UC students eating local, organic produce

S farmers local to UC Santa Cruz are participating in a groundbreaking farm-to-college program, supplying organic produce to the university’s five campus dining rooms and restaurant. The program is running side by side with a 2-year research study on developing institutional market outlets for small and medium-sized growers. The first program of its kind in the UC system, this is one of many farm-to-institution initiatives sprouting up around the country. Hundreds of institutions, including K-12 schools, Kaiser Permanente and UC San Francisco hospitals, and corporate cafeterias, such as Google’s in Mountain View, are offering locally and sustainably grown produce. It’s still a largely untapped market, says Patricia Allen, new director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS). “Farm-to-institution programs could be a lifeline for small to mid-scale farmers struggling to stay afloat,” she says. The seven farms supplying the UC Santa Cruz dining halls are Coke Farm, Phil Foster Ranches, Happy Boy Farms, New Natives/Greensward Nurseries, Swanton Berry Farm, Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), and the UC Santa Cruz farm on campus. Because the UC Santa Cruz purchasing department is not set up to contract with individual small farmers, the growers formed a consortium, Monterey Bay Organic Farming Consortium (MBOFC). ALBA acts as their umbrella organization, pooling and delivering the produce to the campus dining halls three or four times a week, invoicing the university and distributing payments to the growers. Demand for the produce is high, from both chefs and students, but getting the program in place wasn’t easy. To look in detail at the structuring and viability of institutional markets for small and medium-sized farmers, particularly those farming organically or using other environmentally sustainable farming methods, CASFS is heading up a collaborative research project. The study, which began last fall, is being funded by a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (CSREES). The project directors are Allen and Shermain Hardesty, director of the UC Small Farm Center. Specifically, the research team is studying the demand among students for food from small and medium-sized farms with sustainability criteria (for example, organic, locally grown and socially just); the produce-buying practices and preferences at California’s colleges and universities; and the best produce distribution models. Results from the student survey show a definite interest in organic produce. Of the 224 returned surveys from students nationally, 47% said they wanted their college to provide organic food. Most students (53%) wanted their college to provide food locally grown. But the highest interest among students was for food that was humanely produced (78%), provides a living wage to workers (71%) and sustainably produced (62%). Hardesty, who is surveying food-service buyers at California’s colleges and universities, was “very surprised,” she said, to find that about 25% of the Students participate in a “Harvest for Health” activity at the UC Santa Cruz farm, part of a core course required of all first-year students in one of the campus’s residential colleges. UC students eating local, organic produce CASFS farm. The trial consists of 15 blueberry varieties with a total of 180 plants. This is the first season that yield data were collected, and the numbers have not been crunched yet, but Leap is heartened by the trial so far. Though he had to put up bird netting over the entire trial area, it looks as if organic blueberries will grow well on the Central Coast. The berries sold exceptionally well at $4 per half-pint — $6,000 worth just at the UC Santa Cruz Market Cart (at the campus entrance), and they were a popular item in the farm’s CSA (communitysupported agriculture) shares. “The challenge is that blueberries need acidic soil,” Leap says. Inexpensive sulfuric acid can be applied to conventionally managed blueberry fields, but Leap has had to buy vinegar approved by the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) for use in certified organic systems. “We have been injecting vinegar with each irrigation. Before we planted, we applied a lot of soil sulfur and acidic soil amendments, but we still need the vinegar, and buying it in 55-gallon containers and trucking them in here might turn out to be prohibitively expensive,” he says. (Also, see California Agriculture April-June 2005, Vol. 59, No. 2, p. 65.) CASFS — continued from previous page