About The Farm

Our Mission

The goal of Sustainable Agriculture at Eden Hall is to provide multiple access points for students, faculty, and staff to engage with agricultural practices, land stewardship, and food systems practitioners (on and off campus).

We do this integrating with faculty courses and research and supporting student employees, projects, and groups. We leverage our institutional, professional, and personal resources to:

  • Steward agricultural enterprises on our Eden Hall campus while considering ecological, social and economic sustainability factors,

  • Build relationships with farmers and agricultural producers,

  • Learn about regional Indigenous histories and land-use,

  • Grow food that addresses immediate food needs on our campus and outlined by our community partners,

  • Research opportunities and constraints on sustainable livelihoods, and

  • Integrate these agroecological resources into our co-curricular and curricular educational experiences.

A monarch butterfly perched on light purple flowers, with a blurred green background.

Our Vision

We are engaging in and contributing to a network of empowered learners and practitioners with shared values for food sovereignty, diverse food cultures, and skills that contribute towards sustainability within our shared agroecological systems.

Two women in a greenhouse picking ripening purple and green tomatoes from tomato plants.

Our Values

  • Our educational team creates collaborative, transdisciplinary experiential learning opportunities for our students. These opportunities include Falk School classes like Food Farm and Field, Soil Science, and Agroecology.

  • We collaboratively work with campus stakeholders to embody responsible planning and management of our campus resources.

  • We attend to equity, ethics, and access in our courses, research, partnerships, and practice. This includes growing food and seeds that are culturally relevant and distributing food to our communities on and off campus.

  • We host community meals and events to foster connection and belonging with our campus community. We build and sustain relationships with farmers, seed keepers, and other food system practitioners to create community-driven projects.

  • We work to ensure that all of our Chatham community can learn to grow food through intergenerational and multicultural learning opportunities. We support students in finding their passion by uplifting the various assets including their background, interests, skills, beliefs, and values.

What do we do on the farm?

We foster multiple access points for education, research, and collaboration to serve the Falk School's mission alongside student and community goals.

  • Two students in a greenhouse planting seedlings in trays, smiling at the camera. One is wearing a USMC hoodie and the other a beanie and scarf, with gardening supplies and tools around them.

    Research

    From Community-Based Research to biochar trials, Eden Hall Farm co-creates research projects to meet the direct interests and needs of our stakeholders.

  • A woman giving a presentation on harvesting vegetables, with a slide displaying images of tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers being harvested.

    Education

    We offer courses, workshops, student employment, internship, and capstone opportunities that allow students to explore the Living Learning Lab of Eden Hall Farm.

  • Two children harvesting vegetables, including carrots, from crates outside, with gardening tools and supplies nearby.

    Production

    With over 5 acres of certified organic land, we produce thousands of pounds of vegetables, mushrooms and fruit a year, along with hundreds of pounds of maple syrup and honey.

Our Growing Spaces

  • Close-up of a mushroom growing on a tree trunk in a forest setting.

    Mushroom laying yard

    Led by students, we inoculate shiitake logs and wine cap mushroom mulch each year. Mushroom production is integrated into classes and workshops in the spring and fall, with harvests in the summer.

  • Two people in sunglasses and gloves working in a garden bed, smiling at the camera on a sunny day.

    Agroecology Demonstration Garden

    In the Agroecology Demonstration Garden, we prioritize perennial plantings, culturally relevant crops, and agroecological ecosystem services.

  • Person pouring a large quantity of apples from a blue bucket into a wooden harvesting cart outdoors.

    Old Orchard

    We maintain a historic orchard with many different apple varieties. In the winter we hold pruning workshops and in the fall, we harvest and press cider in workshops and classes.

  • A beekeeper in protective clothing and veil crouches in a green field tending to a beehive, with bees flying around.

    Apiaries

    Our apiary team manages two apiaries and plant pollinator friendly plants across campus. We harvest honey in workshops and classes twice a year and teach about alternative hive products, integrated pest management, and more.

  • Two people inside a greenhouse planting and working with rows of leafy green vegetables, with one person smiling at the camera while holding a large sheet.

    Season Extension Technologies

    We have several season extension spaces on campus allowing for students to learn year-round. Our Solar High Tunnel uses solar energy to heat the tunnel throughout the winter. Our Moveable High Tunnel can be moved across two different planting areas allowing for easy crop rotation and improving soil health.

  • Group of people harvesting potatoes in a field with green plants and trees in the background.

    Elsalma

    In our Elsalma fields, you can find our apiary, grafted apple trees, Food Bank Orchard, and annual field production. This space is certified organic and allows for increased production during the summer and fall.

  • Three people in snow-covered forest conducting scientific research or tree sampling, with tools and equipment around, one person holding a bucket.

    Maple Tapping

    We tap Red and Sugar maples on campus every winter, measuring sugar content and total sap flow from each tree. We integrate this farm activity into multi-series workshops and classes such as Botany, Agroecology, and Sustainable Production.

  • A neatly arranged orchard with young trees planted in straight rows on a grassy field, under a cloudy sky.

    Food Bank Orchard

    We partner with the Fruit Tree Foundation and Allegheny County Food Bank to steward 80 fruit trees, including apples, peaches, plums, and pears. The fruit from these trees will fill student pantries at Eden Hall campus.

History of Eden Hall Farm

The land that Eden Hall Farm occupies is the ancestral land of indigenous people from the Osage Nation, the Seneca and Seneca-Cayuga of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, along with the Shawnee, and Lenape peoples. The various tribal communities served as caretakers of this land; through a series of contested treaties this land was removed from Indigenous stewardship. European colonization brought more intensive and extractive agriculture to the region, which is reflected today in the oldest standing buildings on Eden Hall’s campus and our historic apple orchard. In 1912, Elizabeth Heinz and Sebastian Mueller acquired the land which served both as a farm and retreat for the working women of Pittsburgh. The Eden Hall campus was gifted to Chatham University by The Eden Hall Foundation in May of 2008 establishing the largest university campus in Allegheny County.

Agricultural enterprises have been used for research, education, and outreach purposes and have expanded or contracted with interest and capacity. Our current enterprises include maple syrup, mushroom, honey, vegetables, and fruit production.

Faculty members started a garden at Eden Hall in 2008, but this site was developed over as the campus grew. The Agroecology Demonstration Garden (ADG) was established in 2012 to replace the original garden. The historic greenhouse outside of ADG, as well as the apple orchard across the street date back to when the Mueller family stewarded the property. Elsalma, the 4+ acre fenced field named after Elizabeth and Sebastian’s daughters, was established later in 2013. Our Moveable High Tunnel was built in 2013 while our High Tunnel was constructed in 2014. Our newest structure is the Solar High Tunnel which was built in 2015 and serves as a year-round production and learning space. Many of our growing spaces became organic certified in 2014.

Group of people planting and tending a garden beside a greenhouse on a partly cloudy day.