Sarah Tracey harvests sprouts for area restaurants. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

The pursuit of sustainability is what drives Sarah Tracey. A love of community, people, and the earth is what inspires her. Tracey is the founder of Dharma Harvest, an organization which has as its mission to “educate the community for sustainable living, mentally, spiritually, and physically.”

Dharma Harvest, which means “harmony gathering,” is a nonprofit organization that was founded by Tracey in June 2008, and is headquartered at her childhood home, Windy Ridge Farm on Bolton Road. Tracey, who is certified as a visual arts teacher, said that, while student teaching at Concord-Carlisle High School, she realized that students’ lives were unsustainable, pointing to a rising rate of various disorders among students.

“I felt the need to get [the idea of] sustainability into the school system,” she said. “With rising rates of addiction, anxiety, anorexia, ADD, obesity, and depression, we need to reevaluate what actually makes us happy, what fulfills us instead of [what] provides us with momentary pleasure. Studies show that connection to place and a supportive community are powerful antidotes.”

Sustainability is a word that has come to the forefront in recent years and is used so often it can be difficult to remember what it actually means. Applied to a community, sustainability is a state of being whereby community members can meet their basic needs within the limits of Earth’s natural resources, without threatening the ability of future generations to do the same. It means to be able to continue something indefinitely.

Tracey said that Dharma Harvest will “explore all aspects of what sustaining the self means, and how that ripples out into the community, the state, the country, and the world,” and will help to promote “agricultural literacy, sustainable agriculture and permaculture, artistic exploration, nourishment, and a way to exist connected with the Earth.”

Sarah Tracey and Sean Roulan harvest bean sprouts for Dharma Harvest in raised-bed gardens off Bolton Road. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Tracey hopes to sustain Dharma Harvest and its mission through produce sales, courses, lectures, demonstrations, and events. Toward this end, she works two-to-three days a week in the gardens at Windy Ridge, for six-to-eight hours at a time, harvesting produce to sell at the Harvard Farmers’ Market and at a number of restaurants, including Chloe in Hudson and Gibbett Hill in Groton. I caught up with her one recent sunny morning, her eyes shaded by a pink baseball cap, snipping greens from a raised bed—one of several she and helpers put in only four weeks earlier, after sheet-mulching the area with cardboard and manure. She talked about her dreams for Dharma Harvest.

Among her goals for this year, she said, are providing greens for Harvard schools and building an edible garden at the Oak Meadow Montessori School in Littleton, where she received her elementary school education. Other plans in the works include having a “greenhouse-raising” event at Windy Ridge Farm early this fall to erect a 24-by-48-foot hoop house for extending the growing season, building a three- to four-acre forest garden at the site, and converting one of the farm’s outbuildings to a center for nature studies and a wellness program that would include classes in yoga, art, and music. Tracey said she’d also like to start a town community garden on the farm at some point, and within the next two years would like to start a sliding-scale CSA, a community-supported agriculture operation that gives its members a share in the crops, for a yearly fee.

Tracey said there are two other farms in town involved with Dharma Harvest: Laughing Heart Farm on Still River Depot Road, owned by Bob and Sarah Porter, and Flintlock Farm on Still River Road, owned by Phil and Beth Wilson. According to Tracey, the plan is to have Laughing Heart provide greens for the schools (a plan that may be uncertain this season because of flooding in the fields there), and to have Flintlock Farm be a site for growing winter storage crops and grains. She said she’d like to get community members involved in the grain-growing project.

Tracey is the only full-time person in the organization, but she has plenty of help from a number of people who share her vision—people, she said, who she met through her involvement in a permaculture guild and through “life’s journey.” Among those involved are a woman who has a master’s degree in environmental studies, an ecological landscape designer, and a woman who runs a 40-member CSA in New Hampshire. Harvard residents involved include Katie Bolton and Becca Fidele, both college sophomores, and Jen Sundeen, one of the organizers of the Harvard Farmers’ Market.

Tracey said that all those involved share a common bond.

“We all have this vision of creating forward motion [on sustainability] in communities,” she said. “None of us can do it alone.”

Although sustainability is a word most often heard associated with current environmental issues, Tracey says, “It’s not a matter of whether we believe in global warming or peak oil; it’s about quality of life.”