars.

In the second phase, the program hopes to grow enough fruits and vegetables and other items to distribute to Philadelphia food banks. About 600,000 people experienced food insecurity in the Philadelphia region in 2022, according to Philabundance, a local food bank that serves the area.

From there, the plan is to have the students master mass growing, in order to sell products to restaurants and to make the program self-sustaining, she said.

“Imagine a student who has been engaged in this process from elementary through high school, the full scope of growing from the seed all the way through,” Manna said. “It’s an amazing opportunity for students to be a part of a system.”