25 Jul 2005 @ 17:24, by Raymond Powers
College Dining Halls Turning to Organic Food
By Julia Silverman The Associated Press
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Plenty of college kids still subsist on a steady diet of ramen noodles, cold cereal and beer.
Not Nate France. The crop and soil sciences major at Oregon State University wouldn't dream of following the well-beaten path to the local fast-food restaurants for cheap, mammoth burgers.
Instead, every Thursday afternoon until the sun sets, France helps till and tend a pocket-size, student-run organic farm on a couple of soil-rich acres just outside the western Oregon college town of Corvallis.
"I sowed some corn while it was raining, and then I tamped down the soil too much; it caked up, hard as a brick, and the corn plants couldn't come up," said France, 27, who dreams out loud about farming his own land someday. "This next time, I know to mix manure in. This is like a trial by fire, a way to make mistakes before it matters too much."
In the last decade or so, student-run farms have cropped up at almost 60 schools in 27 states. Foodies call it the latest sign of the seasonal, regional food movement's influence, even on a collegiate landscape that's virtually paved with Hot Pockets, Pop Tarts and leftover pizza.
Over the past few years, about 200 schools have signed up with farm-to-college programs, which match local farmers with area universities, according to the Venice, Calif.-based Community Food Security Coalition. The University of Montana-Missoula, for example, allocates about $425,000 for local meat, dairy and wheat products, about 17 percent of its overall food budget.
At Brown University in Providence, R.I., dining hall purchasers started replacing Granny Smiths and Red Delicious with locally grown Macouns and Pippins. Apple consumption tripled, and the experiment extended to locally grown tomatoes and peaches, milk from Rhode Island dairies and, eventually, a farmers' market that set up shop outside the dining hall.
"I was carrying a flat of local peaches into the dining hall once; it was like having bread at the beach and having seagulls following me," said Louella Hill, a recent Brown graduate who helped organized the on-campus farmers' market. "People were grabbing peaches and eating them before I could get to the fruit bowl."
Student farms, which range from half an acre to 200, turn students into growers.
Some student farmers, like those at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, sell the fruits of their labor at on-campus farm stands. The bounty from the University of Idaho at Moscow gets parceled out each week to community members who have prepaid for baskets of whatever's fresh.
Some student farms supply their dining halls with fresh produce, while others sell directly to restaurants. At Colorado State University's student farm, what isn't sold on campus or eaten by volunteers is donated to food pantries.
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