Franklin & Marshall College Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Eric Hirsch is the recipient of a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to lead a transformative three-year research initiative titled, “The Agricultural Futures Archive: Rural and Urban Growers in the Shadow of the Solar Panel.”

This project, from the Mellon Foundation’s “Higher Learning” grant program, marks the second recent grant from the Mellon Foundation to Franklin & Marshall. In 2024, F&M was one of just 10 liberal arts colleges named as a recipient of a “Humanities for All Times” grant, the result of which provided $1.4 million to fund “Reckoning with Lancaster,” an ongoing project that explores and addresses the complex history of Lancaster and the College's role in that story. Hirsch served as a faculty fellow for the first year of that project, which focused on “Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity and the Land Question.”

The Agricultural Futures Archive will collect and preserve 500 oral histories from growers across Pennsylvania — stories that reflect how communities are adapting to climate change, economic pressures and the growth of solar energy in agriculture. These interviews, along with commissioned digital artwork created by growers, will form the core of a new digital and public archive hosted by Franklin & Marshall College.

Pictured above: Student researchers Lottie Zhao '27, Sonja Luyten '27, Lauren Caltrider '26 and co-principal investigator Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Eric Hirsch

Student researchers will play a central role in every phase of the project. Undergraduate teams from Franklin & Marshall and partner institutions Temple University and Salisbury University will be trained in humanistic research methods and conduct the bulk of the interviews. Each summer, three students from each institution — working with project co-principal investigators Stephanie Bernhard, associate professor of English at Salisbury University; and Hamil Pearsall and Melissa Gilbert, professors of geography, environment and urban studies at Temple University; as well as a graduate student leader — will work across Lancaster and Philadelphia counties to gather testimonies from small-scale rural farmers, urban gardeners, refugee growers and Indigenous food producers. Their work also will include supporting archival curation, contributing to digital exhibits and fostering collaboration across the three participating campuses.

“I see this project as helping us understand some of the key turning points we are now facing in our food and energy systems,” says Hirsch. “Farms, and especially small ones, are disappearing across Pennsylvania. Unpredictable climate extremes are increasingly the new normal here. And people who grow food, from rural farmers to urban gardeners, are doing important work to understand and assess what these changes are going to mean for them. We are really looking forward to joining forces across three distinct institutions to launch this work.”

In addition to contributions in research and scholarship, the Agricultural Futures Archive will serve as a teaching tool, policy resource and digital exhibition space. The materials housed within the archive will inform new humanities courses and foster conversation among educators, researchers, growers and policymakers. The project is particularly timely for Pennsylvania, where legislators are exploring agrivoltaic systems — co-locating solar panels and agriculture — as a strategy to support local food systems, achieve renewable energy goals and combat climate change.

The Agricultural Futures Archive work begins this summer with training sessions at Franklin & Marshall for faculty and students from the three participating institutions.