It’s Saturday on a farm outside Tempe. A math major and an English major from Arizona State University are weeding a row of carrots and chatting about where they grew up, while two students from the school of business are turning a compost pile nearby. Afterwards they gather with the rest of the student volunteers for a conversation about sustainability and care, and what that means for how we should live our lives.

This is a reality at the Arizona State University ASU Farm, an interdisciplinary center designed to integrate character building directly into the student experience through sustainable agriculture. In an era where digital disconnection and polarization are increasingly common challenges in higher education, this unique initiative is turning to the soil to ground students in community and virtue. 

“Undergraduates are facing problems like a loneliness epidemic and food insecurity, not only at ASU, but at other universities as well,” says Tyler DesRoches, Associate Professor of Sustainability and Philosophy, and Founding Director of ASU Farm. “We also have problems with civic engagement and civility, and we wanted to come up with an idea that could address all of these.”

And thus, with a grant from the Kern Family Foundation to support Principled Innovation, ASU Farm was born. “The focus is not just the cultivation of plants, but kind of simultaneously, the cultivation of people,” DesRoches continues. Principled Innovation is ASU’s most recent design aspiration, which places character and value at the center of decision-making.

To achieve this, the team partnered with Maya’s Farm, a small farm about 6 miles west of the Tempe campus, and identified six virtues to guide their programming: adaptation, care, cooperation, environmental stewardship, environmental humility, and a strong work ethic. Activities revolve around the needs of the farm and a focus on these virtues.

Sara El-Sayed, an Assistant Research Professor with the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems and Director of the Biomimicry Center, joined the project to help bridge the gap between sustainability and character development. She emphasizes the urgency of this work for today’s students. 

“There’s a generation right now, even more post-COVID, that’s disconnected, that’s online, that doesn’t have the ways of engagement that maybe previous generations might have had,” she said. “Now more than ever, we want to build stronger connections.” 

For El-Sayed, the physical environment of the farm provides a great backdrop for navigating complex human interactions central to the work of Principled Innovation, such as civility.

“On a farm, when you’re weeding, planting, clearing a pen, or rotating compost, there are opportunities to get to know each other, and by framing certain topics around character and ethics, topics that we bring forward, you’re able to have these conversations while you’re doing difficult and often physically demanding work.”

The project is not limited to volunteer days; it also incorporates experiential learning courses like “Accessible Urban Farming” and “The Sustainability Virtues: Cultivating Character for a Flourishing Future.” 

“Watching these students engage in all these different types of projects that they wouldn’t normally have in a regular college classroom has been really transformative,” said Becky Tsang, Associate Director of Academic Operations and Advancement Initiatives for the ASU School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. “Students from across the university will probably think about the farm when they reflect back on their college experience. It’s not just sitting in a large classroom listening to a lecture. It’s hands-on, and they’re tackling real problems.”

To measure the impact of these interventions, the team brought in Stylianos Syropoulos, Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainability and a social psychologist studying sustainable behavior change. He views the farm as a practical setting for instilling patience and persistence in students—virtues often eroded by the speed of modern life.

“Farm work teaches them that things take time, and it places them in that mindset of having patience and persistence,” he said.

One of the interesting focal virtues is ‘environmental humility,’ a broadening of the focus on intellectual humility that so often dominates the discourse on this virtue. Environmental humility is about understanding one’s place vis a vis nature, and it’s a virtue that Syropoulos says his research suggests is linked to broader pro-social behaviors.

“People who score higher on the environmental humility measure we created were also more likely to appreciate the complexity and vastness of nature,” he said. “They tend to report that they engage in more sustainable behaviors, and they are also more grateful in general in their lives.”

The biggest challenge for the farm so far is keeping up with demand from across the university. Their success is a testament to the power of interdisciplinary collaboration. By bringing together philosophy, sustainability, operations, and psychology, the team is proving that the “good work” of education requires getting one’s hands dirty—literally. As universities look for ways to foster character and community, this model offers a fertile path forward.