From Backyard to Classroom

New Mettle Farms began as a residential urban farm in Modesto, California, where we converted 80% of our home landscape into food-producing gardens. What started as a family endeavor quickly grew. A daughter’s    4-H poultry project expanded from a simple backyard coop into the chicken Taj Mahal for Gabey's Smart Chicks—a thriving micro-farm enterprise specializing in heritage chicks, eggs, and incubation. And before long, our urban farm gained a private classroom, where we began welcoming county educators and homeschool families eager to see a highly efficient microfarm system in action.

 

A Decade of Meeting Schools Where They Are

That early community interest became our foundation. As word spread, our urban farm and classroom evolved into traveling educational programs serving schools, libraries, and homeschool communities across Central California. For ten years—including throughout the disruptions of the pandemic—New Mettle Farms rose to meet schools exactly where they were. We developed:

• Sustainable garden designs optimized for student education.

• Hands-on traveling programs and organized field days.

• Video instruction and place-based garden programs.

• Staff training and custom-designed products built to fill critical industry gaps.​​

 

How We Work: Interpretive Design

Today, New Mettle Farms is an interpretive program and product development company. We design regenerative learning systems integrated with garden architecture and educational products. Think of our work like a state park or museum that creates intuitive trail signage alongside physical exhibits. We align outdoor environments to educational content and outcomes using:

• Planting and landscape design, complete with maintenance and continuity manuals.

• Planting guides featuring detailed lifecycle and harvest workflows.

• Multi-topic activity prompts covering STEM, nutrition, and environmental education.

• Cultural transitions paired with artisan skill-building modules.

By embedding natural touchpoints like nutrition and career exploration, we enable educators to easily weave them into their own curriculum. Rather than writing lessons or delivering direct instruction, we build the shared groundwork. This allows teachers, after-school staff, garden clubs, and parents to work from the same foundation—extending real garden-based learning to programs that lack a dedicated garden educator or maintenance staff. To maximize our impact, New Mettle Farms proudly partners with leading agricultural and conservation organizations to bring industry-grade education directly into our regenerative garden programs.

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Still curious? Explore our Project Gallery and Behind-the-Scenes Process.

 

Looking Ahead

As we scale toward our own agricultural location and projects, this same expertise, research, and partnership network will expand. Our future educational and research site will offer students from TK through college hands-on exposure to conservation, regenerative agriculture, and land-based career paths.