Stonington — Eric Dawson stood by the 35-by-65-foot "micro farm" near the Yellow Farmhouse Education Center's eponymous building on Wednesday, explaining that he planted Salanova — a type of lettuce — the day before and was also growing root vegetables and mustard greens. Everything grown there is for donation.

The Yellow Farmhouse Education Center is an independent nonprofit based at Stone Acres Farm. With the help of multiple grants, it's growing its food donation efforts, teacher training, and hopefully, its staff — which is currently executive director Jen Rothman and educator Dawson, who are full time, and director of outreach Laura Jackson, who is part time.

Yellow Farmhouse has partnered not only with Stone Acres Farm but also with Hunts Brook Farm in Quaker Hill, Provider Farm in Salem, Adesa Farm in North Stonington, and the Connecticut College Sprout Garden, to donate farms' excess produce to the New London Community Meal Center and the Stonington Housing Authority.

Rothman said some excess food is hard to donate to individuals. She and Dawson explained that farmers may have excess food if something is not selling in the market, there is too much of a certain crop in the field, or they're looking to put the next crop in.

Since there's so much extra food in the summer and fall, Yellow Farmhouse is looking to build a larder in the basement of the New London Community Meal Center, to store food that has been canned, pickled, fermented or otherwise preserved.

Rothman said this is valuable because some foods can't be frozen, or there may be issues around lack of freezer space and energy usage.

She said Yellow Farmhouse started working with the meal center at the start of the pandemic, to meet the need for people to be fed and farmers to have a place to sell food as the pandemic reduced their wholesale business.

U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, visited Stone Acres Farm — with a tour from farm director Jane Meiser — for the first time on Wednesday, specifically to learn about how American Rescue Plan funding was helping to support education center programming.

The center received $10,000 in ARP money through CT Humanities, which will be used for a fifth-grade social studies project called Connecticut's Culinary and Agricultural Heritage, which involves virtual field trips. Yellow Farmhouse is partnering with the Connecticut Historical Society and the Narragansett Food Sovereignty Initiative on this.

"We sort of feel like food can tell any story. That's the goal," Rothman said.

Yellow Farmhouse also recently received a Connecticut Grown for Connecticut Kids grant of nearly $25,000 from the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, which will help it support a full year of professional development for family and consumer science teachers doing culinary education in high schools.

The education center also has funding to give 8 pounds of kelp to 20 teachers each for lesson plans that Dawson devised with three recipes.

Jackson said they "feel like everyone needs this kind of food education, because whether you go into farming or not, everyone is an eater."

e.moser@theday.com