This is the seventh in a series of videos about sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. The series was produced in collaboration with the Global Food Initiative at the University of California.

Visiting the farm at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was a personal high point of this series, though I couldn’t say exactly why. It could well have been because there’s an experimental blueberry plot there, and when I went in the spring, it was raining, and the green leaves were sparkling and the wet berries were offset perfectly, and here was this glistening working farm on an otherwise more-or-less normal college campus, which just happened to be on a hill above the Pacific.

Or it could have been because the Santa Cruz campus has a series of beautiful, renowned, well-run gardens and farms, unlike on any other campus in the country.

For example, the school has been running a six-month apprenticeship program in ecological horticulture since 1967, in which people from all walks of life come to learn practical and hands-on gardening skills. There are about 40 first-year apprentices, and a few others who have stayed on for longer. Since it began, 1,500 people from around the world have gone through this program, many of them studied under Orin Martin, who is now famous in the food world. Everywhere you go in California you find them: well-educated gardeners and farmers who’ve been trained there and who command respect.