Friday, June 25, 2010

Sustainable Farm Feeding Students


                    Photo by ConstructionDealMkting
For the past two years, the University of Illinois has been supplementing the fruits and vegetables served in its residence halls with produce grown locally at a student-assisted sustainable farm. In its first year alone, $25,000 worth of produce was sold to the University’s Dining Services.
Due to the utilization of high tunnels, which hold in the sun’s heat in the colder months, the farm’s growing season starts several weeks earlier and ends several weeks later, thereby extending the growing season to nearly ten months of the year.
“The problem that we have is that there's a mismatch between when we produce the most and when the students are here,” said Bruce Branham, faculty advisor for the project and professor at the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences. 
Due to the difference between the academic calendar year and the farm’s peak growing season, the operators have begun looking into a possible partnership with the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department to explore options for preserving excess produce. “Our long-range goal is to become big enough that it really does have a big impact on campus,” Branham said. “We could quickly produce more tomatoes than the campus could use, but preservation is the issue.”
While the project originally set out with the idea that the farm could potentially become profitable, Branham quickly came to the realization that this would be very unlikely. To encourage Dining Services to continue purchasing produce from them, they chose to match the prices of the larger food distributors. “Now that's not really a market-driven approach, because that is a wholesale price,” Branham explained. “If you compare the quality of our tomatoes to the quality of the distributors, there would be a big difference.  When you grow produce locally like this, you're doing it more for direct marketing.  But that's fine with us right now, because the students get better quality produce, and they're the ones who funded the project.”
A profit would be possible through selling the produce at local farmers’ markets, where local foods sell for a premium, but the farm does not want to compete with private growers, Branham explained. “We want to keep it internal to the University.  I don't think we should be out at farmers’ markets selling against people who have to pay for their own land and supplies.”
While the farm was largely established as a more sustainable and environmentally responsible means of providing produce for students, Branham states he would like to see it become much more. “We want the farm to be more than just produce production for the dining halls.  We want it to really be part of the University mission of teaching research.  So we hope to have classes that become involved in the farm.”
In addition to being sustainable and providing College of ACES students with hands-on research experience, growing the produce locally also helps to bolster the local economy through providing local jobs and keeping money within the community.
The farm, located southeast of Windsor and Lincoln Avenue, is funded by the Student Sustainability Committee.  It is staffed by a fulltime farm manager, two student interns, a student halftime worker, and numerous volunteers.

1 comment:

  1. no one will ever get sick if we all eat fresh from the farm products.
    thanks for this great info.

    ReplyDelete

Please leave a comment!